ITEM #1, thanks to the Huffington Post for… editorializing:  GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski Just Got Even More Pressure To Vote Against Brett Kavanaugh
Alaska Gov. Bill Walker (I) and Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott (D) announced their opposition to the Supreme Court nominee.

Sure.  But then cometh, the final paragraph caveat… Still, it’s not clear how much Walker’s opposition to Kavanaugh will factor into Murkowski’s decision. While Murkowski has relied on independents as a base of political support in Alaska, Morning Consult found Walker’s approval rating at 29 percent and his disapproval at 54 percent, making him the fifth most unpopular governor in the country.

Gotta follow the lead of the person with the 29 percent approval rating, or you’ll be damned!

ITEM NUMBER TWO… You know who else sucks, besides (as previously pointed out)  Senator Dianne Feinstein?  #2 on my list here… Ed Whelan.
And here we do have something that dove-tails to an emerging argument against Kavanaugh that sidesteps a lot of the trying to nail down what happened 30 and 36 years ago…
THE ELITES SUCK.

The stories of Whelan and Butler have nothing to do with whether one thinks Kavanaugh and Ronell did nothing at all or behaved appallingly. They have everything to do with the current crisis of American elites in many fields, including the law and higher education. For the lawyer and the professor are exquisitely similar. Their academic pedigree is magnificent: Harvard Law School, Yale graduate school. Their position in their profession is eminent, if detached from the rest of the world. If you are a liberal, you probably do not know or care that Whelan writes often for National Review and is a leading figure in conservative legal circles; if you do not know, or care to know, much about critical theory, the writings of Butler are academic in the unflattering sense of that term. But in their world, they are, if not royalty, lords of the realm.

Their motives here are also similar: Eminent friends are being taken down at the peak of their professional career by someone who is, in their world, a nobody. It’s outrageous, and it has to be stopped. And if, by so doing, you defame a classmate of Kavanaugh’s, accusing him of attempted rape, or effectively threaten to obliterate a graduate student’s career by lending a mob of literature professors the imprimatur of the MLA, so be it. That is the point and that is the sin: the willingness to stomp hard on a defenseless little guy in order to protect your highly privileged pal.

And the somewhat intriguing argument, coming admittedly from someone who already hadn’t much use for the man and his politics and judicial philosophy… The standard for the nine people with lifetime appointments at the highest court of the land should have the person having his/her shit together by the time they’re 16… probably particularly in the realm of the privileged frat houses of private schooling.  As with everything about these politicized matters of principle… Come back to us on this when a Democrat (or the other team) appoints someone with a shaky adolescence.  (Noted, Kavanaugh denies this anyways, to some consternation from some supporters I know.)

ITEM NUMBER THREE:   According to a recent YouGov poll, 53 percent of Democrats consider Ford’s allegations credible, compared to only 4 percent of Republicans.
Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison is currently favored to be elected as the state’s next attorney general despite ex-girlfriend Karen Monahan’s allegations of sustained “emotional and physical abuse.” One poll shows that, while 42 percent of Republicans believe Monahan, only 5 percent of Democrats do.
I do see commenters picking at the next paragraph’s assertion / supposition that from what he can tell, the evidence amount is similar… to about the same political ends.  One thing that might account for the smaller number of Republicans believing Monahan as opposed to Democrats believing Ford… (and it’s a little hard to parse the meaning of the numbers and terms here when everything lands in a gray “Want to Hear” thing)… the stakes are bigger for Ford, so to remain consistent the party that benefits from “belief” will shed some support.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR:  Selective memory of how partisan the other side is as opposed to us…  Or, maybe then again… the “you can’t claim any moral high ground after what you did to Garland” on one crucial subtext.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE:  We’re bored here in Alabama, let’s indulge in a fantasy scenario that has Jeff Sessions as the fill in for the Supreme Court.

ITEM NUMBER SIX:  I thought Donald Trump had been doing well, so far as it went, until the great “immediate new hashtag creation” of a tweet last Friday.  No, not winning anyone over — we are at “once you’ve decided a person is an a-hole, everything they do confirms they are an a-hole”, but within divided America that group of the electorate who kept the gender gap at its standard level in the last election because their response to “Grab ’em by the pussy” landed on something like “And Hillary Clinton never over-heard her husband make similar vulgarisms to less than total response?” and then on to “Don’t tell me how I’m supposed to think!”…
and in electoral map tilted toward low population density where Republicans have all but conceded the House anyways but are protecting all that they can…
Well… the instant swipes at anything he’d say were (from what I could see) coming across as petty.  The whole thing where you need a decorder ring to pick out the ever obvious subtexts when Trump defends the man and says “We’ll hear from her”… But then he finally got around to finally confirming the instant reaction — and made it a line in his political rallies.  And gave the shadow boxing “hashtag resistance” what they needed.
So, okay.  #3 — Donald Trump Sucks.

