Elvis and company

The New Neo Posted on by

In 1957, we see why Elvis was nicknamed The Pelvis.

We also see – or at least I think I see – the roots of his dancing in James Cagney. “James Cagney?” you ask, puzzled. Not in Cagney’s tap dancing or his jumps – I love Cagney’s dancing, by the way – but some of his odd shifts of balance, particularly those starting at 2:27:

One more influence – whether Presley knew anything about him or not – could be early Bob Fosse (I really don’t think so, but it’s an excuse to put the clip up). This dance number was choreographed by Fosse for the 1954 musical “Pajama Game,” although this is a clip from the 1957 film. Fosse is not one of the dancers:

That “Steam Heat” number reminds me of this from 1976, although it has zero to do with Elvis Presley (as was perhaps true of the previous two as well):

Putin’s endgame

The New Neo Posted on by

As soon as it became clear that the Ukraine war wasn’t going to end with a very quick Ukraine capitulation and Russian victory, I started to wonder how it was going to end. It seemed to me early on that without a face-saving out option, Putin was stuck in the need to continue and perhaps even to escalate to a nuclear option (a real nuclear option, not the metaphoric one in our Senate).

And in my opinion those who suggest Zelenskyy and Ukraine never should have fought for their autonomy in the first place have forfeited any right to call themselves defenders or supporters of liberty. But their fighting does mean that Putin might feel shamed by how the Russians are doing, and that could be dangerous for the world.

I agree with this quote from George Friedman:

This means that Putin’s war plan is shattered. The resistance has been effective and his troops need a relief he cannot provide. Putin will feint in other directions – perhaps in the Baltics or Moldova – but he lacks the force to fight on another front. He can’t sustain this war easily, especially in the face of NATO soldiers who have so far stayed out of the fray.

Even so, I cannot predict what a leader will do in the end. But for now, it’s clear to me that Putin will cling to power and blame everyone around him. But every day the war goes on, Putin gets weaker. Ukraine should not be able to resist, NATO should not be united, American economic warfare should not be so powerful. Putin is growing more desperate. He has mumbled about nuclear weapons, the sign of utmost desperation. But he knows he and anyone he may love will die in a nuclear exchange. Even if he is prepared to commit suicide rather than capitulate, he knows that the order to launch must go through several hands, and each of those hands knows that the counterstrike will kill their loved ones. Therein lies the weakness of nuclear war: Retaliating is one thing, initiating another. Putin trusts few people, and he doesn’t know how reliable anyone would be in this situation – nor what the Americans might do if they saw preparation for a Russian launch.

If Putin gives up his position, he is compromised, and perhaps lost. The buzzards are circling. So he must continue to fight until he is forced out and someone else not responsible for the disaster takes over and blames it all on Putin. I think that this can’t end until Putin is pulled from the game.

Obviously, I am moving here away from geopolitical analysis into the political. The former tries to minimize individual influence while the latter emphasizes it. That gives my forecast an inevitable imprecision. But given the situation on the ground, and given Russian internal dynamics, it does seem that all the forces coming to bear on Putin dictate a certain direction. The war will end, but the war is evolving in a way that creates unique pressures on the Russian political system, and, because of the nature of the system, that pressure pivots on Putin.

This is not the only outcome. Ukraine might collapse. Russia might collapse. The Russian army may devise a strategy to win the war. A settlement that is respected might be reached. All of these are possible, but I don’t see much movement in any of these directions. A political end is what I would bet on, with the Russians taking the short end of the stick. I wouldn’t have thought this on the first day of the war, but I think this is likely the shape of the last day.

This analysis from Donald Sensing is somewhat similar:

These massacres and casualty levels (on both sides) now mean that a negotiated peace is off the table. For Putin to make such an agreement would be seen by the senior military and civilian Russian leadership as an admission of Putin’s personal failure. And Putin would have to realize that making such a peace would be professionally and possibly personally lethal for him. Russians know good and well that the Czar/General Secretary/President is never the one who fails the country, ever. If Putin accepted a negotiated peace, everyone else within the senior reaches of government and the military would know that the scapegoating purges would come quickly. And Putin knows that they would know that. Who would act decisively first – Putin and his inner, purge-immune circle, or the intended victims?

