55 thoughts on “Pitcher This”

  1. too bad that calming comforting moment of civility and compromise looks to be brief, giving way and returning too soon to the cynicism, anger and distrust we’ve grown so accustom to….

  2. a very serious Alexandra Petri this morning in wapo:  The train will continue, and you will be crushed

     
    “I was … wondering whether I would just be jumping in front of a train that was headed to where it was headed anyway, and that I would just be personally annihilated.”Christine Blasey Ford, on whether to come forward
     
    I am so tired.
     
    The train is very, very urgent. It is moving a man’s career forward. It is very difficult to get the train to stop.
     
    The presumption is that the train will not stop. The presumption is that you will be a scream thrown on the tracks. That it will require a great many of you to be thrown onto the tracks before the train will grind to a halt. It can never be just the one; it must be several at once. Someday we will know the precise conversion. We will tell them: Do not bother unless there are 20 others like you, because the train will continue, and you will be crushed.
    It is painful to watch a woman caught and torn in the gears of a man’s progress. To watch the meaning of her name change into a thing that happened to her once. To watch the first sentence of her obituary get rewritten. To watch her name be linked to this man’s name (Anita, accuser of Clarence; Christine, accuser of Brett). All she asks is for the train to stop.
     
    To make the train stop, you must throw yourself in front. Your whole self. Your fear of flying. Your family.
     
    You must throw yourself in front of the train, but still it may not be enough. These trains move very fast. We must not ask why.
     
    Maybe the train will stop for a week. That seems fair. A week, just to make sure. A week, to take this seriously, at a gentleman’s request.
     
    But I am so tired.I am so tired of this constant parade of pain.
    In the Bible, Thomas says he will not believe what Jesus has survived unless he can stick his hand into the wounds. But this is not a reasonable thing to ask of someone who is not God, to stick your hand into their wound. I am tired of watching people become wounds. Half the Internet is a wound. Have you stuck your hand in it enough? Do you believe yet? The #MeToo movement lurches forward over a path of scars. The change is so slow and the sacrifice it demands so great.
    Even as she testified Thursday, Christine Blasey Ford kept apologizing. (“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can read fast!” she said. She was here to be “helpful,” she said.)
     
    Someday I want to not be tired.Someday I want us not to apologize.
     
    Women are used to squinting to see our own stories in the stories of others. To reading ourselves into the words “all men are created equal.” To being the thing tied to the tracks to raise the stakes.
    I am so tired of the moment when you discover how little your weight counts against the train’s.
     
    I want us to be the train and not the thing thrown under it.I want us to be the thing too urgent to be stopped, not the thing that must curl up apologetically to make room for it.
     
    Is it too much to ask to be the train sometimes? Not all the time, just sometimes.
     
    I am so tired of watching us jump.I am so tired of watching the trains keep going.

  3. Congressional Democrats’ lawsuit alleging Trump’s private business is violating the Constitution can proceed, federal judge rules
    […]
    In his ruling, Federal Judge Emmet G. Sullivan agreed with the legislators, writing that they have legal standing to sue and their case can proceed.
    “The Clause requires the President to ask Congress before accepting a prohibited foreign emolument,” Sullivan wrote. If the allegations made by Democrats are true, he wrote, then “the President is accepting prohibited foreign emoluments without asking and without receiving a favorable reply from Congress.”
    […continues…]

  4. Someone posted a story about “anger rooms,” where you pay to break stuff.

    I thought it was a bad idea, as exercising or meditation would be better.  I think focusing on your anger while venting just makes it build up/ingrains it in you.

    Now, the Dallas woman who created anger rooms has been taken off of life support after being attacked by her live-in boyfriend.

  5. I doubt that there would be any delay in voting if those women had gotten to someone other than Flake.

    The Republicsns are still unaware of who will be coming for their seats every November going forward.

    There’s your train that can’t be stopped.

  6. Not sure why Kavanaugh backers are so upset with Flake. His maneuver could undermine Democrats. They’re getting the FBI investigation they demanded, but what if it turns up nothing new? Could deprive Democrats of their major talking point and provide cover for Collins, Murkowski, and Manchin to vote for confirmation.

  7. Pogo, go back to the Parker piece and start reading the comments. You, and I, aren’t the only people left confused

  8. Frank Rich. At one time known as The Butcher of Broadway for his wicked sharp theater reviews,  remains among the throng of my favorite New Yorkers. He was always wicked sharp on imus. I haven’t seen “Veep” but I understand it’s pretty good.

