Wednesday, May 27, 2009

There's nothing so stupid ...


... that Blogging Tory Jabba the Roy won't mindlessly regurgitate it:

[Recent U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor] is a judge who has a very high reversal rate on appeal and has shown her own bias.

Not surprisingly, Jabba is so fucking stupid that he can't even get Sotomayor's name correct (spelling it "Sotomayer"), but let's take a look at that apparently appalling value of her high reversal rate, shall we? Let's follow Jabba's link to Fox News, where we read:

Sotomayor has a record of being rebuffed by the high court. Of the six decisions she was a part of that came before the high court, five were reversed. In the sixth, the court disagreed with Sotomayor's reasoning.

Other news sources have the numbers slightly different (the difference being apparently counting the number of cases where she wrote the majority decision as opposed to cases where she was simply involved in some capacity):

Sotomayor reversed 60% by high court

With Judge Sonia Sotomayor already facing questions over her 60 percent reversal rate, the Supreme Court could dump another problem into her lap next month if, as many legal analysts predict, the court overturns one of her rulings upholding a race-based employment decision.

Three of the five majority opinions written by Judge Sotomayor for the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and reviewed by the Supreme Court were reversed, providing a potent line of attack raised by opponents Tuesday after President Obama announced he will nominate the 54-year-old Hispanic woman to the high court.

Oh, my God, the humanity of that "high" reversal rate! We should all be horrified and appalled! Or we would be, if we were hideous, bloated imbeciles like Jabba. Now let's see what's really going on:

So the Supreme Court granted review in a total of five cases where she authored the majority opinion and reversed the decision in three of them, giving her a 60 percent reversal rate … which is actually quite good considering that, in recent years, the Supreme Court has reversed more than 70% of all the cases it has heard.

But more importantly, as the article points out, Sotomayor wrote 380 majority decisions in her 11 years on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, the vast majority of which didn’t get reversed by the Supreme Court. In fact, only five even ended up there and thus her three reversals out of 380 decisions gives her a reversal rate of exactly 0.00789473684%.

The only “problem” for Sotomayor here is the Times’ pathetic lack of math skills.

Actually, the correct value is 0.7894%, which is still less than one percent. But still, what's with that high value once a case comes before the Supremes? Let's let someone over at Daily Kos explain it:

That number might seem high, but it makes perfect sense. The Supreme Court, unlike the federal circuit courts of appeal, can choose which cases it wants to hear (a perogative called certiorari). The Supremes select just a handful of matters (maybe 1-2% out of thousands) each year, and they generally pick rulings they'd like to overturn. After all, if they're happy with an appeals court decision, why spend more time on it if they'd only uphold it?

Did you all catch that? It means that the Supreme Court is asked to review lots and lots and lots of cases every year, but the only ones they're going to bother looking at are the ones they see a potential problem with, which means that the cases they take are obviously far more likely to be reversed. Which means that the reversal percentage of only those cases that end up in front of the Supremes is almost utterly meaningless.

In short, 11 years, 380 majority decisions, three reversals. We should all be that good.

P.S. Is it worth asking who else in Stephen Taylor's menagerie of cementheaded whackjobs is going to foist this idiocy on their readership? Feel free to occasionally check over there and leave a comment as to who's the next retard on the list.

9 comments:

Boris said...

They won't acknowledge the math or their error, but blindly charge onward into cognitive oblivion.

b_nichol said...

"But, but, but... she's an activist judge! (and she may be, you know, not white)"

Does anyone here mind if I refer to Sean Handkerchief and his colleagues at Faux Nooz as the greatest assemblage of slacked-jawed fuckwits since the Jerry Springer Show?

Anyone? Bueller?

I thought not.

liberal supporter said...

so fucking stupid that he can't even get Sotomayor's name correct (spelling it "Sotomayer")No, he's not stupid. He got the memo.

And the package.

thwap said...

They wouldn't be able to tell you Scalia's record at all.

They wouldn't know about any of these things except that the head of the herd told them to trumpet this stuff, so they do.

The big joke is that these cretins expect to be taken seriously.

liberal supporter said...

neo is now double deleting. I guess he just can't stand my comments at all!

================= neo May 27
Of course they were screeching about spending more, Neo.
No, they were screeching about spending smart.

Now they are screeching equally as loud about a $50 billion deficit resulting from said spending THEY demanded.
No, they are wondering why a deficit projected to be $30 BILLION became $50 BILLION. It's the inability to forecast that makes Flaherty incompetent. Or he's a liar and tried to hide it, like he did in Ontario.

Kind of makes you wonder what a coalition deficit would have been like when they wanted MORE spending.
Probably about the same, but with people in charge that want the spending to actually work. The CPC is like the college roommate who doesn't want to do dishes, and to prove their point does it badly.

You know, the coalition that Iggy signed on the dotted line to support?
The coalition was a temporary thing, intended to provide an immediate injection of brains into the government, and to get Canada properly represented during the US election to inauguration transition. Instead we were prorogued, paralyzed and are now fighting uphill against "Buy American". It's too late for a coalition now, and besides there will be an election October 19, 2009.


And to think it took Iggy 6 months to figure out such a coalition was bad idea.
It was a good idea during the US presidential transition. It would have left us in a better situation than we are now.

Thank goodness we had Harper who knew immediatley that it was a bad idea, and took steps to put a stop to it.
Harper was a coward and ran away. He didn't and doesn't care about Canada, as so many of his past statements point out. He's only in it for a few more months as PM, so he'll get a better pension.

And another fact is, that the Liberals voted to support this budget.
Yes, the Liberals foolishly believed the government would keep its word. Instead, the CPC is trying to prove that deficit spending is always a bad idea. They are deliberately doing it badly.

So I also could care less about hypocritical Liberals screeching. Its what they do.
I am always amused by supporters of Harper, the most hypocritical PM ever, screeching about hypocrisy. But it's what they do.

liberal supporter said...

Yay! I made it to the update to his post!
He's such a neo!

Hahahahahahahahaha!

There were actually two comments that he kept deleting. Since his usual MO is to single delete and usually comment after, I thought it was something wrong with blogger or my browser cache was hosed. But he again confirmed that it was working. Here's the other one that was "too hot for neo":

================= neo May 27
and what was all that nonsense about iggy taking the high road?
He was referring to personal attacks, such as "you're unqualified because of where you used to live" as opposed to "Flaherty is incometent, since he just blew $20 BILLION over and above the budget in a few months".

Get it?

liberal supporter said...

Meanwhile, another shoe drops. Will Senator Duffy now step down since his appointment was a direct reward for this?

Dr.Dawg said...

Well done. Sorry for the cheerleading of late, but there's simply nothing to add to this.

Bismark said...

Kind of sad when you have to duel with a gutless fraud like Neo through the comments on this blog. Why people waste their time attempting to reason with that pusillanimous sack of shit is quite mysterious to me.