Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op- eds.

In addition to the hoard of documents relating to Supreme Court Trump nominee and Republican hack Brett Kavanaugh's tenure at the Dubya Bush White House that Republicans are trying desperately to keep hidden, there's an emerging issue that Kavanaugh is facing that they'll find harder to conceal:

Senate Democrats are gearing up to press Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on his decades-long relationship with former Judge Alex Kozinski, who was forced into retirement last year by a mounting sexual harassment scandal. 

It’s not just what, if anything, Kavanaugh saw during his time as a Kozinski clerk in the early 1990s that’s on Democratic minds. They also want to know how President Donald Trump’s high court pick would address the judiciary’s ongoing internal reckoning with sexual misconduct that was sparked by Kozinski — one of Kavanaugh’s early mentors who introduced the younger appellate court judge at his Senate confirmation hearing in 2006. 

“Sexual harassment and workplace misconduct in the federal judiciary is a matter of concern to all of us, including Chief Justice [John] Roberts, who convened a Judicial Conference working group to assess the problem and propose solutions,” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said through a spokesman. 

“Given Judge Kavanaugh’s close relationship with former Judge Alex Kozinski, the subject of numerous harassment complaints, we need to know what Judge Kavanaugh knew and his views on this serious problem,” added Hirono, who sits on the Judiciary Committee and will have a chance to directly question Kavanaugh at hearings planned for next month.

To the limited extent they can influence the timing, Democrats need to stick together, take time and insist on due diligence for this lifetime appointment.  (Once again, "Elections have consequences.")

It's a first step:

Apple has removed the entire library for five of Infowars' six podcasts from its iTunes and Podcast apps, BuzzFeed News has learned. Among the podcasts, which were removed from Apples' iTunes directory, are the show "War Room" as well as the popular Alex Jones Show podcast, which is hosted daily by the prominent conspiracy theorist. 

Following the move, Spotify and Facebook have also acted to remove content made by Jones.

Jones is just the most visible of the vicious crackpots polluting our society with hate speech.  Much, much more needs to be done, and done now. (Update :  after an initial 30- days suspension of some videos, it now looks like Facebook is done with Jones and Infowars;  You Tube just yanked him, too -- goodbye 2.4 million subscribers!)

Don't be fooled -- the sociopathic Trump Republican Party still wants to take away your health insurance:

Many Republicans assume their party will take another stab at repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act if the midterm elections go their way, even though GOP candidates aren't making a big deal about it on the campaign trail.

It's in their DNA -- never forget that.

Speaking of Republican DNA, it's been a trend for a while, but Josh Marshall looks at a Survey Monkey poll that asked about Russian interference in our elections:

... [O]nly a quarter of Republicans (26%) think it [Russians trying to influence the 2016 election] happened and that it’s a problem. 31% think it’s great or not a problem. I don’t really take at face value when people say they don’t think Russia tried to meddle in the 2016 election. I think that’s more a statement of defiance, a de facto ‘I don’t care’, than a statement of factual belief. So overwhelmingly, Republicans either don’t care or simply refuse to believe any evidence at all. 

What’s also notable is that Republicans seem more supportive of Russian interference going forward than they do in retrospect. As the write-up explains, this difference may be an artifact of the different structure of the questions about 2018. For 2018, the poll asked partisans of each party whether it would be okay if Russia helped their party win. Here are the results.

(click to enlarge)



Here's the visualization of that data, with two accommodating TrumPatriots!:

(Gooberski and Cletuski at a Trump rally in Ohio)

"Come, let us reason together!"  We would heartily endorse their emigration to Mother Russia rather than face forced conversion to the Dimmycrat Party after the mid-terms! That would sure own the libs!

Finally, we highly recommend the link round- up over at Infidel 753. He always can be counted on to find things on the Internet that are revealing, informative, amusing and sometimes infuriating.  Never a dull time!

BONUS: Vox has an interesting explanation of the motivation behind the two cretins in the picture above. More reaction to them here.