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  1. #17476
    Invincible Jersey Ninja Tami's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by jetengine View Post
    Why even talk about this lab sillyness then ? We're very aware of the cover up attempts.
    Most of the cover ups ion China were for the same reason certain Governors, like DeSantas in Florida, as well as Trump early on, were/are trying to cover up by hiding the data. They don't want to look bad politically or for other reasons. Though it might also be about money.
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  2. #17477
    Extraordinary Member PaulBullion's Avatar
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    "Zoë Baird" is trending on twitter because a picture of her with Biden from when she was nominated as AG by Clinton is being used by carnation twitter as evidence that Biden should remember Reade.

    No, it didn't make sense when I typed it, either.
    "How does the Green Goblin have anything to do with Herpes?" - The Dying Detective

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  3. #17478
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    Quote Originally Posted by PwrdOn View Post
    a
    In most sexual assault cases there is no smoking gun and it's just one person's word against another, which in practice meant that a lot of rich and powerful men could get away with anything given the slightest hint of plausible deniability. This is why the MeToo movement always emphasized believing women by default, because if nothing else, erring on the side of protecting victims would serve as a stronger deterrent to potential predators. But that's all out the window now, since pretty much every woman with a platform has come out in support of Biden, which basically undermines this whole movement because they could hardly go back to #BelieveWomen after this.
    99% of what these come down to is perception after the accuser and accused talk. People keep making the Kavanaugh comparison because it’s recent and it was very much a similar situation of an allegation that happened a long time ago that you could never prove definitively. In fact there is an argument that Reade has more going for her because she actually has people at the time saying that she made this allegation while Ford’s first third party was 25 years in a completely confidential situation.

    But what helped Ford was that she testified to Congress and people thought she came off well despite the inconsistencies and lack of anything to back up her story. That is the risk Biden faces with Reade. What do people think after she talks with a viewership. She could come off well and it’s going to hurt public perception or she could come awful. It’s also a tight rope for Democrats because they are all going to be compared to how they treated Ford a year ago. For instance, you’d love to have a former prosecutor like Harris questioning Reade, but the last thing anybody wanted is for a clip of Harris grilling Reade juxtaposed with her telling Ford how brave she is.

    Strategically that’s where this plays in Republican hands. The Democratic Party needed to get ahead of it so they all had to defend Biden. The Republicans can be non committal on it and sit back and call the Democrats hypocrites. That’s an easy play for them on campaigns even if it doesn’t change the 2020 election.

  4. #17479
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    When you thought the 2016 election was bad, the 2020 election comes along, where both parties presidential nominees are rapists.

  5. #17480
    Mighty Member TheDarman's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rosa Luxemburg View Post
    When you thought the 2016 election was bad, the 2020 election comes along, where both parties presidential nominees are rapists.
    There is not just evidence lacking of this claim, but contrarian evidence when it comes to Biden. Here is a breakdown I wrote:

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VK-...ew?usp=sharing
    With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility

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  6. #17481
    Extraordinary Member PaulBullion's Avatar
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    Tara Reade abruptly canceled the interview she was scheduled to record on Friday afternoon with Chris Wallace for @FoxNewsSunday
    , to air Sunday morning.

    Reade told Fox on Friday, sometime after @JoeBiden
    's interview with @morningmika
    .
    Because of course.
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  7. #17482
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    Feminism Should Make You Uncomfortable

    Tara Reade is difficult to dismiss. Since she publicly accused her former boss, Joe Biden, of sexual assault, multiple outlets reported corroborative evidence that supports her account. She says she told her brother; the New York Times and the Washington Post confirmed that she did. She says she told an anonymous friend; reporters confirmed that too. She told the Intercept that her mother, distraught over her treatment in Biden’s office, called into Larry King Live to ask for advice around the time of the attack, and the clip emerged. On Monday, Business Insider reported the most significant piece of circumstantial evidence to date: A former neighbor and a former co-worker of Reade’s both told the outlet that Reade disclosed a traumatic event to them in the mid-’90s.

    “I don’t remember all the details,” said Lynda LaCasse, the neighbor. “I remember the skirt. I remember the fingers. I remember she was devastated.” The day Business Insider published the report, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi formally endorsed Biden for president.