As for Zelensky, to negotiate a peace with invaders who have mass murdered his people on repeated occasions would also be an admission of failure. Unlike Russia, he would likely remain in office until the end of his term, and even if he was forced out, his exit would have the façade not of disgrace, but of an exhausted hero of world significance, to whom the nation owes its everlasting gratitude.

Until a point, that is, And that point is if the war simply drags on. Putin cannot relent. Ukraine now must win. Before now, all Ukraine had to do was not lose, but that is no longer good enough. Now it must eject Russia from the country, and not slowly. But Putin cannot allow his army to be so defeated.

No one had any real hope for the negotiations occasionally held in Belarus, anyway. After the Bucha massacre, “Mykhailo Podolyak, one of Ukraine’s peace negotiators and aide to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the tone of peace talks had forever changed because of Bucha…”…

The Ukraine war has now transitioned into a proxy war between Russia and the Euro-American alliance. Ukraine is tragically caught in the middle. The very difficult and very uncertain task before Europe and the United States now is to manage the war to keep it inside Ukraine. (But remember the caution attributed to Bismarck that starting a war is like entering a dark room, blindfolded, to look for a black cat that is not even there.)

Sensing thinks that with the atrocities in Bucha and the mass attack at the Kramatorsk train station, the Ukraine war “has transitioned to a new, much larger stage.” I don’t see this as a transition. As I said, from the start I didn’t see any way that negotiations were possible or that surrender by either side was possible unless one side scored an unequivocal victory. That’s one of the frightening things about this war: that a nation with enormous numbers of nuclear arms is led by a ruthless and brutal man who cannot countenance a military defeat and who has also tried very hard to protect himself from those who would either do him in or unseat him in a coup.

The 2020 election is still in the news

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember Maricopa County, Arizona, site of recounts and audits after Biden’s razor-thin win in that state? Here’s the latest from the ever-so-slowly grinding wheels of justice:

“We have reached the conclusion that the 2020 election in Maricopa County revealed serious vulnerabilities that must be addressed and raises questions about the 2020 election in Arizona,” said an “interim report” issued today by [Arizona] Attorney General Mark Brnovich…

The 12-page report, reviewed by Secrets, did not condemn the county’s handling of the election outright but raised enough questions about voter identification, ballot handling, and counting to prompt Brnovich to call for a vast tightening of the rules.

It also revealed that he is readying criminal and civil fraud charges against some individuals the attorney general’s Election Integrity Unit has probed…

Among the key findings in his report…:

–Maricopa officials were not cooperative with his demands for information.

–In many cases, election officials were given less than five seconds to verify voter signatures on file with ballots filed early.

–The number of ballots nullified because of problems dropped even though those filed nearly doubled in 2020.

–There were “multiple violations” in how about 20% of ballots in drop boxes were handled and delivered to election offices.

–Some $8 million in outside funds and grants were used in the vote count, now illegal under a recently passed law. Notably, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife funded more than half of that.

Speaking of Zuckerberg, please take a look at this report on Pennsylvania in the 2020 election [emphasis mine]:

With a series of PowerPoint slides, Shepherd revealed to lawmakers that beginning in July 2020, consultants working for leftist organizations coordinated with local election officials and Democrat Gov.Tom Wolf’s office to lobby five blue counties to apply for these private grants. While the grants originated with the nominally non-partisan Center for Tech and Civic Life—an organization that Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s private foundation later infused with some $350 million in cash—emails reveal that a main consultant involved in targeting select counties, Marc Solomon, worked for the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, or the CSME…

While the right-to-know requests revealed the targeted lobbying of blue counties, there were no emails showing any outreach to core Republican counties until after September 1, 2020. That proves significant, according to Shepherd’s testimony, because when the summer-time targeting of Democratic strongholds took place, the Zuckbucks cash infusion to the CTCL had not yet been announced. Without that cash, there may never have been a chance for the red counties to obtain any funds. (Shepherd also questioned where the earlier CTCL funding came from—something apparently still unknown.)