  9. Can’t read Parker unless I pay a dollar…..whatever she said, it ain’t worth it.

    but the title…..Jiminey Cricket? On the face of it, that’s a bit off-putting.

  10. Sturg, I really enjoyed your insert about the band that did good, despite the absence of electricity, in the last post.

     

  11. It’s a regular FB page called Gigs from Hell, funny gig stories. Stories from bar guys, big banders, wedding  banders, country guys, bluegrass guys, TV guys, weekend warriors, et very cetera…..a hoot, as it were.

  12. I definitely think this is a cya move and the now Trump controlled FBI will find nothing

  13. Jiminy Cricket is the conscience  I hardly think Lindsay Graham could be one for anyone including himself
    Katheen Parker writes drivel for a living

  14. The three fake thoughtful goopers  have never followed through on their threats to do the right thing (except when John McCain led them)

    Susan Collins better never say in public again she is thinking about an issue when you know damn well she is nothing but a gooper blaster

  15. Pinocchio is Trump, not Kavanaugh,  for whom lil Lindsey supposedly tries to play conscience and horseshit whisperer.

     

  16. Just to be perfectly clear — the reasons Democrats do not support Kavanaugh is not based solely on his being sexual predator.  He is also a liar and someone who believes that women don’t know shit about themselves

  17. Great words from Buffy St Marie this morning on NPR:

    The good thing about all these bad things is that more people know about them.

  18. wapo:

    The American Bar Association had concerns about Kavanaugh 12 years ago. Republicans dismissed those, too.

    […]
    Late Thursday evening, the ABA called for an FBI investigation into sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee voted on his Supreme Court nomination. The warning was all the more remarkable, because just hours earlier, Kavanaugh and his Republican defenders had cited the ABA’s previously glowing endorsement of the nominee — “the gold standard,” as one leading Republican put it.
     
    Flash back to the mid-2000s and another fight in the Senate over Kavanaugh’s nomination to a federal court:
     
    Democrats for three years had been blocking President George W. Bush’s 2003 nomination of Kavanaugh to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. They argued he was biased, as shown by his work as a lawyer for Bush’s presidential campaign, for an independent counsel’s investigation into President Bill Clinton and for other conservative causes.
    Republicans kept pushing to make Kavanaugh a judge on the powerful appeals court, year after year. In his defense, they cited multiple reviews by the ABA’s judicial review committee that found him “well qualified” — the big attorney association’s highest possible endorsement, meaning Kavanaugh had outstanding legal abilities and outstanding judicial temperament.
     
    But in May 2006, as Republicans hoped to finally push Kavanaugh’s nomination across the finish line, the ABA downgraded its endorsement.
     
    The group’s judicial investigator had recently interviewed dozens of lawyers, judges and others who had worked with Kavanaugh, the ABA announced at the time, and some of them raised red flags about “his professional experience and the question of his freedom from bias and open-mindedness.”
    […]

    A particular judge had told the ABA that Kavanaugh had been “sanctimonious” during an oral argument in court. Several lawyers considered him inexperienced, and one said he “dissembled” in the courtroom.

    [….]
    In his 12 years on the court, he apparently resolved the ABA’s concerns about his temperament. Kavanaugh cited the bar association’s new unanimous “well qualified” rating for his nomination to the Supreme Court in his opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday — an angry, tearful defense against sexual allegations, in which he suggested “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” had inspired his accusers.
     
    “Here’s my understanding,” Graham told other senators afterward, defending Kavanaugh as he had done more than a decade earlier. “If you lived a good life, people would recognize it, like the American Bar Association has — the gold standard. His integrity is absolutely unquestioned. He is very circumspect in his personal conduct, harbors no biases or prejudices. He’s entirely ethical, is a really decent person. He is warm, friendly, unassuming. He’s the nicest person — the ABA.”
     
    But that evening, as Republicans prepared to vote on the nomination, and Democrats accused them of ignoring multiple women’s claims against Kavanaugh, the ABA once again ran up a surprise red flag.
    “Deciding to proceed without conducting an additional investigation would not only have a lasting impact on the Senate’s reputation, but it will also negatively affect the great trust necessary for the American people to have in the Supreme Court,” ABA President Robert Carlson wrote in a letter to key senators.
     
    His group’s endorsement of Kavanaugh notwithstanding, Carlson urged the Senate to pause the confirmation and have the FBI investigate the claims against Kavanaugh before making a decision.
     
    Twelve years earlier, the group’s warnings about Kavanaugh had at least delayed his confirmation for the hours it took senators to debate them.
     
