US politics general thread

Status
Not open for further replies.
rietrot said:
Saying you're centralist is just sitting on the fence. You have to pick a side.
Most people would classify your libertarian view as on the right.
Click to expand...
Flip the coin, I pick edge :p
Most people would classify me that way, that's proof of the fatal flaw of democracy: majority rule is not correct.

Now, where on your chart is the spot to throw the dart at to say "the government should not have any say in the issue"? That doesn't mean I support guns and weed, merely that I support each individual's choice to have whichever combination they prefer.
 
greg0205 said:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1045458410853081088

You tell 'em Rudy! Tell 'em how you voted for Sotormayor, sorry Sotomayor, when you were a senato... No, wait, back up... Tell 'em how you voted for Kagen, sorry Kagan, when you were in congre... No, wait...
Click to expand...

[B]Philly_Harley[/B]‏ @[B]philly_harley[/B] 11h11 hours ago



Replying to @[B]RudyGiuliani[/B]

The president’s attorney, who was never a senator, believes he voted voted to confirm 2 Supreme Court justices. Another example of “only the best people.”
Click to expand...
 
Christine Blasey Ford took a polygraph test to lend further credence to her sexual assault account. For anyone who didn’t grow up watching bad spy movies, a polygraph is the device affectionately known as a lie detector. The expert who administered the test concluded that she was telling the truth. These polygraph results were just entered into the record by Senator Klobuchar, but not before she made the point that the Judiciary Committee refused to hear testimony from the professional who administered the test.


How much value should anyone give these results? Not very much. Polygraphs exist on that plane right between astrology and phrenology, beset by years of scientific research uncovering flaw after critical flaw in their reliability. That said, agreeing to take one in the first place provides some indicia that a person is confident in their account of events. That does matter.

es, as a judge, Brett Kavanaugh has been all about polygraph tests in making hiring decisions. I guess he only approves of them when other people are getting hired. While he’s not written on the value of polygraph results per se, he’s approvingly cited the technology more than once.

----

Most notably in Sack v. U.S. Dept. of Defense, 823 F.3d 687 (2016), a case about FOIA fees, Judge Kavanaugh waxed philosophic about the value of polygraphs in making hiring decisions:


As the Government notes, law enforcement agencies use polygraphs to test the credibility of witnesses and criminal defendants. Those agencies also use polygraphs to “screen applicants for security clearances so that they may be deemed suitable for work in critical law enforcement, defense, and intelligence collection roles.” Declaration of Alesia Y. Williams, Defense Intelligence Agency, Chief of FOIA Services Section, at Joint Appendix 226. In Morley v. CIA, we stated: “Background investigations conducted to assess an applicant’s qualification, such as … clearance and investigatory processes, inherently relate to law enforcement.” 508 F.3d 1108, 1128–29 (D.C.Cir.2007) (internal quotation marks omitted).
The Government has satisfactorily explained how polygraph examinations serve law enforcement purposes.​

This served as the preamble to finding that law enforcement reports detailing the shortcomings of polygraphs must be shielded from disclosure lest it undermine public confidence in polygraph accuracy.


Now here we are, with Brett Kavanaugh in the midst of the most serious job interview in American government. A lifetime job that actually carries tremendous import to “critical law enforcement, defense, and intelligence collection.” Yet, now that the chips are turned against him, he’s suddenly skittish about polygraphs. In the coming hours and days, his cronies will lay bare every deficiency ever discovered in the technology. They’ll go so far as to claim anyone who might take a lie detector test is already proving that they’re some kind of kook. It’s all going to happen.


Brett Kavanaugh is prepared to stand for the proposition that “there’s a law for thee but not for me.” That should be a disqualifying characteristic in a Supreme Court justice.
Click to expand...

https://abovethelaw.com/2018/09/rem...phs-are-important-in-making-hiring-decisions/

there’s a law for thee but not for me.
Click to expand...

Conservatives in a nutshell.
 
Emjay said:
Sorry, I don't follow (I have not looked at any news today). Are crowds chanting that Ford should be locked up?
Click to expand...
I was talking about the faux outrage regarding presumption of innocence when it comes to Kavanaugh, but the insistence of the right to deny that same thing to Clinton, even after all the hearings, conducted by the right themselves.
 
A Republican Yale drinking buddy of Kavanaugh's tells CNN he lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee

When Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh told Fox News he never drank to excess, several of his Yale classmates were so outraged they decided to set the record straight. One of them, Lynne Brookes, also accepted Chris Cuomo's invitation to join him on CNN after Kavanaugh repeated his claim of relative sobriety under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Cuomo asked Brookes — a Republican who admires Kavanaugh's judicial record — why she changed her mind.

"I'll tell you, Chris, I watched the whole hearing, and a number of my Yale colleagues and I were extremely disappointed in Brett Kavanaugh's characterization of himself and the way that he evaded his excessive drinking question" and "was lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee today," Brookes said. "There is no doubt in my mind that while at Yale, he was a big partier, often drank to excess, and there had to be a number of nights where he does not remember." She said she can "almost guarantee" he doesn't remember a night she witnessed where he was "stumbling drunk, in a ridiculous costume, saying really dumb things" to pledge a fraternity.

Brookes also dismissed Kavanaugh's defense that his studies and sports precluded heavy drinking, noting she played two varsity sports. "I studied really hard, too," she said. "I went to Wharton business school, I did very well at Yale, I also drank to excess many nights with Brett Kavanaugh." She recounted a party where Kavanaugh and Chris Dudley, one of his character witnesses, humiliated a girl by barging in on her in a compromising position.

"I'm not saying it's wrong that he drank," Cuomo concluded after the interview, but "if he's going to be the ultimate judge of truth in our society, a Supreme Court justice, and at 53 years old he's going to lie about what he did when he was 15, what else will he lie about?"
Click to expand...

