Balta1701

He'll have to order it, so if the Senators tell him it's ok to stack the deck to make sure it comes back as "unverified/unverifiable" then he will. If those Senators say that their vote depends on whether the investigation is legit, then you'll get the latter version of "Something bad more than likely happened probably more than once".

They have a solid amount of money coming off the books at the end of 2019 in Sandoval and Porcello and others. I think there's probably room to extend Sale and Betts that year and still be able to get back under the tax level if that's the way they want to go. If they win a world series before then, that's even more money for them to work with.

Apparently what everyone is wondering now, and what we don't know, is how they will set up the "investigation". It's entirely possible that they could ask the FBI to investigate the veracity of this claim by interviewing just the 2 who spoke yesterday and come back with a he-said, she-said story that says that the claims are "unverified", giving cover to Collins to vote for him. Basically, stacking the deck so that the result is the same as yesterday by avoiding any other witnesses or consideration of even the calendar that he handed over. It's also possible that they could interview multiple relevant witnesses including the others who have issued sworn statements and assess whether it is likely that something happened, as would be done on a high level security clearance style background check, if Collins or Flake are actually insisting on a strong investigation to guarantee their vote. If that were done, based on everything that's available they'd probably come back by saying "we can't establish exactly how this particular event occurred but it is likely that there was more than one incident involving Kavanaugh that was inappropriate", which would put then those senators on the spot of having to either vote for a guy who crossed the line or torpedo his investigation.

I think there's a decent chance we do sign Machado, but I will just be stupefied if the White Sox sign Machado and then go and sign Keuchel or Corbin, block their upcoming pitchers, burn through all their available free agent money, and start declaring that they think they can compete for the Central next year. If they sign Machado, it's for the reason RH said at the start of this thread - he can't control when a guy hits free agency, so when a guy hits who fills a major role, even if he has to burn a season, he'd consider it.

His point is that things worked out better for them by not drafting Rodon because Bregman is a better player, but that doesn't really matter to the point that there's lots of benefits to having a higher pick and sometimes a truly top guy does drop. If you don't like the Astros passing on Rodon example, you could look a year earlier when the Astros passed on a 3b named Kris Bryant to draft Mark Appel and there's another case where a team passed on a guy and the next guy on the list sorta outplayed them.

I don't like that they do that either...but hey, if that's the standard then it's equally fair here.

I would agree polygraphs are unreliable, but I guess we have to go by the standard used by law enforcement that they're not admissible as evidence but can still be useful. That standard was recently outlined by this one judge...

If I had to make a guess, I think the optics of Flake closing the elevator on the women saying that they were accused of assault this morning was so bad that it pushed things over the top. Maybe not for him, but maybe for Collins (I think Murkowski has realized if she votes for him her senate career ends, the native Alaskan population understands that while screwing minorities Kavanaugh would screw them in particular and that population provided the votes she needed last time out).

Bill Cosby's case literally does not meet the standard you just outlined.

And that's why so many men get away with rape.

What you're asking for is information the brain won't record. The fact that people demand this information and the brain will not record it during the trauma is therefore used as a way to deny that the traumatic event happened. And that set of demands has the effective result of legalizing rape.

They did ask who was paying for her lawyers and the lawyers interjected they were working pro-bono. I believe one of them actually left his law firm in order to represent her. And, interestingly as she noted...not being able to remember 100% all the details of a traumatic experience like an attempted assault is the way the brain normally handles these things even when there is no alcohol involved, and it's used as an incredibly common way to minimize reporting and punishment of sexual assault.

We're also the only major democracy that regularly has the party that wins a majority of votes out of power.

The lawyers for the 2nd accuser released their email exchange with Grassley's staff today where she says she'd be willing to testify even without the FBI investigation if they could just speak on the phone and the Republican staff would not do such a call.

and then when that didn't work we'd be asking why they didn't work harder to nail him on simply saying an investigation was appropriate because that would play well in the straight up press. After all even the entire American Bar Association just called for one.

There's nothing stopping us from doing both. Honestly, we probably should. An innings eating guy with an ERA of 5 and a guy who maybe pitches 100 innings and then is either trade bait if he's good enough or replaced midseason by someone from Charlotte if he isn't...that fills our 4th and 5th rotation spots to start the year. And, there will probably be some extra innings open in either September or when someone has a DL stint too.

This should be your example though - he was going to deflect and avoid answering at any of the amazing questions you guys think of that he should ask, and since the majority was willing to let him get away with lying and not answering questions, all of these brilliant ideas for things to ask him about his calendar were just going to be things he would easily lie about.

Not a chance in hell.

I think you're completely fooling yourself. He would have either lied or more likely avoided answering the question and they'd have moved on because time would have run out, like happened with 10 other issues last night. Short of raping a 12 year old in the room last night, the Republicans have to get this done.

The f***? A play to get more investigation was idiotic, they needed stuff that could be investigated.

Do you really think that there was some magic question that they were going to ask of him that would change one single Republican vote? For crying out loud they're going to put an attempted rapist on the supreme court, you think they would care about it when he lies and says he had nothing to do with the Whelan thing?

The American Bar Association, which both Kavanaugh himself and Lindsey Graham praised as "The gold standard" for evaluating judicial candidates, last night released a statement calling for a delay of the vote on him and an FBI investigation into this part of his background. To my knowledge none of the justices on the court have been confirmed without an ABA endorsement.

It's the same standard that Kavanaugh will be using in his time on the court. It's not that a President can't nominate a judge in certain circumstances, it's that a Democrat can't.

That would be my guess yeah is this is Kershaw's last shot to guarantee $100 million+ more in career earnings.