    On Friday morning, Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) dispensed with the new one in less than a minute.
    […continues…]

  19. Enjoyed that interview with Buffy Sainte-Marie…..never knew she wrote “Up Where We Belong” and then read on the wackypedia how she’d been blacklisted from radio.     Always did like her.

     

  20. Seth Abramson
    Seth Abramson
    @SethAbramson
    2h

    Replying to @SethAbramson

    8/ Kavanaugh could’ve told a story of personal growth—such that by the 90s he was only engaged in political dirty tricks, by the 00s only receiving stolen Congressional docs, and by the 10s only picking clerks based on their looks—but instead he perjured himself across the board.

  21. Sturg, seeing your hairdo from the back made me think of Monk. A couple of classmates and I watched him and three? others play at Carnegie Hall back over Thanksgiving in ’57 or ’58. They were really good.

  22. Yowza……now THAT was a concert to be reckoned with.

    You know what they say…..bald in front means you’re a thinker…..bald in back means you’re a lover…..bald in front and back means you just THINK you’re a lover…..

  23. Sturgeone,

    Have you been to Walton, New York? Also Roscoe or Rockland?

    My maternal grandmother’s ancestral farmlands now are beneath the Cannonsville Reservoir.

     

  24. I don’t think to those……been to Woodstock, Margaretville, Roxbury, Gilboa, Prattsville, shandaken, etc…….then Albany, Utica, Oneonta on different trips out of gilboa……

  25. If ever so humble there’s no place like home.

    (Homestead lands being flooded by Cannonsville Reservoir, near Walton, New York. Ye Olde Farm was located in Rock Rift.)

  26. Interesting question about the Voter Enthusiasm Poll. Northeast, California most likely safe for Dems but could this be a good time to follow a 50 State strategy, not ceding anyplace? Being a woman is not a Party designation. Extending an outstretched hand can’t hurt. Pretty darn clear from the hearings which party has womens issues at heart & which Party doesn’t.

     

  27. Having watched a beautiful sunset and now wrapped in darkness this evening, I have to wonder where this last summer slipped to.  I know I was busy, a boat or two helps with that.  I know I was working, but not that hard.  Each weekend was an attempt to be free of the anger and fear caused by the greedy old pervert and his mob, but I feel like those few days were to short.

    Fall is approaching, I have to break out a jacket to walk the dog tonight.  There should be frost, if not snow, in the Colorado Rockies by now.  My crazy Finnish cousins are preparing for a long night of darkness; I know not how they do it – even if it is in my genes too. Oh, they drink more coffee than anyone else, that might help.

    Out we go for a short walk.  Probably need to flip the thermostat to heat tonight.

  28. nbc news:
    The White House is limiting the scope of the FBI’s investigation into the sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, multiple people briefed on the matter told NBC News.
    While the FBI will examine the allegations of Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez, the bureau has not been permitted to investigate the claims of Julie Swetnick, who has accused Kavanaugh of engaging in sexual misconduct at parties while he was a student at Georgetown Preparatory School in the 1980s, those people familiar with the investigation told NBC News. A White House official confirmed that Swetnick’s claims will not be pursued as part of the reopened background investigation into Kavanaugh.
    [….]

    Instead of investigating Swetnick’s claims, the White House counsel’s office has given the FBI a list of witnesses they are permitted to interview, according to several people who discussed the parameters on the condition of anonymity. They characterized the White House instructions as a significant constraint on the FBI investigation and caution that such a limited scope, while not unusual in normal circumstances, may make it difficult to pursue additional leads in a case in which a Supreme Court nominee has been accused of sexual assault.

    ]…continues…]

  29. fox news:
    [….]
    “If true, this is outrageous,” her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, tweeted Saturday afternoon. “Why are Trump and his cronies in the Senate trying to prevent the American people from learning the truth? Why do they insist on muzzling women with information submitted under penalty of perjury? Why Ramirez but not my client?”
     
     
    Avenatti also represents Stormy Daniels, an adult film star who has alleged she had a sexual encounter with Donald Trump back in 2006.
     
    “The scope and duration has been set by the Senate,” Raj Shah, a White House spokesman, told Fox News. “The White House is letting the FBI agents do what they are trained to do.”
     
    According to The Journal, Swetnick has recorded a TV interview to be aired Sunday, the first woman making accusations against the Supreme Court nominee to do so. NBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday aired a clip of her interview with John Heilemann of Showtime’s “The Circus,” in which Ms. Swetnick called for an investigation into the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh.
    […continues….]

  30. another must-watch by millions will be that John Heilemann of Showtime’s “The Circus” on sunday…. unless IMPOTUS does something outrageous to redirect the spotlight to be on him.

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