SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT: Lindsey Graham promises ‘full scale’ probe into Democrats’ handling of Ford-Kavanaugh allegation.

WELL, SURE, HE’S A DEMOCRAT: Juanita Broaddrick: Sen. Feinstein had no interest in my rape allegation against Bill Clinton.

SO I JUST FINISHED Todd Henderson’s Mental State, a new thriller that revolves around a Supreme Court nomination, and it was a very fast-paced enjoyable read.

ECLECTICISM FOR THE WIN: MAGA Hat and Colin Kaepernick Shirt Make Kanye West a One-Man Bridge Across Our Political Chasm.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Western Civilisation “Not Welcome Here.”

OPEN THREAD: Bring your Sunday best.

HAVE THEY NO DECENCY? NO DECENCY AT ALL? SPOILER: NO. When They Came For Kavanaugh’s Kid. “From Illinois Times editorial cartoonist Chris Britt. How can a man do this to another man’s child? How can editors allow this to pass? What corrupt and wicked hearts they have.” Well, yes. That’s who they are, that’s what they do.

HMM: Availability of Palliative Care Doesn’t Impact Hospital Treatment Intensity.

SO TWITTER IS BANNING RIGHT-LEANING PEOPLE ALL OVER, BUT #KILLKAVANAUGH IS THE FIRST AUTOFILL ON #KILL RIGHT NOW.

UPDATE: (Bumped). Over four hours later, with Twitter notified before I posted, it’s still doing this.

STICKING IT TO THE MAN: Kanye West wore a “Make America Great Again” cap on SNL, and he said some pro-Trump things and got booed and cut off.

The establishment is always trying to silence a rebel.

JACK DUNPHY: Los Angeles Times Portrays Police Officers in a Bad Light…Again.

CASS SUNSTEIN: Kavanaugh Confirmation Won’t Affect Supreme Court’s Legitimacy: After all, conservative and liberal justices agree on most cases. That’s one key to the institution’s reputation.

Nonetheless, I predict that if the Court becomes majority-conservative, the left will do everything it can to delegitimize it.

THIS EXPLAINS A LOT: Study finds people flock, or behave similarly to others, despite reasoning abilities.

Related: Social Media As Social Disease.

AT AMAZON, save big on Pet Supplies.

Also, Fall Deals in Tools and Hardware.

FLORIDA: Andrew Gillum staffer fired after calling for Trump’s execution, wearing shirt deriding pro-Trump states. While Gillum tells us voters are sick of “gutter politics.”

FLASHBACK: Ted Kennedy on the Rocks.

In December 1985, just before he announced he would run for president in 1988, Kennedy allegedly manhandled a pretty young woman employed as a Brasserie waitress. The woman, Carla Gaviglio, declined to be quoted in this article, but says the following account, a similar version of which first appeared in Penthouse last year, is full and accurate:

It is after midnight and Kennedy and Dodd are just finishing up a long dinner in a private room on the first floor of the restaurant’s annex. They are drunk. Their dates, two very young blondes, leave the table to go to the bathroom. (The dates are drunk too. “They’d always get their girls very, very drunk,” says a former Brasserie waitress.) Betty Loh, who served the foursome, also leaves the room. Raymond Campet, the co-owner of La Brasserie, tells Gaviglio the senators want to see her.

As Gaviglio enters the room, the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair. With Gaviglio on Dodd’s lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair. As he is doing this, Loh enters the room. She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers. Startled, Kennedy leaps up. He laughs. Bruised, shaken and angry over what she considered a sexual assault, Gaviglio runs from the room. Kennedy, Dodd and their dates leave shortly thereafter, following a friendly argument between the senators over the check.

Eyewitness Betty Loh told me that Kennedy had “three or four” cocktails in his first half hour at the restaurant and wine with dinner. When she walked into the room after Gaviglio had gone in, she says, “what I saw was Senator Kennedy on top of Carla, who was on top of Senator Dodd’s lap, and the tablecloth was sort of slid off the table ’cause the table was knocked over—not completely, but just on Senator Dodd’s lap a little bit, and of course the glasses and the candlesticks were totally spilled and everything. And right when I walked in, Senator Kelly jumped off…and he leaped up, composed himself and got up. And Carla jumped up and ran out of the room.”