But even after the new funds came in, the Democrat counties still received a substantially higher cut of the $22.5 million in grants spread across 23 counties…

Far from being an outlier, Pennsylvania’s experience matches the growing evidence seen in other states that the Zuckbucks and other leftist money funded state-run get-out-the-vote efforts for Biden. What makes Pennsylvania different, however, is that the emails connect the grant process to government actors and show the state’s collaboration with left-wing political activists to lobby Democrat-only counties. This evidence raises constitutional concerns under the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

There are many ways to illegally influence an election, apparently. Trust the left to know about all of them and to be willing to employ them.

Then there’s this general summary of many of the important and suspect irregularities in the 2020 election. It’s long, but here’s an excerpt:

COVID-19 and Mail-in Ballots: When the pandemic struck early in 2020, democracy assistance providers in the United States and other Western nations responded almost immediately. By April of 2020 USAID had produced a paper highlighting how authoritarian leaders and other malign influences might use the pandemic to undermine democracy and human rights, and provided advice on how civil society groups overseas might protect against or mitigate these abuses. Subsequent papers by the foreign policy establishment focused on how election processes could be modified to protect voters while ensuring integrity during the pandemic. During 2020, USAID provided substantial assistance to many countries to facilitate COVID adaptation, ensuring in-person voting could be conducted safely and more or less on schedule.

Within the United States, however, the immediate electoral response to the pandemic was a push by one party for mail-in rather than in-person voting. It is well known among election specialists that mail-based voting is much more susceptible to fraud and abuse than in-person voting, but it was argued that the pandemic made mail-in voting necessary (despite the examples of safe in-person voting from other countries). The new mass mail-in voting processes were conflated with existing systems for absentee voting, but the new systems lacked the checks and security features developed over generations for absentee voting. In the event, the public-health fears proved unfounded, as much of the country did vote in person without appreciably affecting the overall incidence of the disease.

In many parts of the country, matching a signature on a voter list with that on an absentee ballot was the only way to verify the identity of the voter. To handle the huge number of mail-in ballots compared to previous elections, signature matching processes were changed or eliminated without proper transparency or consideration, shortcuts were taken and safeguards dropped, which weakened security and diminished confidence in the validity of millions of ballots in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Mail-in or absentee ballots lacking an outer security envelope would normally be ruled invalid, but in Pennsylvania they were accepted, contrary to international practice and norms.

In most elections worldwide, mail-in ballots must be postmarked by a specified date (usually Election Day) to be counted, but in Wisconsin and Michigan employees of the United States Postal Service were instructed to backdate late arriving ballots so they could still be counted.

Mail-in ballots also facilitated a practice called “ballot harvesting,” in which political operatives go door to door picking up ballots from homeowners. This undermines the secrecy of the ballot and introduces opportunities for intimidation and vote buying, and in places like senior homes and apartment blocks enables one person to collect, fill in, and submit numerous ballots. Ballot harvesting decreases the security and credibility of election processes and is consequently contrary to international best practices.

Voter Registration and Voter ID: The U.S. government has provided hundreds of millions of dollars through its foreign assistance to support voter registration processes in other countries. An accurate voter list and effective voter ID are seen as essential for deterring malpractice and cheating, and for enhancing voter confidence in the integrity of the process. American foreign policy also promotes the Open Election Data Initiative, which advocates internationally for transparent and publicly accessible election data.
Domestically, again, the picture is quite different. The average accuracy of state-maintained voter lists is far below what would be considered minimally acceptable overseas. The update process is often non-transparent, and some states outsource their list maintenance to a private organization funded by a politically partisan billionaire. Many states restrict public access to some election data, and charge exorbitant fees for data they do release, limiting the public’s ability to verify the process, and violating international norms.

This is stuff we already knew, but it’s a good reminder and summary.

Boson mass: back to the drawing board?

The New Neo Posted on by

Unexpected news:

The scientists at the Fermilab Collider Detector (CDF) in Illinois have found only a tiny difference in the mass of the W Boson compared with what the theory says it should be – just 0.1%. But if confirmed by other experiments, the implications are enormous. The so-called Standard Model of particle physics has predicted the behaviour and properties of sub-atomic particles with no discrepancies whatsoever for fifty years. Until now.

CDF’s other co-spokesperson, Prof Giorgio Chiarelli, from INFN Sezione di Pisa, told BBC News that the research team could scarcely believe their eyes when they saw the results.

