Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson says some foolish things

The Justices of the Supreme Court make their living with words. They read them, they write them, they speak them, they listen to them, and they rule with them. We currently have a Justice who uses words very poorly.

At her confirmation hearing before the Senate, Justice Jackson was asked to give a definition of “woman.” That’s a legitimate question, since many legal matters depend on whether a given person is a woman or a man.

Her answer was:

“I can’t. Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.”

Jackson was of course dodging the question. Fine, that’s what you do when you’re being cross examined by a hostile questioner. But the unartfulness of her dodge was striking. A person trained and working with the tool of words should have been able to craft an answer along the lines of:

We all know that words can mean different things in different settings. In the case of the word “woman,” there is of course a traditional definition in genetics which is ‘a person with two X chromosomes.’ We also know that there are people in the world without two X chromosomes who view themselves as women. I respect their views of themselves, just as I respect the views of geneticists. I can’t say without the particular facts of a case in front of me how those views should be weighed, if at all, in a court of law.”

Blah, blah, blah, right? Yes, but that’s the point of an artful dodge – don’t give the questioner a sound bite. Jackson didn’t seem to recognize that she’d handed her questioner – and her present and future critics – a sound bite that will live forever.

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Will we use reverse discrimination to “correct” the gender gap the way we disastrously “corrected” the racial gap?

A persistent myth is that, for the same job, women in America are paid only 84 cents for every dollar that men are paid.

I explain below, first, why that myth is false and, second, why it’s dangerous.

There are the several reasons why it’s false. The figures use a category of “full time work” for their comparisons. That’s defined as any work over 35 hours per week. That means a man working 55 hours a week is compared to a woman working 36. So, a man making, say, $30/hour for those 55 hours for a total of $1650/week is deemed to be making $210 more for a “full time” job than a woman making $40/hour for 36 hours for a total of $1440/week for a “full time” job – even though in point of fact, the woman is making $5/hour more.

It’s not like this all balances out in the end because women and men overall work the same number of hours. They don’t. The high-hour work is mainly by men.

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An AI-generated speech shouted at the teleprompter by an angry old man on amphetamines

This week was the ridiculous annual spectacle where the president is supposed to tell us the state of our so-called union, as if we don’t already know. That’s a particularly appropriate topic for the current president who was elected on the promise that he would be a “uniter, not divider” who would bring normalcy and decency back to the office.

A few seconds into it, this “uniter, not divider” was implying that the people who currently disfavor his re-election, a cohort comprising over half the country – and especially his “predecessor” whose name must not be spoken – were in league with Vladimir Putin.

It almost made me miss the good old pre-1989 Democrats who liked Russia.

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The Democrats believe Trump is a witch

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.

Émile Cammaerts

I suppose technically speaking, he would be a warlock. Unless he has undergone that “gender affirmation” mutilation that the Democrats promote for other people’s children.

Which I doubt.

The ancient notion of witchcraft was an understandable aspect of the pre-Enlightenment inability to understand the connections between natural causes and effects, together with the absence of a scientific method of data-gathering and experimentation to discover those connections.

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The Colorado Secretary of State says she now trusts the people to make the decision she didn’t trust them to make four months ago

The cabal that calls itself the Democratic Party of Colorado nearly pulled a coup last fall. Unburdened by any inconvenient process that might have been due, a Democrat state judge decided that Donald Trump was an insurrectionist. Therefore, under a clause of the 14th Amendment designed to prevent former Confederates from running for federal office, Trump was ineligible to run for president.

Never mind that Trump had never been convicted or even charged with the crime of insurrection.

On appeal, four of the seven Democrat-appointed justices on the Colorado Supreme Court agreed. The other three in their strident dissent all but wondered out loud what kind of Colorado-legal weed the majority was smoking.

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My apology to President Trump

I voted for Donald Trump twice. But I’ve never used the words “altruistic” or “generous” to describe him. In fact, whenever my support for Trump came up, I always hastened to add, a little sanctimoniously, that I don’t like the man personally.

I might be changing my mind. Here’s why.

Trump didn’t need to go into politics. He’s a billionaire. He had everything a man could want, including a gorgeous ex-model for a wife. (Money is a more potent aphrodisiac than power. Sorry, Henry Kissinger – you’d have known that if only you’d had money.)

Trump went into politics anyway. Sure, there was an ego factor. I hope it doesn’t surprise you that successful men have egos. So do successful women.

But Trump could have exercised that healthy ego in many other ways involving less risk and less cost. He could have bought a cruise ship, or a gold-plated 747, or donated a billion dollars to get a medical center named after him, or started a charitable foundation – a real one, not like the Clinton Foundation.