    The Reade story creates an obvious problem for liberals. Biden is the presumptive nominee. On his unsteady shoulders rests the task of defeating Donald Trump. Not only are Democrats desperate to believe their champion will win, they are eager to believe that their candidate is morally superior to the president he challenges. For liberal feminists, though, Biden was ostensibly a complicated figure even before Reade spoke to the press about her assault. Seven women, including Reade, accused him of unwanted touching or kissing last year. On abortion, he is not a consistent ally; Biden supported the Hyde Amendment for years before abruptly changing his mind in time for his latest presidential campaign. The memory of his treatment of Anita Hill during the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas is recent enough that he called her last year, for the first time, to account for it.

    Nancy Pelosi has a political reason to pretend that Biden is better than he is, and so does any Democrat who either holds office or wants to someday. Stacey Abrams paused an energetic campaign to become Biden’s vice-president long enough to tell HuffPost that Reade’s claims had already been examined, and enough was enough. Biden, she added, “would make women proud as the next President of the United States.”

    But outside electoral politics, the project of evaluating Biden should be less fraught. Liberal feminists with media platforms have the flexibility to say things that Democratic politicians cannot. They can urge Democrats to take Reade seriously, even call for Biden to withdraw. They don’t have reelection campaigns to win or White House appointments to lobby for, and can hold the party accountable for its reliance on such a disappointing man. Otherwise, what’s the use of a public platform at all?

    Reade has given public feminists an ideological test. Many are failing. Though some have said they’re outraged by the choices on the ballot, others rushed to discredit Reade before her story had been fully vetted by the press. “Reade seems almost engineered in a lab to inspire skepticism in mainstream Democrats, both because her story keeps changing and because of her bizarre public worship of President Vladimir Putin of Russia,” Michelle Goldberg wrote in the New York Times, before the Intercept and Business Insider corroborated new pieces of Reade’s story. Goldberg, who has been critical of Biden, went on: Reade said she left politics because she loved the arts, not because Biden had assaulted her. Unlike the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, which Goldberg once called “profoundly inspiring,” Reade’s story had too many inconsistencies to be totally credible.

    Days later, Nation columnist Joan Walsh launched similar accusations. “Even in the era of #MeToo, Reade’s story is problematic,” Walsh wrote. Reade changed her story “multiple times,” Walsh complained, before concluding that the woman’s story, while possible, was improbable. Goldberg and Walsh both emphasize Reade’s past writings, which cast Russian president Vladimir Putin in glowing terms. Reade has “a strange obsession” with Putin, Walsh wrote; only then, after she thoroughly poisoned the well, did she admit that Reade’s fringe views don’t make her a liar. Still others implied that Reade is a Russian plant. “I don’t buy the Tara Reade ****. I’m not here to defend any man whose shortcomings and past dumb moves are widely known. I’m here to karate-chop disinfo and dirty tricks in an election year,” tweeted BoingBoing.com editor Xeni Jardin.

    But Reade’s alleged “inconsistencies” are not so damning. If she is telling the truth about Biden, her hesitancy to go public with the full story makes sense. It would be easier to tell the truth in pieces, to start with the sexual harassment, especially as other women came forward with their own stories about Biden’s misbehavior. What else was she supposed to say at the time? That Uncle Joe Biden, a massively popular figure, put his fingers up her skirt and inside her, and retaliation drove her out of politics? Nobody sane would relish the fallout. Nor is it unusual that Reade would say years ago that she left politics because she’d decided to pursue the arts. That public explanation might even be true: Trauma rearranges a person’s priorities. And we should know by now that there are no perfect victims, that immense social and legal obstacles prevent women from going public about assault, that anyone with power, whether it is political or cultural, can wield it against the weak.

    “There is no one response to sexual assault,” the Times reported in the middle of the Kavanaugh hearings. “A trauma victim can as easily appear calm or flat as distraught or overtly angry.” Unreported assaults like Blasey Ford’s are “all too common,” the Brennan Center for Justice noted, for a variety of reasons. Survivors fear stigma, and even blame themselves for their own abuse, and often have no reason to believe that the criminal-justice system would work on their behalf. When the perpetrator is powerful, the likelihood that justice will ever occur can seem especially slim. Harvey Weinstein’s abuse was not a secret in Hollywood. But at the peak of his career, he was “one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood — and one of the most terrifying,” as Vanity Fair put it, qualities that allowed him to fend off the truth for years. Why forget all this for Joe Biden?

