SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET: 

WOMEN FOR BRETT – FROM MSN:   COLUMBIA, S.C. — As the Senate is divided on President Donald Trump's Supreme Court pick, so too are women across the country.  Female voices have echoed throughout the U.S. Senate this week demanding male senators justify their support for Brett Kavanaugh's U.S. Supreme Court nomination despite an allegation of high school sexual assault.  But other women have spent hours calling Senate offices in support of Kavanaugh, condemning what they saw as an anti-Republican ploy that's damaged not only Kavanaugh's reputation and livelihood but also his accuser's.  To Hannah King, a college senior from Bristol, Tennessee, Christine Blasey Ford's allegations of a drunken attack by Kavanaugh at a 1982 party when both were in high school were jarring and scary. But while King expressed empathy for Ford, she also said she's concerned about the timing of Ford's allegations, which surfaced publicly only after Kavanaugh — already a federal judge — was nominated to the Supreme Court.  As others have pointed out, women have men in their lives, and they wouldn't want them treated this way.  I've always believed that one of the most overlooked constituencies in America is mothers of sons, who are horrified at the way their boys are treated at some schools and many colleges.  Don't get them too angry.  I think Hillary did. 

WILL THIS MAN SURVIVE? – FROM BIZPACREVIEW:    CNN may have some regrets after asking a “group of expert commentators” about their reaction to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings with Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford.  While the commentators delivered a predictable narrative on the testimonies of the Supreme Court nominee and the woman accusing him of sexually assaulting her nearly four decades ago, one of the group went rogue.  Citing facts as the basis and not the spectacle that unfolded, CNN legal analyst, Paul Callan, gave a no-nonsense assessment of why he was in favor of the Senate confirming Kavanaugh, while delivering a scathing appraisal of Ford’s testimony and Democrats’ behavior.
“Many Americans will ultimately come away from Thursday’s hearing feeling disgusted not over the character of Judge Brett Kavanaugh but that of those Democratic senators who attempted, on the weakest of evidence, to portray the judge as an attempted rapist,” Callan wrote. “Their strongest documentary evidence appeared to be inscriptions about beer drinking in his high school yearbook.”  Noting that courts of law are where claims of criminal conduct are to be resolved, Callan argued that Ford did not meet the standard for delivering the missing pieces in her story.  Read the whole thing.  It's excellent.  Then pray for this analyst to survive.  I wonder if we'll ever see him again on CNN.

LOWEST OF THE LOW – FROM THE NEW YORK POST:  In a shocking irony, the John Jay College (New York City) professors accused of pimping out their students raked in more than half a million dollars in government money to study prostitution.  Thousands more in taxpayer and non-profit cash poured in for the academics to study addiction — at the same time the profs were allegedly running their own on-campus snakepit called “the swamp,” where drugs were sold and used.  Four professors at the publicly funded criminal justice college are on paid leave while the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and State Inspector General probe allegations they brought the underworld they studied into the hallways of John Jay.  Accusations of rape, sexual harassment, facilitating prostitution, and using and selling drugs first surfaced several weeks ago in the written complaints of two John Jay graduates, which were shared with The Post and authorities.  How did the presence of this cesspool go unnoticed by other members of the faculty, in a school devoted to teaching law enforcement? 

September 29, 2018