The Saudis aren’t the fastest liars on the planet, that’s for sure. It took them a week to come around to “he died under questioning by rogue elements,” which ranks with only a dog eating homework and a grandmother’s funeral in the Pantheon of Lame Excuses. Turkey found more evidence of Jamal Khashoggi’s death, so total denial was no longer feasible.
Tom Carper likes to brag about what great physical shape he’s in, but Joe Biden walks the walk. His whirlwind campaign schedule brought him yesterday to nearby Burlington County, N.J., where he made a surprise visit to a popular diner in support of former Obama White House aide Andy Kim, who’s in a tight race with incumbent Tom MacArthur for the usually safe-Republican seat.
Elizabeth Warren, contrary to right-wing belief, never intended to be a politician. She was a college professor, so she has a belief that the record needs to be kept straight and facts need to win out. If she were a politician, she would have known that you don’t get in a pissing contest with a skunk. The quick adoption of the right-wing spin by the mainstream media shows how liberal it is, I suppose, and I guess everybody already assumed Trump is the sort who would welsh on a bet anyway.
I did get one right when I predicted political violence would boil over first in the Pacific Northwest, where northwoods lumber hicks and hipsters are in close proximity. While Charlottesville bears that shame, violence remains pretty close to the surface in Portland, Ore. Police there revealed they found armed white-power group members on the roof of a parking garage overlooking the site of an August protest. Right-wingers are holding such rallies hoping to draw Antifa forces precisely so they can respond with violence, as the Proud Boys did the other night in New York, where they attacked protesters after a talk by Gavin McInnes at a Republican club. Some point out that the GOP embracing violent extremists means we’re entering Stage 2 of fascism.
Lots of questions remain surrounding the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fight. For example, Trump accuses the Democrats of leaking the letter Christine Blasey Ford sent to Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office. The evidence, however, points to a less suspected source: the White House itself. The letter leaked almost immediately after it was placed in Kavanaugh’s FBI file, so the arithmetic isn’t hard to do.
Sussex readers, take note: While most of Mexico Beach, Fla., was wiped off the face of the earth, one house stands tall amid the wreckage. The New York Times asked the guys who built the house that survived how they did it. It boils down to spending the money and exceeding code. The house is built of reinforced poured concrete and stands 10 feet off the ground on 40-foot-deep pilings, giving it the ability to withstand winds up to an estimated 250 mph. So construction costs were about double the local norm, where buildings don’t even have to meet the South Florida 175-mph standard.