Innocent Bystanders

How to Legitimately Overturn Precedent September 29, 2018

From Hot Air: “ABC’s Terry Moran: Overturning Roe Won’t Be Legitimate if Kavanaugh and Thomas are Deciding Votes”

And Allah notes that this isn’t really about Kavanaugh at all.  There’s enough wiggle room that the argument can change configurations as necessary to always reach the same conclusion.

Another thing that’s revealing is how many different arguments in the alternative against the legitimacy of overturning Roe are bundled into a clip that runs less than a minute in length. A simple argument capitalizing on the news du jour would be that any majority which includes Kavanaugh will be illegitimate because of the nature of the allegations against him. A more complex argument would be that any majority which includes Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas is doubly illegitimate because they’ve both been accused on the record of sexual assault. Make that claim and you’ve got your bases covered even if Kavanaugh ends up being borked and his replacement ends up on the Court as the fifth anti-Roe vote. Was Clarence Thomas one of the five votes too? Then it doesn’t count.

But Moran[] … notes that any all-malemajority with Kavanaugh and Thomas that overturns Roe would be suspect. … Was the majority composed of five men? Well, then, it’s illegitimate.

And what if, say, Amy Coney Barrett were to replace Kavanaugh as nominee and provide the fifth vote? … If Gorsuch and a second Trump appointee are part of a majority that overturns Roe, it would mean that two of the five votes came from justices nominated by a president who lost the popular vote. … Plenty of people grasping for reasons to believe that an outcome they despise is unfair will grasp at it.

I agree with all of that – if you’re anti-fetus, then no set of circumstances could possibly arise that would mean you can legitimately overturn Roe.  It was a decision handed down from Mount Sinai itself, as canonical as Genesis and as inerrant as Revelation.

I want to talk about the problem with judicial activism that liberals have created for themselves.  I’m going to assume (contrary to the evidence) that their arguments are based on intellectual rigor, rather than stating the conclusion and working backwards for a justification.

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CBS Twists Statistics and Reality in Their Attempted Trump Debunking September 20, 2018

Another day, another failed Trump debunking.

Today we have Irina Ivanova of CBS news telling us that Trump is incorrect when he claims that the recovery from the Great Recession was the slowest since the Great Depression. Here’s her first chart:

Looky looky! That darn Bush had worse job recovery than Obama!

But.

Let me start by saying that this is a stupid chart to measure recovery, because it gives no indication of what you’re recovering from. A better measure would be: how long did it take the job market to recover the jobs lost in the recession?

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Double Crested Cormorant September 18, 2018

So named because during mating season, it gets big white plumes of feathers on either side of the head, which makes it look very much like Bernie Sanders.

Ibn Tulun Mosque, Cairo September 18, 2018

The oldest mosque in Cairo still surviving in its original form, and the largest in terms of land area. It was completed in 879 AD.

September 2018 Employment Report September 7, 2018

The Employment Situation Summary report is out today, with some accolades from the press for “Higher Than Expected Job Growth“. By the IB employment metric, however, we’ve had no real progress in almost a year.

The IB metric is a harsh one, only counting full-time jobs, and dividing by the civilian non-institutional population rather than the working population. But it’s a fair measure of how tough life is: it counts how many people with decent jobs are supporting how many people.

And by that measure, we’ve stalled out since last September. At least we’re still above 0.5, though.