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The People in Charge of the Kavanaugh Confirmation Are So Scared They Did Something Insane Last Night

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OK.

Hope you’ve had your morning coffee.

What happened last night is the culmination of years of far right wing religious conservatives being given a platform they don’t deserve. And it shows just how terrified the people running the Kavanaugh confirmation process are.

Most people don’t know the name Ed Whelan. He’s considered by the right wing elite to be a great legal mind. In the days when the fight for marriage equality was front and center, Whelan’s positions were prominently supported and distributed by anti-LGBT groups, and he was called on to speak against marriage equality.

Apparently, Whelan is good friends with Judge Brett Kavanaugh, and is working to help him get confirmed.

Thursday night, in a mad series (mad as in: odd, desperate, strange, and OMG WTH are you doing?) Whelan shared his theory that Brett Kavanaugh may not be the person who sexually assaulted and attempted to rape Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.

Got that?

Not that it didn’t happen, but just that someone else was the attacker, and Blasey Ford is mistaken.

It was not well-received:

Already there’s been a Kavanaugh doppelgänger theory, published in of all places The Washington Post, by none other than Kathleen Parker. She wrote on Tuesday, “given the high regard in which Kavanaugh has been held throughout his life, including during high school, it would make the most sense. Could there be a Kavanaugh doppelganger?”

Now the Kavanaugh team is (unofficially) putting out that maybe Blasey Ford was attacked – but she is just mistaken about who held her down, covered her mouth so she couldn’t scream or breath, and tried to rape her.

They think this is a good idea.

The Washington Post Thursday night reported this was being discussed by the White House group trying to get Kavanaugh onto the nation’s highest court, and describes the the insanity that took place last night, noting that Whelan “is close friends with both Kavanaugh and Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society who has been helping to spearhead the nomination.”

“Kavanaugh and his allies have been privately discussing a defense that would not question whether an incident involving Ford happened, but instead would raise doubts that the attacker was Kavanaugh, according to a person familiar with the discussions.”

OK.

Here’s what that looked like, as the Post explains:

Amid the maneuvering, the nomination was roiled further late Thursday by incendiary tweets from a prominent Kavanaugh friend and supporter who publicly identified another high school classmate of Kavanaugh’s as Ford’s possible attacker.

Ed Whelan, a former clerk to the late justice Antonin Scalia and president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed to floor plans, online photographs and other information to suggest a location for the house party in suburban Maryland that Ford described. He also named and posted photographs of the classmate he suggested could be responsible.

Exhibit A, screenshot of a few of Whelan’s tweets from Thursday night, offering up a different, possible suspect:

The Post adds:

Ford dismissed Whelan’s theory in a statement late Thursday: “I knew them both, and socialized with” the other classmate, Ford said, adding that she had once visited him in the hospital. “There is zero chance that I would confuse them.”

So the Kavanaugh team is so disturbed their guy is about to lose his confirmation battle they’re willing to stoop to this – and even name someone else who they say might have been the attacker.

Here’s how a few experts responded to Whelan’s crackpot theory.

First, the always spot-on Steve Schmidt:

Some are calling for the FBI to determine if Kavanaugh was in on this:

Some suggest it appears Kavanaugh did know:

Some are wondering about Whelan’s behavior:

And for more, the always perfect Rachel Maddow.

 

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News

Donald Trump Isn’t the First President to Try to Buy Greenland

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Incoming President Donald Trump is back on his quixotic plan to buy Greenland for the United States. But that’s not the first time the United States has expressed interest in buying the vast expanse of ice and tundra.

Trump’s most recent attempt to get the Denmark-owned self-governing territory is wrapped up in his announcement of Ken Howery as ambassador to Denmark. In 2019, Howery was named Trump’s ambassador to Sweden.

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump said.

READ MORE: ‘America’s Dumbest Senator’: Ron Johnson Dragged for ‘Incredibly Ignorant’ Claim About How Greenland Got Its Name

Trump’s interest in Greenland started during his first term, when billionaire and former Estée Lauder chairman Ronald Lauder suggested the president buy the territory. In August 2018, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) met with Danish ambassador Lars Gert Lose on Trump’s behalf to float the proposal. At the time Cotton said that Greenland was “vital to our national security,” according to TalkBusiness.

Denmark refused offers, with Denmark’s foreign policy chair calling it a “terrible and grotesque thought,” according to the New York Times. Indeed, the proposal was first reported on as one of Trump’s jokes.

The most recent attempt is just as unpopular with the Danes and the Greenlandic people.

“Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom,” Greenland Prime Minister Mute Egede told Reuters.

As strange as it may seem, Trump is not the only president to try to get Greenland. Nor is the idea quite as baffling as it initially sounds. Though the territory is mostly covered in ice—with areas of pure ice—it has lots of mineral resources, including stores of uranium, coal, gold and rare earth metals, not to mention oil and gas.

