Via Philip Cohen in The Atlantic, here are two fascinating charts about the prevalence of the name Mary in the U.S. For an explanation of the second chart, follow this link.
The Judicial Confirmation Crisis in One Easy Chart
The dotted line marks 24 days, the average time George W. Bush’s nominees – by this point in his presidency —had to wait between being approved by the Judiciary Committee and getting an up-or-down vote from the full Senate. The blue lines represent the number of days each of the nineteen nominees currently waiting for a Senate vote has been stalled. The dark blue lines – seventeen out of the nineteen – represent nominees who were approved with overwhelming bipartisan support by the Judiciary Committee. These nominees have no recorded Republican opposition – instead, the GOP is stalling them just for the sake of stalling.
Fourteen of the nineteen nominees are women or people of color. Nine have been nominated to fill seats officially designated as judicial emergencies. All of them deserve prompt up-or-down votes from the Senate.
Can we see the line representing the average wait for all of Obama’s nominees, as well as some lines representing the longest waits imposed on Bush’s nominees? That would make for a more valid comparison.
After all, the Brookings administration says the “pace of confirmations has picked up.” The blue-lined individuals could be outliers. Maybe they aren’t! But the chart above obscures as much as it clarifies…
That is totally depressing. As long as we allow the blue to go down, the green will invariably go up.
The two have nothing to do with each other. One might as well compare spending on schools with spending on hospitals.
Also missing from the analysis: Results of spending.
E.g.:
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/chart-of-the-day-federal-ed-spending/
and
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/20/AR2008062002276.html
Excerpt:
For many reasons, including better policing and more incarceration, Americans feel, and are, safer. The New York Times has not recently repeated such amusing headlines as “Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling” (1997), “Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops” (1998), “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction” (2000) and “More Inmates, Despite Slight Drop in Crime” (2003).
(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)