M'uh credibility.
 
Randhir said:
https://abovethelaw.com/2018/09/rem...phs-are-important-in-making-hiring-decisions/
Conservatives in a nutshell.
Click to expand...
Try reading the case:

The case was about a freedom of information request for an investigation into polygraph bias by a PhD student:
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-dc-circuit/1735693.html

The reason why he made a definiton of polygraphs as a law enforcement tool is because that is what the government (I might add, wrongly) uses them for. He wasn't doing a review of their effectiveness. That was also not brought up by the applicant on this matter.

If the argument had been: polygraphs are ineffective at providing information thus do not reveal any information that would be harmful for a law enforcement agency investigation, his judgement on the matter would have actually mattered.
 
Last edited:
konfab said:
If the argument had been: polygraphs are ineffective at providing information thus do not reveal any information that would be harmful for a law enforcement agency investigation, his judgement on the matter would have actually mattered.
Click to expand...

Well done for (purposefully?) missing the point.
 
Randhir said:
Well done for (purposefully?) missing the point.
Click to expand...
What point? That he is acting inconsistently?

Did you read the case?
It wasn't his position to make a judgement on their effectiveness. What he had to do as a judge was to see if their use would be classified under law enforcement.
We turn next to the Exemption 7(E) issue. Citing that exemption, the Department of Defense denied Sack's request for various Department reports about polygraph examinations.

To withhold documents under Exemption 7, the Government must make a threshold showing that the “records or information” were “compiled for law enforcement purposes.”
Click to expand...

What do you suppose he should have said?

Bearing in mind that appeals courts are limited by the following:
Because the courts of appeals possess only appellate jurisdiction, they do not hold trials. Only courts with original jurisdiction hold trials and thus determine punishments (in criminal cases) and remedies (in civil cases). Instead, appeals courts review decisions of trial courts for errors of law. Accordingly, an appeals court considers only the record (that is, the papers the parties filed and the transcripts and any exhibits from any trial) from the trial court, and the legal arguments of the parties. These arguments, which are presented in written form and can range in length from dozens to hundreds of pages, are known as briefs. Sometimes lawyers are permitted to add to their written briefs with oral arguments before the appeals judges. At such hearings, only the parties' lawyers speak to the court.
Click to expand...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_courts_of_appeals

There was no evidence presented stating why polygraphs are not compiled for law enforcement purposes on the part of the applicant.
 
Last edited:
Ba dum tss

Kavanaugh Has Become a Hero to the Incel Community

Brett Kavanaugh’s fate as a Justice on the Supreme Court hangs in the balance following a highly contentious day of hearings Thursday with him and the woman who accused him of sexual assault.

But even as he waits for a final verdict from members of the U.S. Senate, Kavanaugh has seen his stature rise elsewhere. The federal judge has become a hero to the sexually frustrated, misogynist “incel” community, after he claimed that he remained a virgin for years after graduating from high school.

Incels is a shortening of the phrase “involuntarily celibate.” It is a group of sexually frustrated men who gather in internet forums to complain about their lack of social status and the women they blame for it. And in various internet forums over the past few days, they’ve expressed interest in Kavanaugh after he claimed, in a Fox News interview Monday, that he never had sex in high school or for years after. Kavanaugh did so to dispute accusations from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford that he had sexually assaulted her during the summer of 1982.

“I did not have sexual intercourse or anything close to sexual intercourse in high school or for many years thereafter,” Kavanaugh said.

In response to that line, incel forums lit up with discussion of the Supreme Court nominee, with one user saying they now saw Kavanaugh as one of them. David Futtrelle, a writer who tracks right-wing internet groups like incels, noted on his blog that the Fox News interview appeared to have earned Kavanaugh “some enthusiastic new fans.”

“Kavanaugh being an incel once makes me him more lol,” wrote one poster in an incel forum.

Another poster wrote that Kavanaugh’s claim about his virginity boosted his support for the nominee “to 110%,” while one user on a Reddit forum devoted to incels said that Kavanaugh had inspired a new kind of incel, “Kavanaughcels.”
Click to expand...
 
@Emjay

Following on from your posts this morning... Perhaps you might give this a moment of consideration.

The rape culture of the 1980s, explained by Sixteen Candles

When a third woman accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct this week, Kavanaugh supporters immediately stepped forward with a familiar defense: It couldn’t have happened, because surely if it had, someone would have said something at the time.

In a sworn declaration delivered through her lawyer Michael Avenatti, Julie Swetnick avowed that she witnessed Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh drug girls at high school house parties where the girls were later “gang raped.” Swetnick further says that Kavanaugh was present at a party where she herself was drugged and raped, although she does not directly say that he participated in her rape.

In a statement released by the White House, Kavanaugh (who has denied all three allegations against him) called Swetnick’s statement “ridiculous” and “from the Twilight Zone.” His denial was widely echoed by supporters to whom the idea that such terrible things could happen on a routine basis, and that no one would do anything to stop them or even avoid the parties, seems absurd.

If a crime happened, this argument presumes, surely everyone involved would have recognized that it was terribly wrong and someone would have spoken up at the time.

But if there’s one thing we can take away from the popular culture of the 1980s, when the alleged events took place, it’s that a sexual assault at that time might not have been immediately clear as what it was, for participants and observers alike. Some of the most popular comedies of the ’80s are filled with supposedly hilarious sequences that portray what in 2018 would be unambiguously considered date rape.

As long as everybody involved is acquainted with each other, these movies tend to treat those rapes as harmless hijinks. They don’t really count. They’re funny — even in movies as sweet and romantic as Sixteen Candles.
Click to expand...
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X