From Sleeping Dogs Department:
Well, that might make Hill’s claims more plausible, but technically McEwan isn’t claiming sexual harassment against her, nor is she specifically describing any harassment of other women.
Actually, the more I think about it, the less significant the whole sexual harassment thing seems. The problem now is the dogged determination that it didn’t happen, it couldn’t happen, and anyone suggesting otherwise better apologize, in a robotic binary fashion that brooks no ambiguity and which we’ve seen quite a lot of in the last ten years from various high-ranking Republicans. Fuck, just shut up about it, Virginia - people will believe what they want to, anyway.
Talking about pornography with a girlfriend isn’t harassment, but talking explicitly about pornography to an employee is. If McEwen’s experience is similar to Hill’s it would corroborate Hill’s claim of harassment.
But you do agree that if we assume it didn’t happen, then she should apologize? 
Talking about porn with a woman you are dating does not constitute harassment. So why in the world would you offer up this story to rebut the charge that no other woman said Thomas harassed her? Did this woman say Thomas harassed her? No. Did she say she saw or heard him harass anyone else? No.
So what was the point of your post?
If she were head of an organization that lived and died on the existence of Obamacare, perhaps there’d be a point here. But so far as i can tell, her organization is a general supporter of libertarian and conservative causes, not one formed specifically to defeat Obamacare.
What I said in #463:
Yes, I would.
But remember that what I object to arises when we assume that Hill knows she lied, and Thomas knows Hill knows she lied.
How did your lesbian bar example capture that aspect?
This is how I see it as well, and it would be just as stupid if Hill had left a message asking Thomas to apologize. It’s a case of unstoppable cannonball meets unmovable wall.
Well, we can assume an apology is justified, I assume, if we’re to make that assumption.
But don’t hold me to it.
Well, I don’t see a problem, then. On the assumption (heh) that the docile housewife stereotype is fading, I’d expect members of SCOTUS that have spouses to have spouses that work, and since Washington is a political town, a SCOTUS spouse could easily have a political job. I wouldn’t want to analyze the Thomases without some equivalent details about other SCOTUS justices and spouses. It would be unfair.
In any case, Virginia Thomas embarassed herself, probably on an angry passive-aggressive whim. Who hasn’t done that?
Now, certainly we cannot assume that simply because she is libertarian/conservative, that means she is opposed to ObamaCare! Why, she might just be one of the many, many principled conservatives who strongly support ObamaCare. Like…uh…well, like…uh…hmmmm…
Help me out here, Bricker. Memory shot, you know how it is. Maybe just the top five names…
Seriously, Bricker? You were a PD. If you were representing the defendant in a lawsuit and the judge’s wife were engaged by a company that got a benefit from the State winning (say the company was also suing in civil court and would benefit from a criminal conviction), you wouldn’t scream for recusal of the judge?
Forgive me but I only read a few posts in and only had the pleasure of reading Bricker’s entertaining adjustments to the hypothetical.
Did it look like this by the last page:
"…Ok, so it’s been proven with a complete video history of their lives that Anita Hill was incorrect, not only that, through advances in deciphering neural activity, we are able to determine that she herself did not believe it happened, and further, when we analyzed her neural reactions to the voice mail, it was clear there was some portion of her brain that was receptive to the idea of “olive branches” in general (although we couldn’t ascertain if it applied to this situation specifically), and furthermore Ms Thomas’ neural activity was proven to show that she was detecting the potential affect of her voicemail on Ms Hill as she was recording it, thus leading her to believe that she at least had small but non-zero chance at convincing Ms Hill to apologize.
Now, then, given that - is she still tone deaf?"
The phone call makes Virginia Thomas look like an idiot.
If that wasn’t her intent, she’s tone deaf.
If that was her intent, congratulations. She’s not tone deaf, just a fucking weirdo.
But… but… he was plusoneing me. 
So we are looking for a narrow definition of harassment that would exonerate Thomas by allowing him to ooze out? Sorry, but his ruling on the case against strip searching a 13 year old girl, his problems with Anita Hill and his interest in porn attested to by a long term ex girl friend, builds a damning case. He is a pig. He has problems telling the truth and he is a crappy judge, which almost every body agreed on when the Repubs pushed through his nomination,because they knew how he would vote. He is a low point of Supreme Court Judges.
If I thought the judge wasn’t going to go my way? Of course.
It’s the American way!
I suspect that her intent was to be able to say that she extended an olive branch, and was rebuffed by Anita Hill who wouldn’t even return her call. Virginia Thomas tried to storm the moral high ground only to be parried by the public release of the text of her voice message. Terse, factual, to-the-point reporting has a way of cutting through people’s BS. Still, Mrs. Thomas’ approach might have worked had Hill not been in the mood to deal with the situation.
You let her off too easily. She acted like an asshole. I apologize in advance for the next several hundred posts regarding the commonly accepted definition of “asshole.”
This pit thread is degenerating into a debate. This makes me go :(. Can’t we step up the ad hominem attacks?