    Liberal feminists had another option, which was to say nothing, and wait for more information. From a professional standpoint, delay would have been prudent; it would have also been more ideologically consistent. Democratic politicians serve feminist aims more often than their alternatives. But settling repeatedly for the least-worst name on a ballot becomes a self-reinforcing pattern. The party will shove Biden after Biden at us, and when we resist, ask us when we decided to support the nation’s Trumps instead.

    There is no simple way out of the predicament that Biden and his allies have created. But premature attacks on Reade boost a candidate at the expense of a movement. They tell us only that the lessons of Me Too can be set aside as soon as they are inconvenient. That strategy might serve electoral politics, but it betrays feminism. The movement exists to critique power: to identify its abuses and demand its redistribution. Accept that, and you don’t serve the political class; you’re in tension with it. That’s uncomfortable. That’s inconvenient. That’s the point.

    The alternative is even more distasteful. We’ll settle for Biden, and men like him, over and over; we’ll tell ourselves the conservative is worse, that at least the Democrat will make a woman his vice-president. We’ll eat scraps, and we’ll still go hungry, and all we’ll leave to our children is a political future only a little bit better than the present. Our grand prize? To clean up after men like Joe Biden. That isn’t power. It’s just women’s work.

  8. #17483
    Mighty Member TheDarman's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rosa Luxemburg View Post
    Yeah. It doesn’t make me uncomfortable. Her story isn’t adding up for reasons I outlined above. I gave her the benefit of the doubt initially, but I did what any good person does—I listened and weighed the evidence for and against. And, by a wide margin, the evidence against is massive. It isn’t lacking evidence that is the problem (Ford/Kavanaugh), it is the abundance of contrarian evidence. Paul even cited some above.
    With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility

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  9. #17484
    Extraordinary Member PaulBullion's Avatar
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    OBAMA CAMPAIGN'S VETTING OF JOE BIDEN FOUND NO TARA READE COMPLAINT IN 2008, DAVID AXELROD SAYS


    Axelrod, who led both of Obama's successful 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, said Biden and other potential picks for vice president and cabinet spots under the former president were subjected to "deep-dive investigations" -- and at no time in that background checking process was Reade's 1993 sexual assault complaint discussed.

    Axelrod wrote an op-ed for CNN Friday declaring "had any credible issue been raised, you can be sure Biden would not have been the nominee" for Obama's vice presidential pick. Offering a defense of Biden, Axelrod acknowledged that society is finally "confronting" its long past of silencing women who were sexually assaulted -- but Reade's allegations simply don't fit the credible criteria.

    "It is striking that when an experienced vetting team put Biden under a microscope before he was chosen to be second-in-line for the presidency, neither [Reade's] allegations, nor anything resembling them in Biden's history, showed up," Axelrod wrote.

    "Through that entire process, the name 'Tara Reade' never came up. No formal complaint. No informal chatter. Certainly, no intimation of sexual harassment or assault from her or anyone else. The team of investigators, expert in their work, would not have missed it," he continued.
    "How does the Green Goblin have anything to do with Herpes?" - The Dying Detective

    Hillary was right!

  10. #17485
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    Sexual assault and white supremacy are foundational to the U.S.

    TW/CW: this article discusses sexual assault and anti-Blackness

    On March 25, Tara Reade provided an excruciating account of her sexual assault at the hand of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr on The Katie Halper Show.

    Reade, who first spoke of Biden’s inappropriate touching in defense of lawyer Lucy Flores in 2019, explained that the assault occurred when she had been a staff assistant to the Delaware senator in 1993.

    Biden has since won the Wisconsin (April 7) and Alaska (April 10) Democratic primaries. It would also take 19 more days until publications like the New York Times would consider Reade’s allegation.

    Biden is protected by rape legislation that continues to protect and under-sentence white men who rape.

    In “Rape, Racism, and the Law,” scholar Jennifer Wriggins traces American rape law to its origin: to punish the sexual assault of white women by Black men (i.e. the myth of the Black rapist). Its inverse is, of course, to protect white men in their “institutionalized assault” of Black women. This racialized and rigid conception of sexual assault had several ramifications that persist to the present day.

