That Roy Moore story is something. How worried should I be about Strange as a write-in candidate?
I don't know, but the link in 1 is news to me.
For AL, if Twitter is an indicator, everyone is still figuring out relevant laws and contingencies as we speak. It looks like a candidate can't withdraw from the ballot this late, but the party could rescind its nomination and prevent any votes from them from being counted. That sounds to me like a recipe for chaos and great difficulty in coordinating any kind of write-in campaign. And Moore might well go to pure denial and refuse to withdraw.
Moore won't withdraw. Canonically, the girl has to be dead.
The arc of God's sense of humor is long, but it bends toward public release of the pee tape next October.
There are now at least 5-6 R senators, including McConnell, saying that if the allegations are true Moore needs to step aside. Alabama has already started mailing absentee ballots, so it's too late to replace him on the ballot. Murkowski has already talked to Strange about write-in campaigns, and McConnell presumably is too.
Of course, the "if true" in everybody's denunciations is doing a lot of work, and the most likely outcome is still that Moore denies everything and the entire GOP (including Fox News) falls into line, saying the whole thing's a hit job by the Bezos Amazon Post, testing the loyalty (and imperviousness to non-Fox News) of the AL electorate.
6: The story only broke an hour ago.
I have a crackpot theory of why all of these revelations are coming out (and sticking) now: It's a reaction to Trump. In theory we as a society were opposed to sexual harassment and sexual assault, but the fact that a known actual sexual assaulter got elected to the Presidency made many more women say "Fuck this shit" and more men embarrassed into backing them up.
You have to wonder if the 14-yo (and maybe others equally young) are the deep shame underlying Moore's ostentatious Bible-bashing, and if so, how it feels to have your deepest, darkest secret on the front page of the WaPo.
I don't know about deep shame. I think it may suggest all of his moral posturing is opportunism, not just political opportunism.
I like that she one woman remembers he bought Mateus Rosé. Nobody who hasn't lived through 1981 would even remember that.
Moore won't withdraw
Of course not, rhythm method is the only biblically acceptable option.
I don't feel sorry for Roy Moore at all.
Louis CK barely even feels like news. (Of course, the news isn't out. Maybe there will be some real news in the news once it hits.) The accusations have been public for years. I used to really love his show, but I've long since accepted that he's probably a creep. Some of the creepy humor on his show that was funny when I thought he was mocking it is less funny if you realize he's an actual creep. (Although: I actually do think he's genuinely mocking it. I think he's got some self-awareness and is on some level mocking himself for being a creep. But that's not exculpatory.)
I figured that not only will Moore stay in, but he'll win. Surprise me, America!
You know, everyone tells me how funny Louis CK is, but every bit I've heard from him is just mean. Like, the humor is in the truthtelling or something, but he consistently sounds mean to my ear. I've never found a way to appreciate him. (Except that he did do a nice plea about how smartphones let people avoid emotion leading to the death of their souls.) So anyway, I feel no personal loss at finding out Louis CK is also a creep.
Statements from senators are getting stronger: Portman says "I think if what we read is true, and people are on the record so I assume it is"; McCain calls for him to step aside without any qualifier.
Which creepiness, like Urple says, is hardly news.
If Moore and the people who voted for him gave even the slightest fuck about what McCain said, Strange would have been the candidate.
16.1 was supposed to say "surprised about". Not sure how that came out as "sorry for". I don't feel sorry for him either but that's presumably obvious.
12.2 I hope your crackpot theory is true.
Alas, I think Moore is going to be Alabama's next Senator.
Louis CK NYT article is up. Looks like 5 accusers on the record.
The Louis CK story is now out in nytimes
17, 20, 27: Yeah. Sigh. I guess we're left to hope that continued support for Moore weakens all these chickenshits down the line, opening up the field for gains in non-Alabama states.