Greenland is also well positioned politically. There are a number of American military bases in the territory, and it boasts frequent visits from diplomats and military officials. It was even called “the most strategic location in the Arctic and perhaps the world” by Walter Berbrick of the U.S. Naval War College, who has urged the United States to increase ties to Greenland—and even called the purchase of the territory a “strategic option” that “deserves serious consideration.”

The first time the U.S. thought about buying Greenland was in 1867 when Secretary of State William Seward, under President Andrew Johnson, proposed buying it and Iceland from Denmark for $5.5 million in gold, or about $117.2 million in today’s money. The offer was never made to Denmark however. That same year, Seward negotiated the Alaska Purchase from Russia for $7.2 million ($129 million today).

In 1946, President Harry Truman’s Secretary of State Owen Brewster tried again. He offered $100 million (or about $1 billion in today’s money) in gold bullion. While the offer was popular in the American government, Denmark balked. The main reason cited was that Danes saw Greenland as part of Denmark’s cultural identity and a connection to the country’s history as Vikings, according to The Conversation.

That refusal appeared to settle things. America was happy to merely work with Denmark and Greenland without actually owning it until Trump stepped in. It remains unlikely that Denmark will ever sell—in fact, Greenlandic independence appears to be a surer bet. But one can only assume that Trump won’t stop trying.

Image via Shutterstock

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Lara Trump Thinks Microsoft Office Assistant ‘Clippy’ Is a Real Person Spying on Everything She Writes

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Fox host Lara Trump either has a new conspiracy theory, or she is very confused.

Hosting the 5 p.m. EST hour, Trump was ranting about Microsoft Word’s Clippy and the suggested changes to words like “postman” into “letter carrier” and “mankind” into “humankind.” It’s part of the right’s latest attack on “wokism,” which they define as anything done in polite society that makes them uncomfortable.

“Someone is reading this?! And assessing what I’m writing?” Trump said, assuming that a person was actually watching and reading what she was typing in Word instead of an AI programed into what they call “office assistant.” It was once named Clippy, and it was never a real person.

According to Trump, the “office assistant” is a lot like her fancy new car that doesn’t require a key, just a push-button to start it. She said that the car wouldn’t start if she didn’t jingle the keys around. That’s false. Push-button start cars use safety technology that requires your foot on the break, the car in park, and the key fob in the car with you. It’s essentially a small low-frequency transmitter. So if the car won’t start, it’s likely that you need to replace the batteries.

According to Microsoft, the assistant doesn’t have to be turned on.

“The checker can be turned on and off in a menu called ‘Grammar & Refinements’, which lists everything it checks: Age bias, Cultural bias, Ethnic slurs, Gender bias, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, Gender-Specific Language, Racial Bias, Sexual Orientation Bias and Socioeconomic Bias,” said the statement.

See Lara Trump’s rant below:

 

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Trump Official Billed US for $456,000 in Private Jets Over Five Months: Report

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New information is coming out about the use of private jets by Tom Price, the former Georgia congressman who spent eight months as Secretary of Health and Human Services in 2017.

“Tom Price, the health and human services secretary, resigned under pressure… after racking up at least $400,000 in travel bills for chartered flights and undermining President Trump’s promise to drain the swamp of a corrupt and entitled capital,” The New York Timesreported at the time. “Already in trouble with Mr. Trump for months of unsuccessful efforts to repeal and replace President Barack Obama’s health care program, Mr. Price failed to defuse the president’s anger by offering regret and a partial reimbursement.”

A Freedom of Information Act request was filed by The Washington Post and the new emails the newspaper obtained shed light on how the scandal began.

It started in April of 2017, only four months after Price took over the department. Price’s staffers sought to fly him to Los Angeles after his Delta Air Lines flight was delayed due to bad weather.

“Officials quickly secured a $29,000 charter flight — which also had to be scuttled, as tornadoes plagued the D.C. region. But the day’s events left a scar on Price’s top aides, who vowed that the Trump Cabinet official would never again wait on a commercial airline’s schedule, and foreshadowed a five-month travel sprint in which the health department spent $456,000 in taxpayer money on Price’s charter flights across the United States,” the newspaper reported.

In one case, Price did not even need to fly at all, much less on a private jet.

“One of the final trips came in September 2017, when health officials chartered a jet for Price, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway and their aides to fly round trip between Washington and Philadelphia — at a cost of $14,955 to taxpayers, according to government records,” The Post reported. “The department’s Office of Inspector General later concluded that Price’s flight to Philadelphia wasted more than $10,000 in taxpayer money compared with flying commercial, and that he could have made the trip by train.”

Prior to joining the Trump administration, Price spent a dozen years in Congress and chaired the House Budget Committee.

Read the full report.

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