One of the most infuriating things about the whole Dr. Ford affair is that the media has completely let Republicans get away with their lie, over and over again, that there is "no corroborating evidence" to support her allegation.
Republicans have basically moved the goalposts to define "corroborating evidence" as just eyewitnesses, physical evidence, and that's it.
Actually, corroborating evidence is *anything* that supports a person's account.
The therapist notes from Dr. Ford's session in 2012 are corroborating evidence for her story. As is the July 1st entry on Kavanaugh's calendar. As would be Mark Judge's employment records at Safeway.
None of these things *prove* her story, but they do *corroborate* it.
What pisses me off about arguments like this is not just the minimization of rape. It's the entire premise that Kavanaugh has some fundamental right to be on the Supreme Court because he won the lottery of birth and rose through politics through his connections and family wealth.
I mean, when @bariweiss laments that something he did when he was 17 could take away his future, what's being taken from him is something 99.9999999% of Americans will never have, a great many of whom would be just as smart as he is if they had the educational opportunity.
This is part of a broader idea in our culture that the powerful have a right to be powerful.
That's the opposite of how it should be. We should *constantly* question what right the powerful have to their power. Especially those who earn it from privilege.
I'd happily accept more judges on the federal bench whose law degrees aren't Ivy League and who didn't clerk for the existing Washington judges, but who, say, ran a nonprofit for battered women, or served as a public defender in a rural place a million miles from anywhere.
I want more federal judges who have had to deal with true hardship and problems in their lives, or at the very least, who have spent a good portion of their careers helping those who do.
People who have been on the end of the failures of our social, political, and legal systems.
Actually, public universities were first created in the U.S. in the early 1800s, and many state run land-grant schools established under the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 initially offered free tuition.
In fact, @MorlockP, tuition costs began exploding in the 1970s for two reasons: state governments started slashing taxes that previously went toward funding public universities, and the federal government started creating privately-run middlemen to handle lending and collections.
There were other reasons as well: the economy started phasing out low-skilled factory jobs, causing an explosion in the number of people who need a college degree, and the rise of the for-profit sector like ITT and Corinthian that investigators revealed as billion-dollar scams.
Kessler seems to think if the rate of unarmed black kids being shot by police is not high enough that it can be expressed per 100,000 people, it can't possibly be a "frightening level" as @BetoORourke said.
He misses the point. Beto wasn't talking about a quantitative hazard.
By @GlennKesslerWP's standard, lynching was never occurring at a "frightening level" either. "Only" 4,000 people were lynched in the South between 1877 and 1950.
The point of terrorist acts like lynching isn't the body count. The point is that it makes everyone else obey.
Which is basically what liberals are complaining about too.
@jack is more concerned with "showing that we are not adding our own bias" than really applying the rules consistently, because so many right wing extremists are on his platform that real enforcement would look biased.
We have reached a point where enforcing Twitter's rules as written is incompatible with Twitter execs' desire to insulate their company from complaints from conservatives.
Because conservatives are just plain more likely to abuse the rules than liberals.
If Twitter rules require suspending accounts that direct abusive language against a particular group, and prominent conservative Twitter accounts are retweeting literal Nazi content, Twitter can't have it both ways.
Either they throw out the rules or they piss off conservatives.