The Roy Moore story sets two incredibly powerful opposing forces in motion. Bible-thumping old authority vs the kinds of pretty white girls who are the only true victims (see, kidnapping). I dunno, man. Maybe the cognitive dissonance will keep Republican voters home.
They won't see the pretty white girls as victims because Moore would have made a good husband by those standards.
The part where one of the girls's mothers let her stay out with him past curfew for exactly that reason was among the truly retch-inducing parts of an all around horrible story.
If you want people (but mostly just women) to only have sex in marriage and you want nobody to have sex unless they can afford to raise lots of babies with the wife staying home to care for them and you want an income distribution such that approximately the bottom third couldn't possibly afford to raise a family, this is what you want. Young girls from poor families married to middle-aged and older men with money with the encouragement of their parents.
You are being ridiculous, Moby. Women can't be people.
If you google Moore's wife's name, the top autocomplete--at least for me--is "kayla kisor moore age". Here says she was 24 in 85, making her about 56, 14 years younger than Moore. As somebody between those ages, a 38 year old marrying a 24 year old is creepy and at best has a fraught power dynamic.
I would not say I feel sorry for Louis CK, but having read the article mentioned in 25/26, I have to say he seems pathetic in a way that the other men named in the #MeToo wave have not.
I was on a disciplinary hearing recently for a frat party that went amok. We were specifically hearing charges for the frat, not individuals, along serving alcohol to minors, having pot there, not obeying official rules for an organization, etc.
There were redacted parts to the witness statements about Title IX, meaning there might have been sexual assaults. Plural, because gossip. However, that's a separate case, not to enter into the situation in our case.
So we had to punish the frat for things like kids passing around a joint and having a keg. After we concluded the case, I asked about the status of the title IX abuses. Both alleged victims declined to press charges.
What makes me so angry is that the frat got punished because someone smoked pot, but they do not get punished for creating an environment which is fertile ground for sexual assault. Regardless whether or not those two cases were or could have been brought to fruition, I'm so angry about the fact that the frat is not held responsible for the climate they created.
I have no idea how you'd ever write a rule that frats aren't allowed to hold rapey parties. You probably couldn't. It just makes me angry that it is what it is.
35: I just spent a while googling that myself, and it was weirdly hard to find. At any rate he was her boss and she was recently divorced and pregnant.
I really really loved Louis CK's show, but the allegations definitely ruined it for me (years ago). At any rate it feels like a loss to me in a way that I don't think any of the other people do. Like I don't think I'm going to not be able to watch LA Confidential because Kevin Spacey is in it.
In LA Confidential, Kevin Spacey played a crooked cop who almost (but for a last minute crisis of conscience) forces a young man to have sex with an older man for the benefit of Kevin Spacey. It's really not that far off.
Right, but that's sleazy and bad in the movie already.
Spacey has played a lot of sleazy guys who projected an image different from what's really going on, sometimes with sexual issues. Knowing that it's less of an act makes it feel a bit gross, as I expect Louis CK's work does.
Russell Crowe goes around punching people, but I don't think that hurts my viewing of his work in LA Confidential.
36 Being a powerful comic, cornering young women and masturbating in front of them isn't "pathetic", it's predatory and evil, _just_ as evil as the other abusers that have been outed. His crocodile-tear apologies and claims of having "problems" or that he was "going through a rough time" don't make him more sympathetic/less powerful than the Weinsteins of the world. In fact it was even more hurtful to these victims because it was layering psychological abuse on top of sex crimes. He used his power to ensure that his victims would remain silent and leave him free to abuse more people. Not "pathetic" -- evil and scary. I'm so impressed by the women who have come forward, and also grateful for the NYT reporters who did the story.
The GOP thinks what Moore did is fine because Mary was also a teenager when Joseph married her?
It's not an unusual sentiment among christians that large age/power differences are fine so long as you get married and don't have premarital sex. If you think marriage is *supposed* to have huge power differences, that affects how you think about it. I'm not surprised at all by the response in 45.