Understand, I don’t know.  Maybe this is so key to his brand that, politically speaking, he just needs to roll with it.  Then again, the same raw politics works with Feinstein.

ITEM NUMBER SEVEN:  Commenting, despite the fact that I haven’t watched the Bruce Kavanaugh interview on Fox News — and, actually, I’m not entirely sure that contra to the griping of “soft ball lobs from friendly source” — there isn’t some value in just having him put down his framing as he needs it…

Now we have something to bat about.  The “Virgin until long after college” line gets the immediate response that that doesn’t prove anything on sexual assault… but stick with it on its terms, and we are at that land of “conjecturing the environment” — it is a curious framing, because now that just invites the great unleashing of winky nudgy yearbook references and better corroborated stories.

ITEM NUMBER EIGHT:  All right, now it’s #4:  Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer suck.  It’s been widely discussed and determined that it takes three allegations for them to pierce the “he said / she said” nature, and remove that”doubt” — and this is at the heart of the “believe all women” mantra.  Which is why it’s a shame that this is what we have dredged up.  Unless there’s something more to the story…
Oh, yeah.  For the sake of feminism, as per the slate article here, we do need to be sure to give Jane Mayer credit.
In the last election, Governor John Kasich of Ohio got into some hot water for giving the recommendation to women entering college to avoid the partying with the binge drinking.  Victim blaming, they called it.  I suppose he might have granted the same premise for young men entering college to alleviate some of the problem, for the overall stodgy upright suggestion.  (And I will give you the suggestion… the dorm environment sucks.)  But the perils of drunk college partying.  And supposing it happened at all, it all slides out of people’s memory and into a kind of “hearsay” legend… that took six days for the would be victim to decide whether or not it was accurate.

I’m trying to determine whether to put Brett Kavanaugh as “sucky figure #5.”  (Or am I splitting the two New Yorker writers into two?)  I would need to watch the damned Fox News interview, (though maybe that’s just theater review), — and digest further what strikes me as probable falsehoods for what would otherwise be a reasonably defensible position… how far does he go with the “choir boy” act … but as it were

“It is not accurate to say those who knew him at the time dispute this,” Farrow said. “We talked to a roommate from the time that was living with him when this alleged incident took place who said he was frequently drunk, that he took part in activity that made him unsurprised by this claim and that he found this woman credible.”

That’s… Not… corroboration.

ITEM NUMBER NINE:  Having to pivot in Tennessee.   Blackburn’s campaign is also trying to pressure Bredesen to say whether he would vote for Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s embattled nominee for the Supreme Court. Bredesen has spoken favorably about Kavanaugh’s experience, and political operatives in Tennessee believe he was preparing to announce his support for the judge before Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault.

Somewhat easy stance to take for his attempted distancing try, in that he wouldn’t have been in any position to vote for him.

Now we are at:

While Bredesen didn’t specify how he would vote, he said Kavanaugh’s accusers should first be heard, and said both parties’ responses to the nomination process “disgusts” him, noting that dozens of senators have already announced how they’ll vote before hearing from Kavanaugh’s accusers.
“They’ve taken what is an important and serious obligation under the U.S. Constitution and turned it into a circus,” he said.

I imagine he’s in close contact with Joe Manchin and Joe Donnelly.

“I’m very open. I haven’t closed any doors at all on Kavanaugh. I just want to make sure there’s a fair, open and civil hearing,” said Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, perhaps the most conservative Democrat. “The man has to have a chance to clear his name, but these ladies have the complete opportunity to tell their story.”

Mailings from Heidi Heitkamp suggest she’s settled on the  “No other choice” and frame it in the broadest term possible, and is running against intemperate remarks by his opponent.

ITEM NUMBER TEN:  Do love the self-unaware glibness of internet denziens here. See…

  While unrelated to Cruz’s enthusiasm for elevating an attempted rapist to a role that will define women’s rights for a generation, one protestor spoke truth to power and said, “Beto is way hotter than you, dude.”

Sometimes quoted as…

“Beto is way hotter than you, dude,” another shouted in reference to Cruz’s Democratic opponent in his re-election fight, Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke.

O’Rouke’s tweet can be read as “dude.  Not helping.”  But be that as it may, the real issue is how the objectification that comes with this “hotness” as against the issue brought up on sexual assault allegations.

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