Legal to Rape in KY, As Long As the Bitch Had a Drink First

This is fucking bullshit.  Shame on you, Lexington grand jury members.

From the Herald:

Rape and sodomy charges against the son of Franklin County Sheriff Pat Melton were dismissed by a Lexington grand jury this week, according to court documents.

Patrick Melton, a 22-year-old University of Kentucky student, was accused of “sexual and deviate sexual intercourse” without the consent of the alleged victim on July 7 at his residence on University Avenue in Lexington, his citation stated.

He was arrested in August. The woman allegedly tried to squirm, push and kick Melton, according to his original arrest citation.

Multiple witnesses confirmed the victim’s statements that she was intoxicated and passed out prior to the incident, his citation stated.

The grand jury met Tuesday and dismissed Melton’s first-degree rape and first-degree sodomy charges, according to court documents.

It's Justice Rapey McLiarFace's world now.  We just live in it.

Violence is Repugs' Only Response

They won. Rapey McLiarFace is on the Supreme Court, where he can force the nation into a Lords-n-Serfs economy and an only-rich-straight-white-men-are-human-and-have-rights society.

But constant attacks, death threats and violence is all they know. And domestic terrorism to prevent anyone from ever challenging any rich, white, straight, repug man again is what they do.



From NPR:

Christine Blasey Ford is still being harassed after leveling sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, her lawyers say.

"Justice Kavanaugh ascended to the Supreme Court, but the threats to Dr. Ford continue," said Ford's lawyers, Debra Katz, Lisa Banks and Michael Bromwich, in a statement to NPR.

Kavanaugh stridently denied the allegations about the assault and went on to win confirmation in the Senate. Ford is still working to get her life back on track, her lawyers say.

She has had to move four times, she wrote last month. She has had to pay for a private security detail. She hasn't been able to return to her job as a professor at Palo Alto University. A spokeswoman for the school did not respond to a question about whether there was a timeline for Ford to return.

Ford's accusation that Kavanaugh had assaulted her when the two were in high school — and Kavanaugh's emotional response — took place before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 27. Ford detailed the intimidation she was receiving then.

"My family and I have been the target of constant harassment and death threats," she told the committee.

"People have posted my personal information on the Internet. This has resulted in additional emails, calls, and threats. My family and I were forced to move out of our home. ... My family and I have been living in various secure locales, with guards."

Although the spotlight has receded, the danger has not, Ford's lawyers say, but she is not interested in trying to turn her story into something that could make the experience lucrative.

Embracing Malice

From LGM:

This is a great piece from Serwer about the significance of Trump’s mockery of Christine Blasey Ford:

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track.

SNIP

Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.

28 Days. VOTE.

Make Every Repug Candidate Pay For Kavanaugh

Rapey McLiarFace is now the raping, lying face of the republican party.  His despicable performance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the screaming hysteria of repug fanatics spouting ludicrous conspiracies have laid bare the true nature of their party: despising and degrading women in order to promote and protect privileged, rich, straight, conservative, freakazoid white men.

 

To repugs, either you are one of them, or you are scum to be assaulted and kicked into the trash.

 

Which side are you on?

 

29 Days.

VOTE

KY Abortion Rights Activists Ready to Fight Gilead

It's an underground railroad for women barred from basic health care, and with Rapey McLiarFace now on the Supreme Court, it's going to be working overtime.

Think Progress:

Kentucky pro-choice activists have prepared for the day when the court rules against them and makes abortion inaccessible — a possibility the country at large is now reckoning with since Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement last week.

Kentucky’s last remaining abortion clinic is only open right now because a federal judge issued a (final) order in September and blocked the state from revoking EMW Women’s Surgical Center’s license.

“We have a contingency in place,” said Kentucky Health Justice Network’s Marcie Crim ...  if, let’s say, Roe v. Wade is overturned in a post-Kennedy court.

If a person can’t access abortion services in the state, Kentucky Health Justice Network will drive or fly them to where they can get one. They already drive people to Granite City, Illinois — a five hour car ride from Lexington where one abortion clinic recently closed. When Gov. Matt Bevin (R) successfully shut down the Lexington abortion clinic in January 2017, requests for her group’s services had “gone through the roof,” said Crim. They also drive people to Chicago, Illinois, Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. for the procedure.

In May 2018 alone, the grassroots abortion fund helped 78 people get the procedure. Activists drove 45 people to nearby clinics or gave them a gas credit card. They also paid for 33 people’s abortion services because insurance wouldn’t cover it under state law restricting coverage; for a handful of those people, they also provided child care and lodging because Kentucky requires that a pregnant person wait at least 24 hours after mandatory counseling to get an abortion, thus turning an hours-long procedure into a two day event. 

The contingency plan works for a hobbled or vanished Roe. The latter is a real concern since Kentucky lawmakers have made it clear that they’ll ban abortion to the maximum extent allowed under the Supreme Court. If Roe is overturned, Kentucky Health Justice Network will need to hire more than the 60 volunteers they currently staff or have them work overtime. It means they’ll need more people to donate money. It might mean having to turn people away. And for Kentuckians who need the procedure, it means a lot of hard choices. 

