Rand Paul Supporter Stomps Head Of Female MoveOn Member Outside KY Debate - video at link.
Josh Green flagged an incident that occurred outside of the Rand Paul-Jack Conway debate in Lexington, Kentucky Monday night that's already dominating the news in Kentucky and could easily make headlines nationally.Typical of the Rand Paul crowd - free speech for them, but no one else. Rand Paul is known to be a wacko so it is only natural that he attacks that kind of person. In order to deflect from their attack on a woman - fully armed with petitions no less - Paul supporters are claiming someone stepped on the feet of one their side. Yep, accidentally stepping on someone's foot - if it did happen - is the same thing as several men beating a woman. I guess it would take several male Paul supporters to beat up one woman since they're known to be some of the country's biggest wussies.. Here is a picture of one of the fascist conservatives who attacked her. There is also another man who kicked her head once she was held down.
As the candidates arrived, a group of Paul supporters pulled a female MoveOn member to the ground and held her there as another Paul supporter stomped on the back of her head and neck.
According to the Louisville Courier Journal, "Lauren Valle of MoveOn.org approached Paul and tried to give him an "employee of the month award" from Republicorp...a fake business MoveOn created to symbolize what it says is the merger of the GOP and business interests controlling political speech."
The whole thing was caught on video. Watch:
At the end of the clip, Valle is alert and speaking with the press. However, MoveOn's political director Ilyse Hogue tells TPM that Valle is in the hospital and they're awaiting word on her condition. We'll get you more information when we have it.
We have a call out to the Lexington police department's public affairs office for further comment. According to WTVQ, an assault report was filed but there have been no arrests.
Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's Ethics Problems, Then and Now
It is now nearly forgotten that Thomas's ethics record gave Hill's accusation traction. Briefly a federal appeals judge, and before that a Reagan operative charged with undercutting civil rights enforcement, Thomas had a long habit of telling untruthful stories. As the late civil rights scholar Haywood Burns, dean of the law school at City University of New York, testified during the '91 hearings before Hill's accusations surfaced, Thomas's testimony and record were marked by "a lack of candor, compassion and ethical judgment."
Reporting to Congress as head of the EEOC, Thomas misrepresented his agency's nonenforcement of age discrimination law. As a federal judge he sat on an appeals court review of the criminal conviction of Col. Oliver North, despite having spoken out in support of North's actions in the Iran/Contra scandal. He failed to recuse himself from a case involving his political patron, Senator John Danforth.
To score points, Thomas even lied about his sister: falsely describing her in speeches as pathetically welfare dependent, a mocking depiction utterly at odds with the proud and hard existence of a woman who worked a series of minimum-wage jobs for most of her life to support her family.
Perhaps Ginni Thomas's phone call was a smokescreen—an attempted distraction from the reporting on Liberty Central's funding. Maybe it was unrelated. Either way, twenty years later it bears remembering that Hill's accusations were not just a matter of "she said, he said." Hill, in 1991, testified as a credible witness of unquestioned probity. Thomas had a documented ethics problem then—and, it appears, an ongoing ethics problem now. Back then, Thomas's truth problem obscured his shameful role in undoing the very civil rights tradition that made his nomination possible. Today, the Thomases' evocation of that old episode obscures an ethically challenged Supreme Court justice complicit in handing American politics over to corporations and anonymous far-right donors—that is the real scandal.