According to Loh, Kennedy “was sort of leaning” on Gaviglio, “not really straddling but sort of off-balance so it was like he might have accidentally fallen…He was partially on and off…pushing himself off her to get up.” Dodd, she adds, “said ‘It’s not my fault.’ ” Kennedy said something similar and added, jokingly, “Makes you wonder about the leaders of this country.”

Giving Kennedy the benefit of the doubt, it’s quite possible he did not intend an assault but meant to be funny, in a repulsive, boozehead way. Drunks are notoriously poor judges of distance, including the distance between fun and assault.

Read on for a second incident involving a drunken Ted at the same DC restaurant that occurred two years in 1987, the same year that Kennedy was gearing up his verbal assault on Robert Bork, the moment that created our modern dysfunctional political system.

VICTORY GIRLS: Facebook Blackout: I’m a Traitor to My Gender Because I Won’t Participate in the Virtual Burka Protest.

Friends, I am going to let you in on a secret operation to make the men of this world feel really bad.

Women are being instructed to blackout their profile pictures on Facebook in order to show the world what it would be like without women. I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.

This is characterized as a project to prevent domestic abuse. You will be instructed not to share this with men, to pass it only to women. Will you comply?

Not surprisingly, I will not be participating. I do not belong to the mob, and I do not subscribe to groupthink. Because of these selfish actions, I will likely be labeled a traitor to my gender, and perhaps even a self-loathing female. At the very least, I’m sure I will be banned from the sisterhood. . . .

Look, I know a lot of women, especially young women, are lost, and are trying to navigate their lives in this utopia feminists call The Patriarchy. The feminists have told them lots of lies about how women are more limited than ever, how women are more targeted than ever, and how masculinity is more toxic than ever. But it’s just not true. Our society, in America, is more equal than ever, more accommodating than ever, and men are (sadly) more placid than ever.

Women have never had so much opportunity and it is frustrating to see them set these self-imposed limitations. What is even more frustrating than the damage they do to themselves individually, is the damage they are doing to women’s place in the world generally. Feminists keep moving the goal posts so that they have new things to complain about, but if yesterday’s feminists were to look around and see the dynamics we have going on today, they probably would’ve been pretty impressed. . . .

Feminists wanted a sexual revolution, but come to find out they can’t handle it the morning after. They wanted women to be in the locker room, but come to find out they can’t handle a little rough talk. They wanted to be taken seriously, but come to find out they have made a mockery of themselves by presenting as fragile teenagers who need a chaperones and vocal coaches. Women need to take responsibility for themselves and quit blaming their shortcomings on men. Men have graciously moved out of the way, but please let’s not expect them to be doormats too.

You could make a pretty strong argument for bringing back the patriarchy, just based on feminist statements about how fragile and gullible women are.

SPACE: How SpaceX’s 1st Passenger Flight Around the Moon with Yusaku Maezawa Will Work.

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME: Led Zeppelin forced to defend ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in court again.

A federal court jury in June 2016 found Led Zep did not steal the opening riffs of “Stairway to Heaven” from the song “Taurus” by the band, Spirit.

But the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered the retrial because the jury should have been allowed to hear a recording of “Taurus” — an obscure instrumental on the first album of the California band.

A trustee for the estate of Randy Wolfe, the writer of “Taurus,” claimed in the suit that Led Zep copied the song’s descending chromatic scale for the opening of rock anthem “Stairway to Heaven.”

Although, as musician, producer and prolific YouTube maker Rick Beato notes, Spirit didn’t invent descending chromatic bass notes under chord changes, which were a staple of the Beatles, all the way back to Duke Ellington and Richard Rogers.

However, Zeppelin’s documented history of actual musical plagiarism does them no favors in this retrial.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to ‘Christine Blasey Ford-Proof’ Your Daughter.