    Even as rape statutes became race-neutral after the Civil War, race still constituted a principle role in hearings, where juries were allowed “to consider the race of the defendant and victim in drawing factual conclusions as to the defendant’s intent in attempted rape cases.” A Black man accused of the rape of a white woman was often deemed guilty, by the virtue of his race and (wrongly) associated immorality.

    What results from the excess and harsh punishment relegated to this form of coerced sex — largely fabricated by white supremacy to maintain control of Black men and white women — is that “all coerced sex experienced by Black women and most coerced sex experienced by white women” became “implicity condoned” by the legal system.

    The rape of white women is rendered inconsequential before the criminal justice system unless the perpetrator had been “a violent Black man who is a stranger to the ‘virtuous’ victim.” But, as Griggins writes, “the great majority of rapes of white women are committed by white men.”

    This has provoked an aggressive criminalization of Black men as perpetrators of rape, but also in a woeful abandonment of Black women as victims of rape.

    Who leaves (mostly and often) unscathed? White men.

    Why? Rape legislation, historically, has acted as an extension of white supremacy, never as a real means to afford protection to women subjected to sexual coercion.

    From Donald Trump to Biden, each are protected and nurtured by white supremacy, as allegations of rape become leveled. Trump witnessed allegation after allegation in 2016, only to win the presidency. Biden has seen several allegations of inappropriate touching and one allegation of rape, only to win the Democratic primary.

    Not only is the racist legacy of rape legislation a disservice to survivors of sexual assault, but so is the politicization of sexual assault.

    From Christine Blasey Ford to E. Jean Carroll and many others, Reade’s experience is sidelined to make room for partisan take after take, which leads to a symbolic annihilation or “‘the way cultural production and mass representations ignore, exclude, marginalize, or trivialize women and their interests.’”

    As in, whereas the narratives of individual women may assume an at-first influential role in the news, they ultimately become “trivialized and subsumed through political rhetoric” and thus disappear. Political agendas, in which sexual assault allegations are deployed as a “rhetorical weapon intended to discredit or harm an opposing candidate,” become more championed than the experiences of the survivor.

    White feminists like Alyssa Milano, who have co-opted the #MeToo movement in recent years, have abandoned survivor’s rights to instead support Biden’s presidential run.

    Her highly publicized image in the Kavanaugh hearings may distort the reality: Milano is not a survivors’ champion.

    She aligns herself with the politicization of sexual assault allegations — a politicization that is often careless and negligent toward the survivor, but nonetheless a politicization that does not threaten Milano’s position as a rich, white woman. When a sexual assault allegation surfaced, which did not work in favor of her preferred political agenda, she was quick to dissociate from the #MeToo movement.

    From rape legislation to its politicization, the survivor — in this case, Tara Reade — is rarely centered and often disappears once the allegation’s political usefulness dissipates.

  11. #17486
    Extraordinary Member PaulBullion's Avatar
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    It is odd how sure you are about this.

    How can you be sure she is not another Carolyn Bryant?
    "How does the Green Goblin have anything to do with Herpes?" - The Dying Detective

    Hillary was right!

  12. #17487
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    The Democrats defended one rapist president in Bill Clinton, so despite whatever progress they've made since the 90s, it isn't surprising that they would defend another.

    They are really committed to being Republican-lite.

  13. #17488
    Extraordinary Member CaptainEurope's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rosa Luxemburg View Post
    The Democrats defended one rapist president in Bill Clinton, so despite whatever progress they've made since the 90s, it isn't surprising that they would defend another.

    They are really committed to being Republican-lite.
    Except Biden is not a rapist. He seems as much of a rapist as Angela Merkel.

  14. #17489
    Mighty Member TheDarman's Avatar
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    I figured as much. Obama was an exceedingly careful politician and so were those he surrounded himself with. They wouldn’t even let a Muslim American woman sit behind him at a rally because they didn’t want to feed the speculation of him being a Muslim non-citizen. There is no way they would’ve allowed Biden to be VP if a record of this existed. There were plenty of other “safe” choices that Obama could’ve used. It wouldn’t have been worth the risk.
    With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility

    Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

  15. #17490
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    Quote Originally Posted by PaulBullion View Post
    It is odd how sure you are about this.

    How can you be sure she is not another Carolyn Bryant?
    Joe Biden is not Emmett Till.

    This is an absolutely disgusting comparison.

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