“No-one was expecting this. We thought maybe we got something wrong.” But the researchers have painstakingly gone through their results and tried to look for errors. They found none.

The result, published in the journal Science, could be related to hints from other experiments at Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider at the Swiss-French border. These, as yet unconfirmed results, also suggest deviations from the Standard Model, possibly as a result of an as yet undiscovered fifth force

HORATIO:
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.

HAMLET:
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Whitmer case verdicts – 2 acquittals and a hung jury on the other 2 defendants

The New Neo Posted on by

First of all, although I had followed the Whitmer “kidnapping” case and written about it many times, I had no idea it had already gone to trial.

Just goes to show how much other news there’s been lately.

But I’m pleased to report this result:

In a huge defeat for the U.S. Department of Justice, a jury today acquitted two men accused of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the fall of 2020 and deadlocked on a verdict for two other defendants. The verdicts were announced at the Gerald R. Ford Federal Building in Grand Rapids after more than four days of deliberations; jurors heard 13 days of testimony in a case the government considered one of its biggest domestic terrorism investigations ever.

I’d say it’s a huge defeat for the FBI as well – although in terms of politics the damage was already done to the right when the case first hit the news.

One of the biggest issues in the case was entrapment, and that’s an affirmative defense that’s very difficult for defendants to prove. The deck is stacked in favor of the FBI and law enforcement on that matter. I wrote about the subject at some length; here’s an example.

But in the actual trial, according to Julie Kelly:

Defense attorneys had argued—successfully, it would appear—that their clients were entrapped by the FBI; at least a dozen FBI confidential human sources and undercover agents working out of numerous FBI field offices were deeply embedded in the plot.

Jonker ruled before the trial began on March 8 that defense counsel could not raise the entrapment issue until the government rested its case, but that plan was quickly scuttled when it became obvious the four defense attorneys were unable effectively to represent their clients without demonstrating the FBI’s extensive involvement. To prove entrapment, the defense had to convince the jury that the government induced the criminal behavior and the defendants lacked predisposition to carry out the kidnapping conspiracy on their own.

Against the objections of prosecutors, Jonker notified the jury last Friday they could consider entrapment…

A roster of FBI agents and experts took the stand during the three-week trial…

…[T]wo men charged in the same indictment had pleaded guilty and testified for the government in exchange for lighter prison sentences.

Those two might be kicking themselves right about now.

I agree with the defense here:

…[D]efense attorneys angrily condemned the FBI’s sting operation. “When I look at what happened in this case, I am ashamed of the behavior of the leading law enforcement agency in the United States,” Joshua Blanchard, Croft’s public defender, said during his closing argument. Christopher Gibbons, Fox’s public defender, called the government’s conduct “unacceptable in America. That’s not how it works. They don’t make terrorists so we can arrest them.”

And yet they do it quite often.

Here’s what I mean when I say the political damage was done, which I believe was really the point of it all:

The case produced damaging headlines for Donald Trump in October 2020 just as millions of Americans were already voting for president, including in the crucial swing state of Michigan. During a dramatic speech on October 8, 2020, Whitmer blamed Trump for “stoking distrust, fomenting anger, and giving comfort to those who spread fear and hatred” and for refusing to condemn “hate groups like these two Michigan militia groups.” Joe Biden accused Trump of sending “dog whistles” to white supremacist militias, later telling reporters it was “despicable” and “beneath the office of the presidency” that Trump allegedly encouraged the would-be kidnappers.

And these terribly dangerous “kidnappers” have of course been imprisoned since their arrests:

Harris and Caserta, who have been incarcerated since their arrests in October 2020, were released from custody. Fox and Croft will remain in prison as the government decides its next move.

Will the government keep going with this travesty of a case? I wouldn’t put it past them, although maybe they’ll just let it fade away. And go to the next travesty.

[ADDENDUM: Hat tip: commenter “Griffin.”

Here’s a piece that describes the trial in detail. Please read the whole thing. It’s almost as frightening as the case itself – really, maybe more so. It turns out that the defense was blocked from mounting much of a case at all, whereas the prosecution was given free rein. That was why two of the defendants made guilty pleas as they saw what was going on.