ANKLE HOLSTERS ARE UNDERRATED: I Carry: Glock G42 in a Galco Ankle Guard Holster. Sure, if you’re standing up they can be awkward. But if you’re seated — or especially driving a vehicle — they’re very convenient.

JONAH GOLDBERG: The Moral-Panic Phase.

Why the Hell are people losing their minds? I don’t know. Why did St. Vitus’ Dance sweep Europe? Why did tulips get so expensive during the Tulip Craze? Why did the witches hang?

I suspect what’s happened is a convergence of things. First the #MeToo movement, which mostly has been a force for good, is entering its moral-panic phase. Second, the Internet accelerates groupthink and extremism for all the familiar reasons. Third, a lot of Democrats have concluded that the only way to win the party’s presidential nomination is to prove you can be the most fearless jackass in the herd (See, Cory “Almost Spartacus” Booker) and the presence of Michael Avenatti in the market has put inflationary pressure on everyone’s asininity. Fourth, as I keep writing (even at book length), we are turning politics into a form of tribal entertainment where it’s easy to convince ourselves that our opponents are existential monsters.

And fifth, as politics has become a secular religion, the Supreme Court has become like a Roman Temple and people are terrified that Kavanaugh is a less indulgent priest. If the Supreme Court wasn’t the institution where a single swing justice — not coincidentally the one Kavanaugh is slated to replace — decides how human beings should define themselves in the world, people wouldn’t be freaking out nearly so much.

Read the whole thing. In his New York Times column this week, Ross Douthat concludes that “we all sense that in this political disaster, we’re seeing a glimpse into a cultural abyss.” What comes next?

A column by Barton Swaim in the Weekly Standard that Glenn linked to earlier today argues that “The Sexual Revolution Is Over:”

What comes next probably won’t be some 21st-century form of Victorian public morality. But neither, if I’m right, are we likely to advance further into the realm of sexual chaos urged upon our society by young radicals a half-century ago. Everything comes to an end, including revolutions.

Thursday’s hearings also “may be a watershed moment in Identity Politics,” a blogger at Maggie’s Farm writes:

This was a great example of how identity has been weaponized for political gain. Don’t think this is the end of Identity Politics, though. The Democrats need identity to survive. Mao’s Cultural Revolution relied on hearsay and Identity, and was implemented shortly after the Great Leap Forward had failed to propel the nation forward economically. The Democrats are failing massively. They are launching their own Cultural Revolution. I’ve warned friends of mine who are sympathetic to the ’cause’ to be careful. Movements like this eat their young.

In any case, as Rod Dreher writes, it’s also “The End of a Trusting Society:”

Look at what Brett Kavanaugh now has to put up with: an Erik Brady column in USA Today saying he shouldn’t coach his daughter’s basketball team because he might be a pervert. Excerpt:

The nation is deeply divided. Sometimes it feels like we don’t agree on anything anymore. But credibly accused sex offenders should not coach youth basketball, girls or boys, without deeper investigation. Can’t we all agree on that?

“Credibly accused”? This is beyond disgusting — and it’s in a major American newspaper. How does it differ from this, had USA Today been around in 1954:

The nation is deeply divided. Sometimes it feels like we don’t agree on anything anymore. But credibly accused communists should not work in Hollywood without deeper investigation. Can’t we all agree on that?

Gosh, I can’t imagine why Judge Kavanaugh was upset in his testimony, can you?

This is the world we are creating for ourselves.

The Washington Post, through its then-subsidiary publication Newsweek assured us at the start of 2009 that “We Are All Socialists Now.” Apparently the socialist state that DC elites had in mind was East Germany.

KELLYANNE CONWAY REVEALS SHE WAS SEXUALLY ASSAULTED, TOO: The White House senior adviser to President Donald Trump shares a painful truth with CNN’s Jake Tapper. This is a MUST-READ by LifeZette’s Deirdre Reilly.

THE NEW YORK TIMES SUDDENLY NOTICES “The Invisible Recession of 2016.” It wasn’t invisible — Trump saw it — they just didn’t report it because they didn’t want to make Obama look bad or hurt Hillary’s prospects.