Law prof: Believe the Facts, Not Necessarily the Women

“Believe the women” may be an oft-recited mantra, but Glenn Harlan Reynolds at USA Today cites two celebrated cases that disproved it. In the Duke lacrosse case, “the prosecutor who believed the woman in question wound up losing his law license.” In the University of Virginia case, “Rolling Stone wound up facing millions in damages.” In both cases, those who raised questions were shamed as rape-enablers. But “a story is true or not based on its facts, not on who the accuser, or the accused, happens to be.” Now Keith Ellison, running for Minnesota attorney general, stands accused by a former girlfriend of domestic abuse (he claims she’s lying) and only 5 percent of state Democrats believe her. Says Reynolds: “Believe the women? Not so much.”

Border watch: Surprising Stats on Undocumenteds

Conservative: GOP Needs To Start Acting Like a Majority

The daily continuation of the “twisted, never-ending saga” of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process has Kimberly Ross at the Washington Examiner urging Senate Republicans to “act like the majority party.” Meaning GOP leaders should “usher the way through the swamp” and stop “entertaining claims and treating the opposition with patience it does not deserve.” If they don’t act now, she warns, “they’ll irreparably damage themselves ahead of the approaching midterms and well into the foreseeable future.” Because the Democrats are in complete control — and they couldn’t care less “how the current intentional circus may derail a man’s life.” They “welcome claims from anyone so long as they cast doubt on Kavanaugh.” Yet “their more numerous opponents are letting them get away with it.”

Numbers cruncher: New York’s Wasted Decade

Ten years after the collapse of Lehman Bros. ushered in the 2008 financial crisis, the city’s economy has boomed. But City Journal’s Nicole Gelinas laments that New York “has not taken advantage of its prosperity by investing enough capital in critical physical infrastructure to support future economic growth.” Because while increased city spending went to “higher worker salaries and wages for a rapidly expanding public-sector workforce,” it “sure didn’t go to better urban infrastructure.” Nor, she adds, “have the state and city used their salad days for strategic planning of new infrastructure.” And “if this is how our critical infrastructure performs at what may be the tail end of an economic expansion, how will it fare in a bust?”

Border watch: Surprising Stats on Undocumenteds

National Review’s Mairead McArdle reports that a new Yale School of Management study has concluded “that the population of undocumented immigrants in the US is close to double the generally accepted estimate.” According to one of the study’s authors, “there’s a number that everybody quotes, but when you actually dig down and say, ‘What is it based on?’ you find it’s based on one very specific survey and possibly an approach that has some difficulties.” Using operational data such as deportations and visa overstays as well as demographic data, the authors concluded that the undocumented population, widely believed to be 11.3 million, “may be more than 22 million.”

Culture critic: Social Media’s Become Like Boring TV

So much for social media being “the vanguard of digital life,” says James Poulos at The Federalist. Increasingly, those platforms are announcing that they’re pivoting to video, making them “more old media — specifically, television — than new.” Buzzfeed, for example, recently announced it would move away from podcasts to a TV-style production model. But “it’s more than social news that’s collapsing back into television,” suggests Poulos. “It’s social media as a whole.” Worse: “Like TV, social media is a platform for ads. Like TV, social media promises entertainment and delivers enervation. Like TV, there are a zillion channels on social media, and all too often, nothing’s on. Also like TV, social media is fundamentally about what Neil Postman said it was about in his 1985 bestseller ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death.’ ”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann