Yes, Susan Wright just got through posting about a new Roy Moore accuser: Tina Johnson. But there are even more. The #FAKENEWSBEZOSPOST has a story titled Two more women describe unwanted overtures by Roy Moore at Alabama mall.

One of the stories is about a 22-year-old woman who merely says Moore was much older and very persistent and creepy in his unwanted overtures. The other woman is a bit more interesting. Gena Richardson says she was a high school senior when Moore, then 30 years old, engaged in behavior that sounds a lot like the conduct described by Beverly Young Nelson:

Instead, she says she met Moore at the movie theater. She says she can’t remember what they saw, but she remembers clearly what happened after. She says it was cold and Moore offered to drive her to her car, which was more than a football field’s distance away in a parking area behind Sears. She says he parked by her car and began chatting with her, and she says she told him again about her dad.

“I just explained to him that my dad’s a minister, and you know, I just can’t sneak around because that’s wrong,” she recalls. “So I thanked him and started to get out and he grabbed me and pulled me in and that’s when he kissed me.

“It was a man kiss — like really deep tongue. Like very forceful tongue. It was a surprise. I’d never been kissed like that,” she says. “And the minute that happened, I got scared then. I really did. Something came over me that scared me. And so I said, ‘I’ve got to go, because my curfew is now.’ ”

Her first contact with Moore was “just before or after her 18th birthday,” so she was either an adult or close to it. But the interesting bit here is the similarity to Nelson’s story, including the offer to drive the young girl to her car, grabbing her as she started to get out, and frightening her with the forcefulness of his conduct. The Post says her account “was corroborated by classmate and Sears co-worker Kayla McLaughlin.” Another woman who has been secretly planning to derail Roy Moore’s possible future Senate bid for forty years!

I can tell that plenty of people will say “men kiss women at the end of dates so this is a nothingburger.” But those who said the forcefulness of Nelson’s alleged encounter sounded out of character for Moore now have another data point to consider.

Any way you slice it, Moore was clearly a skeevy presence there at the mall. Other women in the story describe Moore as someone everyone looked out for, so they could avoid him. One says “I can remember him walking in and the whole mood would change with us girls,” describing herself as feeling “creeped out.”

Yeah, Moore defenders, it’s all made-up character assassination. You just keep telling yourself that. You have to believe that, so you do.

[Cross-posted at RedState and The Jury Talks Back.]

[guest post by Dana]

As you are aware, one of the better things that President Trump has done since taking office is to nominate Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Of course, not everyone is pleased with the nominee, nor charmed by his popular Twitter feed. For example, at his confirmation hearing today, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D) took Justice Willett to task for a tweet the Tweeter Laureate of the 84th Texas Legislature made back in 2015 right after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the Obergefell v. Hodges case:

Demonstrating that he is not above using an innocuous bacon tweet in an effort to serve his political purposes, the manipulatively humorless senator proceeded to use the tweet in an effort to show Willett’s lack of respect for the Court and, ostensibly, judicial precedents.:

…Leahy suggested that the bacon tweet showed Willett’s disdain for the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriages.

“I don’t think one would see that as praising the Supreme Court decisions,” Leahy said of the tweet.

Willett explained that he meant the tweet as a mild joke to lighten the tension in a tense political climate.

” Senator, as for the bacon tweet, that was the day after the Obergfell decision was issued and it was my attempt to inject a bit of levity,” he said. “The country was filled with rancor and polarization. It was a divisive time in the nation.”

Leahy followed up, asking Willett, “And you think that cut back the divisiveness with a comment like that?”

“Senator, I believe every American is entitled to equal worth and dignity,” Willett said. “I’ve never intended to disparage anyone and would never do so. That’s not where my heart is.”

(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)

–Dana

You have already heard me rant and rave about how the GOP tax bill is a tax hike on the middle class (primarily the professional middle class in large urban areas) to pay for tax breaks for the super-rich. The Senate version of the bill is no different in that respect — in fact, it’s worse, eliminating deductions for all property taxes without even the $10,000 cap included in the House bill. But the Senate version released yesterday comes with yet another stupid idea: repealing the ObamaCare individual mandate . . . without repealing ObamaCare.

You’ll find no more fierce opponent of ObamaCare than myself. It’s exactly the sort of Frankenstein monster you’d expect when central planners assume control over a huge of the economy. But you can’t fix the monster by giving him a new right arm, three new toes on his left foot, and tightening the bolts on his neck. The monster has to be destroyed.

The problem is not, as some might try to tell you, that ObamaCare “won’t work” if the individual mandate is repealed. ObamaCare won’t work and can’t work, period, no matter what — because central planning can’t work. What ObamaCare does is monkey with supply and demand for a product: health insurance. The law mandates it be supplied at prices that would be unavailable in a truly free market (guaranteed issue). This is effectively a form of price control, which generally creates a shortage. The law then tries to compensate for the effects of the price control by mandating purchase of the product by legal fiat.

The unpopular mandated purchase provisions do compensate somewhat for the popular price controls, but in the absence of a free market any such central attempt to balance prices is always doomed to fail. It’s hubris on the part of the central planners to think they can succeed. The key lessons of the failed experiments in socialism in the 20th century have not been learned — and probably never will be.

The market is a wondrous mechanism that ensures, almost as if by magic, that demand for goods is balanced by a supply of the desired goods. But thanks to various forms of government intervention, including federal tax policy and federal and state regulations, we had not had an actual free market in health care or health insurance for a long time, even before ObamaCare.

ObamaCare’s dog’s breakfast of mandates will never be a sustainable, functioning mechanism, and removing one mandate does not solve the problem of skyrocketing health care costs and rising premiums. It will almost certainly make it worse. This is why previous efforts to repeal only the individual mandate while leaving the rest of ObamaCare in place have gone down to ignominious defeat. It’s horrendous policy, and no honest person can really dispute this.

But when it comes to doling out tax breaks to the rich, horrendous policy is just the ticket. Anything to provide a paper credit to balance the goodies handed out to big donors.

And the public will like it. Nobody will analyze this from first principles, the way I just did. They’ll just say: “hur hur, they’re gutting ObamaCare, hur hur, ah like it!”

Hooray for the GOP!

P.S. Increasingly, I don’t feel that bad about the prospect of the Democrats picking up another Senate seat in Alabama for three years. After all: genuine ObamaCare repeal has not happened and never will no matter who is in charge. Yes, Dems love to hike taxes, but Trump would probably veto their tax hikes while he would sign the GOP tax hike — so one more vote against the GOP version of a tax hike is fine by me. And the GOP will still have its majority to confirm good judges. Win-win! I’m not getting tired of all the winning yet! How about you?

[Cross-posted at RedState and The Jury Talks Back.]