It’s amazing that the jury was able to penetrate the incredibly one-sided presentation and find these men either not guilty or refuse to give a verdict. Once you read the article I think you’ll be outraged at how this was conducted. I certainly am.]

Children and the new sex ed

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t remember any sex education in my New York City public school until maybe the age of twelve, and even then it was very basic. It was a slide show about menstruation that was only shown to the girls, as I recall – pretty funny since some of us were already menstruating. There was a separate presentation for the boys, and to this day I don’t know what it was about although I can guess. Not menstruation.

I think that was our sum total of sex education right through high school. Oh, I just remembered – some time in senior year of high school there was a movie showing childbirth. It was quite explicit, and probably was the single most effective deterrent imaginable to teenage sex. We boys and girls could barely even meet each others’ gazes for a while after that.

I knew girls in high school who got pregnant because they didn’t know the facts of life or birth control. Their parents had been remiss in that regard. So probably a bit more school-based sex ed about – well, about the basics of sex itself – might have been a good idea.

But then again, maybe not. Because the pendulum has now swung so far it’s come around to hit us in the back of the head, and in particular the push seems to be about LGBDQ + and it’s introduced at earlier and earlier ages – ages that used to be known as “latency” because sexuality was really way on the back burner during those years.

Roger Simon describes some of this:

N is for Nonbinary and T is for Trans.

Did you know that?

If you were a Williamson Country, Tennessee, kindergartner and clicked on the book “The GayBCs” on the iPad given by your school for you to take home over the weekend, you would.

You’d also know the B is for Bi. (You can shout it out loud/ “I like boys and girls/ and that makes me proud.”)

C is—needless to say—for Coming Out and D is—what else—for Drag.

..“The GayBCs” are educationally meaningless, in fact, an educational fraud. Hardly any children at that age are prepared to learn to read from them, with or without the traditional parental accompaniment.

It would most likely do the reverse, make the child so overwhelmed and baffled by what would have to be incomprehensible concepts for them, he or she (apologies for the old-fashioned pronouns) could be turned off reading altogether. It certainly wouldn’t help…

So what really has been going on?

The obvious part is the so-called grooming, a term the left is always complaining about, but is real to a great extent. These teachers and educators are using their classrooms and materials, including the ubiquitous iPad, to encourage, even prepare, children to be LGBTQ+, whether they are or aren’t, or, more accurately, might someday become that way or not.

Simon goes on to add that another goal, one the left has been trying to achieve through many methods as well as this one, is the destruction of the family.

The sort of thing described used to be almost universally recognized as child sexual abuse. It remains child sexual abuse, and my guess is that the majority of Americans – probably the vast majority – see it that way. And yet institutions that supposedly protect children, such as schools – and some which used to provide pleasant family entertainment, such as Disney – are fully onboard.

Sight lines

The New Neo Posted on by

A day or two after my cataract surgery I was looking at a relative and noticed he looked older. There were lines in his face I’d never seen before. It was alarming, because at first I thought there had been a sudden and abrupt aging process. But then I realized that it was just that I was seeing more clearly the details I hadn’t seen before, like when HDTV first came out.

Then the same thing happened with my own face in the mirror.

Initially I had figured it was because the surgery had been stressful. Then I thought it was because I wasn’t wearing eye makeup. Then I decided it was the extra-bright lighting in the bathroom that I was using as a guest.

Then I closed my left eye – the one with the new lens in it – and looked at myself in the mirror with my right eye. The lines disappeared, and I looked the way I had thought I looked all these years. Soft focus, lines blurred or erased.

Oh, well. It’s a small price to pay to be able to see better. But a disconcerting one.

Russia is kicked off the UN Human Rights Council

The New Neo Posted on by

The UN Human Rights Council is a joke anyway, but this happened today:

The United Nations General Assembly voted Thursday to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council following global outrage stemming from alleged atrocities recently committed by Russian troops in Bucha, Ukraine.

A total of 93 members of the assembly voted in favor of the measure, while 24 were against and 58 abstained. Those who voted against the resolution included Russia’s regional ally Belarus, China, North Korea, Iran and Syria.

What has the UN Human Rights Council ever accomplished? The current 15 members – elected by the General Assembly to a three-year term that began in January of 2021, are as follows (now minus Russia of course):

Bolivia, China, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, France, Gabon, Malawi, Mexico, Nepal, Pakistan, Russian Federation, Senegal, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Uzbekistan.