RCP polling average only has Moore up by 6. But that election has been lightly polled, and there has been nothing recently.
But that election has been lightly polled
Because most teenagers can't vote.
I'm shocked and pleased to see Senators stepping up on this. They were all such shitbag weasels when he won the primary, and obviously Republicans are awful on sexual harassment*, that I would have expected nothing but no comments and "not our place to interfere".
I literally can't imagine Moore stepping aside, even if video turned up.
*where (elected) Democrats are 1 1/2 steps better than "awful"
It's a December election, so you'd expect pretty weak turnout. Jones has to play this right, but unless the story is recanted, he's got a real shot at getting enough of an enthusiasm gap to actually win this.
44: I don't think evil and pathetic are mutually exclusive and I think his behavior was evil. Pathetic and scary, maybe different.
FWIW, Jones' background/image/story becomes really useful/salient here: all of a sudden, it's an election between a dirtbag creep and an upstanding protector of society. Not that it will flip any Moore voters, but it becomes a lot easier for anyone remotely persuadable to justify getting out to vote.
A Jones win might literally scare the shit out of every non-retiring Republican.
How long would Jones serve? 2020? IMO he'd actually stand half a chance of winning reelection in the year of throwing out Trump.
PS - Have any of the "Trump will be reelected" people revisited their priors after Tuesday?
Am I right in thinking everything anyone thinks they know about Mary's or Joseph's age is surmise, not the Bible? (There's some apocrypha that have Joseph as pretty old.)
Anyway, I agree that 12.2 seems to be the dynamic, and I'm happy to see it keep rolling on.
Not like there was much going on between Mary and Joseph at first. Or at all, if you don't believe that James-the-brother-of-Jesus stuff.
53: Pretty sure, unless there's some hint of it in the story about her cousin Elizabeth.
James-the-brother-of-Jesus stuff
Catholics could be a lot more smug about Baptists claiming that Jesus turned water into grape juice if not fort he Virgin Mary thing.
Anyway, I recognize that "pathetic" isn't the best thought for me to have, but it's one I have anyway. It seemed not just evil but somehow demeaning himself in a way was that caused by his own evil but separate from it.
I've never watched his shows, so maybe that's part of it.
49: McConnell and the others regard Moore as an enemy. They see a golden opportunity to kick a man when he's down. (As you suggest in 52.2)
They are biding their time on Trump ...
10: Any sense whether this is anything but, well, fake news?
My theology is pretty weak, but I thought one of the tenets of Christianity was that Joseph (or anyone else) didn't have sex with Mary to produce Jesus.
61: I don't think John Schindler is regarded as a reliable source.
63 I'm not sure. His conclusions are pretty bland for a fantasist: the Russians have produced a bunch of fake tapes because that spreads chaos, but there probably is a real tape -- not the pee tape of legend -- showing inappropriate behavior.
For a while, it was reassuring that people I've thought were obvious glaring assholes and preposterous buffoons [Weinstein, Wieseltier, Roy Moore, Trump, one other dude I know who is less famous but who got caught up in this] were also horrible rapists. Makes me feel like I can spot them. Louis CK makes it harder, so screw him not only for being evil but also for that.
What a strange life it would be to be the SVR's Trump body double. "Now, Vassily, get your wig back on, sit over here and pretend to be getting really excited when Anna and Irina start peeing on the bed. And keep your face turned away from the camera this time. Places everybody... and action!"
61: I'm going to disagree with Charley and say that from the internal evidence of the article itself (and I have no other information) the guy is a narcissistic bullshitter. You have to go 14 grafs in before he gets to the headline speculation, and those 14 grafs are largely spent qualifying himself as an expert on the topic, which he wouldn't need to do if he were actually legit.
He offers the "conclusions" of his "spy-friends" without any actual evidence. He names no names, and his story is designed to be impossible to falsify. If kompromat shows up, he knew it all along; if it doesn't, he has an explanation for that.
Jezebel on trying to report on this over the years.
Oog, just realized this messes up some episodes of Parks & Rec on top of everything else. Of course his character wasn't great to begin with.
When Louis CK reappears on Parks & Rec in a later season, it's clear his character is really an asshole, so that part's ok.
I might be more bummed about Jeffrey Tambor than CK.
Oh boy. I hadn't seen that. I almost never do this and have particular reasons to think that Tambor is not a monster and also see 65, so discount accordingly, but I really hope that one is just categorically false and think it might be.
Eventually will every single prestige TV series I've held off on watching, because of hesitancy at the commitment of time and emotion, have become unwatchable?
Apparently some Trumpkins using this to say how smart it was for Trump to back Strange. See what the thin-skinned doofus says when he wakes up.
67 I'm not disagreeing. It just seems like a lot of windup for not much of a pitch; I'd expect more bait from a clickbator.
38 year old marrying a 24 year old is creepy and at best has a fraught power dynamic.
24 comes in two years younger than the half-their-age-plus-seven rule.
12: the fact that a known actual sexual assaulter got elected to the Presidency made many more women say "Fuck this shit" and more men embarrassed into backing them up.
I have had this thought as well.
62: Yes. Opinions differ as to whether she stayed a virgin for her whole life (which is not common in Protestants but is held by Catholics and Orthodox).
Moore out with fundraising email saying "most vicious and nasty round of attacks against me I've EVER faced."
Shelby (other AL senator) responds with "supported Luther Strange," Strange thanks him in a tweet.
Well, it looks like the Alabama GOP, at least, is behind Moore. Strange write-in without fill GOP support would split the vote. Unless he breaks down and sticks his dick in something on live TV, my guess is an anemic continued campaign with less national support that Jones could win, but is by no means guaranteed.
Unless he breaks down and sticks his dick in something on live TV
Lots of pumpkins going to waste this time of year. Just saying.
80 sounds about right to me.
Need to flood the state with money and bodies, ideally Southern-accented ones.
I would be shocked if the distancing last more than a few days. (We saw the same initial response from republicans trump's access Hollywood tape.) If Moore doesn't drop out, which it doesn't appear he will, they will all be back supporting him soon. His behavior isn't abominable by conservative ethics (it's not like he hit on a *man*), and regardless, need that vote for tax reform.
12, 76: I'm not sure that Trump is the main catalyst here. I think the main causes were the Bill Cosby accusations (the famous New York magazine cover came out in July 2015) and the Harvey Weinstein accusations recently. In both cases, you had a critical mass of women coming forward publicly in a way that protected them from individual retaliation. In the latter case, particularly, we have a lot of A-list Hollywood actresses that people like and trust coming forward to tell their stories.
Coupled with the Twitter campaign, we now have a bunch of other people coming forward with stories they had been afraid to discuss publicly before out of fear of career retaliation, in a context where they can expect to be believed. Trump may be a minor part of that, but we didn't see a lot of this between the Access Hollywood tape and several months after his inauguration, except for the accusations against Trump himself.
I have no special insight into why this is happening now, but I think that one thing that did happen very soon after his inauguration is a whole bunch of women (mostly) with pussy hats marched. I think that did a great deal of the context.
Trump and Louis CK both have kind of orangeish hair, so there's also that.
Shockingly, sexual harassment news channel is condoning sexual molestation in pursuit of tax cuts.
83: Well, of course, because they told him he has to drop out if he did it, so if he doesn't drop out, that will mean he didn't do it and they can support him.
Alabama Governor appoints when a Senator steps down, right?
They are gong to support him until he wins. Vocally call for his resignation after he wins. (Without actually doing anything.) Then have Republican Gov appoint another Republican if Moore surprises everyone and resigns.
I hope his opponent does a constant stream of Moore's asshole decisions from now until the election.
That's how we got Senator Strange. More or less.