He instead chose to run for president back in 2016. That doesn’t make him Mother Teresa, but it makes him a lot closer to Mother Teresa than to Joe Biden – the guy who has spent a lifetime in politics because he’s been a failure at every other thing in life, including parenting, and whose lifetime in politics has been primarily for the purpose of lining the greasy, grafty and grifty pockets of himself and his cheesy, sleazy family.

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Fani for Vice President!

The sun is setting on Fani’s career as a lawyer, and she’ll be seeking other career opportunities.

First, let’s recap why her law career is ending.  

Fani’s case against Donald Trump includes a preposterous RICO charge for violating the racketeering laws. Fani has no expertise in that arcane law, so she hired her boyfriend and paid him three-quarters of a million taxpayer dollars for his expertise. Never mind that he, too, has no such expertise, having never tried a RICO case.

The scheme worked well for Fani and the boyfriend, for a while. The boyfriend took Fani on expensive vacations to exotic places, paid for by the taxpayer money he received from Fani’s office. Fani says she always paid him back for her half, but the payback was in untraceable cash that she kept around the house. There’s no bank record of her withdrawing that cash, and no bank record of him depositing that cash.

To casual observers, and, more importantly, to the judge, this all looked a little crafty and grafty.

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How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen – the Quiet Years

My book about the decline of Aspen was published last year, entitled “High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen.” It debuted at Number 6 on Amazon in its category of political books. That put the book in rarified air with the likes of Tucker Carlson and Jesse Watters (who helped me promote it when I appeared on his show).

Although I’m no longer in the stratosphere with Tucker and Jesse, sales are still climbing and, more importantly, so are royalties. You can get the book at Amazon or Barnes and Noble for $18 or $8 for the e-version.

Meanwhile, here’s a teaser. It’s Chapter Two, about the odd period between the silver boom and the post-WWII boom, entitled “Cows, Potatoes and Ghosts — the Quiet Years.”

Here come da judge – and he’s gonna take a load off Fani

Here come da judge….

– Pigmeat Markham

Take a load off Fanny….

– The band

Lawyering is hard work. First, you have to get a college degree. OK, that’s not hard work; that’s a four-year summer camp these days. But then you have to get into law school.

Once in law school, you waste three years being taught a lot of BS, but they never teach how to practice law. I got an ‘A’ in Property Law but was never taught how to buy a house. I got an ‘A’ in Contract Law but never drafted – or even read – a contract. I got an ‘A’ in Civil Procedure but was never taught when to stand up in a courtroom and when to sit down.

Then you have to take the Bar Exam to become a licensed lawyer. It’s in studying for the Bar Exam for a month that you finally learn some law. But you still don’t know how to buy a house, draft a contract, or when to stand up and when to sit down.

Then you have to find a job. That can be challenging. If you find a job in private practice, you have to bust your nuts for 5-10 years to make partner.

And you’re forever an hourly worker. At some point, your hourly pay can add up to a lot. But you’re never making money while you sleep. You make money by the hour.

(An old lawyer joke: A successful, fit lawyer died and went to heaven. At the gate, he told Saint Peter there must be a mistake. He explained that he was only 48 years old. His saintliness looked at his scrolls, peered over his reading glasses at the newly dead lawyer, and said, “Huh. According to your billing records, you’re 117 years old. And you’re in the wrong place.”

All that said, I loved practicing law. It was a privilege, and I was fortunate to enjoy it with some remarkable people. But it’s no picnic, and certainly no vacation in Aruba.

Which brings us to a charming Georgia peach of a lawyer named Fanny. Er, I mean Fani. I’m told that the difference between Fanny and Fani is the pronunciation. The latter is pronounced FAW-nee. Or maybe it’s Faw-NEE.

However you pronounce the name, it’s particularly fitting for this woman, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, this steatopygiatic Fanny Fani is the District Attorney in Fulton County, Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump for the purpose of advancing her career under the pretense of prosecuting him for saying things he shouldn’t have.

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Their combined age is 158; let that sink in

I sometimes forget to zip up after using the bathroom. Thankfully, I don’t have to take my pants off in the bathroom because, if I did, I’m sure I would sometimes forget to put them back on. I would lose pants and party invitations the way I used to lose umbrellas and girlfriends.

In my prime, I occasionally beat the chess computer. Those days are gone. Nowadays, I’m lucky if I can find the goddam chess computer.

My fast ball? It left so fast it left my head spinning.

I’ve lost my keys so many times that I bought a gizmo to put on my keychain so that I can use my phone to make the keychain ring. Now if only I could find my phone. Soon I’ll be trying to start the car with my phone and trying to telephone people with my keys.

Mea culpa. I admit it. I stipulate to it. I confess. I do not have the mental capacity or physical strength to be president of these United States.

We’re on the brink of nominating for president two men older than I, who are even less physically and mentally fit for that job.

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