As former UN ambassador Nikki Haley said, “Now do Venezuela, Cuba, and China.” I wouldn’t sit on a hot stove till that happens.

The vagaries of a parliamentary system may allow Netanyahu to return to power

The New Neo Posted on by

A defection means that Bennett’s government has lost its fragile majority:

Plunging the government into crisis, coalition whip Idit Silman announced Wednesday that she is quitting and will instead work to form a new, right-wing government without a resort to new elections.

Silman’s announcement, which she said was due to the “harming” of Jewish identity in Israel, means that the coalition no longer has a majority….

According to reports, Silman did not tell Prime Minister Naftali Bennett — head of the Yamina party of which she is a member — of the move in advance, leaving the premier to learn through media reports that he had lost his government majority.

Ouch.

In the US, such a defection would only threaten the leadership of the legislative branch involved. In Israel and other nations with a parliamentary system, it threatens the ruling executive branch as well. Here’s the way it could work:

The first option would be for it to pass a law to dissolve the Knesset. To pass, this would require the support of at least 61 of the 120 members of Knesset…

With the Knesset in recess, scheduling a vote on such a bill is thought to be unlikely before the weeklong Passover festival which begins at the end of next week, but could be arranged soon after that…

The second option would be for Likud to form an alternative government in the current 24th Knesset, although it appears it would struggle to do so…

Likud ran a scathing, months-long online campaign against Yamina joining the government and ousting Netanyahu, and Silman was a key target.

The lawmaker was frequently harassed, and she said she was physically attacked at a gas station; at the time, Netanyahu suggested that Silman could have made up the story of the assault in order to tar opponents of the coalition.

The article goes on to indicate that a significant number of former allies of Bennett’s government have turned against him, not just Silman.

As for Netanyahu’s possible return, here’s the scoop on that:

On Wednesday, Bibi called on additional members of the ruling coalition to defect and form a new government with him at the head. There is a fair chance this will happen. It’s not only right-wingers in Bennett’s anti-Bibi coalition might be tempted. Ambitious and frustrated centrists (Defence Minister Benny Gantz’s name comes up most often) who could give a new Likud government a wider public base may also wish to join.

If no one else defects, a 60-60 split will paralyse the Knesset (unlike in the US Congress, there is no tie-breaking vote). That would almost certainly lead to a new election in the summer, the fifth in the past four years. Netanyahu will be the candidate of Likud; polls show him by far the most popular party leader. He faces three indictments on criminal charges of fraud and corruption which rumble on. But those indictments are not looking as solid as the prosecution thought, and even if he is convicted, he could appeal, dragging out the process while staying in office.

In my opinion the prosecution always knew the accusations were garbage, but felt it to be politically expedient to bring the charges, hoping to turn voters against Netanyahu at the right moment. Of course, even if Netanyahu or his party return to power, they face a hostile Biden administration

Ketanji Brown-Jackson confirmed by a 53-47 vote

The New Neo Posted on by

This action by the Senate was a foregone conclusion, even without the ever-so-helpful three Republican votes. That is because not a single Democrat defected, not even Manchin.

That does not surprise me terribly, although with the three Republican votes Manchin might have been allowed to defect had he wanted to do so. Democrats are capable of imposing tremendous discipline, and in this case I think they wanted no naysayer to disturb the confirmation of the first black female to the Court. Unfortunately – as with Kamala Harris, first female VP and first “person of color” VP – Brown-Jackson is not even close to the most impressive black female candidate that might have been chosen.

The actual effect on the Court is probably to preserve the status quo. Voting against Brown-Jackson would only have caused her replacement by someone who would be voting the same way on the Court as she will be voting.

The three Republicans who voted for her confirmation are Susan Collins (understandable, because her popularity in Maine depends on her being willing to vote with Democrats on some things), Lisa Murkowski (who needn’t vote that way, being from Alaska, but who likes to thwart the GOP routinely), and Mitt Romney (who has become some sort of malicious spoiler). I find it interesting that Lindsey Graham, who virtually always votes for the confirmation of all SCOTUS nominees, didn’t vote “Yay” on this one.