Vocally call for his resignation after he wins.
This, I doubt.
Politics are mostly forbidden at the predominantly WWC bar in which I play pool, but yesterday I cussed out a couple of guys having a loud rape-apologetic conversation. They looked chastened. Later, some other guy came over and started a conversation with me by saying he doesn't watch football anymore ever since they started kneeling. So help me, I burst out laughing. He seemed less chastened and more resentful.
What did he expect? If ever there were a plant of color, it's you.
Not exactly on topic unless they prove human trafficking: The massage parlor near me that I always figured must be a front for prostitution was raided for prostitution.
Never mind. It's a different massage parlor that I was less suspicious about.
96: I always thought that was the shadier one*, but I refused to believe anything was going on specifically because of the thread on NextDoor I think you learned it from. My biases are highly affected by local idiots who think all massage parlors with non-white masseuses are actually brothels staffed by sex slaves. (Also, that thread name is killer: "Awareness and discussion of ongoing and imminent criminal activity leading to the veritable downfall of our once great Squirrel Hill. What do you have to say?")
* For years it was above a Subway. You have to be pretty committed to a massage to go through it despite the smell of Subway bread.
Eggplant! I was going to email you to let you know that the DC Democratic Socialists use an awesome escaped-red-panda logo but since I probably accused you publicly of being complicit in the escape I can surely share this without violating the sanctity of off-blog super cute red pandas.
That was a truly marvelous thread title in terms of performative whiteness. Like a Rowling character.
96.last was exactly my reasoning also. Plus, back when Doug Shields was on city council, he said it was and I looked at Backdoor and they said it was.
I'm just going to assume every knows Doug.
Louis CK has admitted the charges are true.
trusting dudes: should you? jury out.
in truth the influence of learning to love and trust my brother-in-law has softened my unreasonable man-hating. he's more trustworthy than my actual brother.
My brother isn't bad, for a lawyer. But I guess only a woman would know.
I've now done permit drawings for two Asian massage parlors, and always feel conflicted, or at least awkward, about it. Once I worked for the owner, the other time for the contractor.
I got paid, so that's the only happy ending I need.
Part of the reason I've never gone for a massage is that I don't know how to tell the legit from the not-legit without going to the corporate place where I'm sure the worker doesn't get to keep nearly enough of the fee. Also, I don't like being touched by strangers.
That's me, too. I can't tell the difference, not that I've ever been to one (I don't like massages, period). I think it's wrong to tar them all with the same brush, and support a strong regulatory state to prevent abuse. Then again, I also support a strong regulatory state for legalized prostitution on the New Zealand model, not like that's ever going to happen.
Roy Moore's statement that he didn't generally pursue teens is the worst denial since Woody Allen's "look at all of the step-daughters I didn't marry."
trusting dudes: should you? jury out.
I'm not prejudiced or anything, but middle-aged white men are the worst.
103: On social media, I am often uncertain on the degree to which it is appropriate to commiserate with other peoples' misfortunes and to celebrate their triumphs, but I think I can confidently state, on behalf of your imaginary friends, that we sure are glad that life is becoming more manageable for you.
111 is very specifically on topic in a way that I just learned.
106: Big chains are also kind of icky. I can't find a good roundup, but searching "major massage chain name + sexual assault" is pretty sad.
I heard a credible rumor last weekend that an unnamed member of my department is acting abusively to one of our grad students. I have no idea who the colleague is, and it's unclear if it was specifically sexual harrassment. It didn't seem like enough to trigger mandatory reporting (which the rumor-sharer strongly did not want), but I did tell my chair that there might be a problem.
Ugh. We're a pretty small department, and I can't stand thinking this is true of one of my colleagues--but it probably is.
I thought Louis CK was a jackass way before it was cool. (because he's always been a shithead on disability issues.)
I also think he's funny, though, and I'm marginally more surprised by/disappointed in him than some of his cohort.