Thanks to the Kentucky Health Justice Network, one of the choices does not have to be an illegal, back-alley abortion likely to kill the woman.  Support their work or ask for help here.

Meanwhile, Back at the Baby Jails

Everybody who thinks Rapey McLiarFace (stolen from Wonkette) has any more respect for brown babies than he does for white women, stand on your head.

Erik Loomis:

This nation is in a fight to the death over whether people of color will be treated with human rights. I don’t want a bipartisan solution to this, not that one was ever going to happen anyway. I want to crush conservatives’ belief that they can ethnically cleanse the nation. Abolish ICE is a good beginning.

And only electing Democratic candidates to take over Congress is going to do it.  

31 Days. How many Democratic voters are you sending to the polls?

The Repug Skeleton Key

Albert Burneko at The Concourse:

It’s a bit late for anyone not to have figured this out yet, but the skeleton key to understanding American conservatism is this: At bottom, it lacks absolutely any moral or ideological underpinning beyond the reactionary protection of moneyed white men—of their station, their wealth and power, and their egos. Its supposed ideas and abstractions are just a framework for spasmodic lashing-out against anything that can be interpreted as a threat to rich white dudes. It likes supply-side economics because the supply side is made of rich white dudes. It likes tax cuts because the taxes are mostly cut for rich white dudes. It likes cops and soldiers because cops and soldiers uphold a social order with rich white dudes at the top. It likes “traditional family values” because social, economic, and sexual dominion over women are the most traditional family values of all. It likes “Make America Great Again” because rich white dudes used to roll through society and over everyone else with even greater impunity than they do now. All of these things are just proxies for reiterating, over and over and over, forever, the power and security and primacy of rich white dudes.

A Democratic House Can Stop Rapey McLiarface

Paul Campos at LGM:

Speaking of questions, if Kavanaugh is confirmed and Democrats take the House, he needs to be impeached immediately.  Of course he won’t be removed by a Senate vote, but I more than suspect that an actual investigation of Brett Kavanaugh, by people with subpoena power, will uncover enough dirt to at a minimum delegitimize him even further, and it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that the revelations could be ugly enough to force him to resign.  In particular, I’m pretty confident that Kavanaugh’s finances are not going to withstand any serious scrutiny. 

This guy is really dirty.  Whether or not he’s confirmed in the next few days, the battle against him needs to continue.

VOTE!  Vote early, vote often.  Take your family, take your friends, take your neighbors, take your dogs.

32 Days.

Rape Our Daughters

Make every repug candidate everywhere answer to this.

Down With Tyranny:

This is Happening Because Only Men Have Bodily Autonomy

Digby:

The problem is that when it comes to women's bodily autonomy, the law is inadequate to defend it and society is muddled and confused, at best. Anti-abortion arguments pit the life of a woman against a potential life that is growing within her own body and refuses to even accept that her life, her decision, can take precedence even in the earliest stages. A woman's right to control her body and her reproduction must come second.  With rape, unless she can prove that she was raped or otherwise assaulted, her knowledge of what happened cannot be given any more weight than the evidence she can bring to the table. Her bodily integrity can, therefore, be violated without consequence.

I don't have all the answers to these complicated questions. But I do know that it's long past time we recognized that our system and frankly, our way of thinking, is inadequately serving half the human population. I don't want innocent men to be accused or punished for crimes they did not commit. (Again, being denied a promotion to the Supreme Court, particularly after pitching a tantrum worthy of a 5 year old on national TV is not such a situation. And false accusations are very rare.)

But until we deal with this inequity in our legal system and society at large, what we now have cannot be called justice in any real sense of the word.

.

Stooges

El Jefe at Juanita Jean's place:

Republicans have shown themselves to simply be stooges for the worst president in US history, possessing neither shame or backbone.  They are willing to sacrifice our republic to perpetuate their own power and their own twisted world view.  Worse, their nominee for the highest court in the land is the same.  He’s a spoiled little rich kid who started life on third base who’s goal is to keep normal people from getting to first base.  If he gets to the court, you can kiss the principles of fair play, equality, privacy, and voting rights goodbye.

VOTE! Vote early, vote often.  Take your family, take your friends, take your neighbors, take your dogs.

Paid for Abortion

Down with Tyranny:

The Face of Cowardice

Down with Tyranny:

The New Confederacy

If even after the blatantly anti-constitutional decisions of the Gorsuch Supreme Court this June you still think elections don't matter, think again.

Scott LeMeiux at LGM:

This is a flatly neoconfederate Court, refusing to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments to stop racial discrimination but willing to use them to stop integration. 

 
One of the many things that’s at stake in presidential elections is whether the Constitution’s mist critical provisions will be meaningfully enforced. If you’re wondering when I’ll stop passionately arguing against people who see elections as fora for atomistic consumer expression, the answer is “never.”

And Brett Kavanagh is going to make it exponentially worse, and for generations to come.

VOTE on Nov. 6. Vote early, vote often.  Take your family, take your friends, take your neighbors, take your dogs.  Issue non-violent threats to every Democrat you know who is not planning to vote (i.e., no more sex for you, no more homegrown tomatoes, no more using the pool, no more sharing high-speed wifi - you get the idea.)