Entries for October 2006

Here's an interesting report from the Heritage Foundation on who is enlisting in the military. It uses census and other data to identify the origins of recruits in addition to statistics the military provides. Here's the conclusion:

A couple of polls suggest shifts in the tide in House races—shifts in both directions.

I was off the campaign trail for an interview late last week with Office of Management and Budget Director Rob Portman on the budget. He has good news and bad news. The good news is that the budget deficit has gone down far more than any model has predicted and seems headed to go down even further. The bad news is that in the longer term, we face a "train wreck" with rising spending on entitlements–Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

This afternoon I had the privilege of being one of eight columnists interviewing George W. Bush in the Oval Office. The others were Tony Blankley of the Washington Times, Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal, Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, Lawrence Kudlow of CNBC, Kathleen Parker of the Orlando Sentinel, Mark Steyn of the Chicago Sun-Times, and Byron York of National Review–all conservatives of various stripes. Like many others who have been with Bush in the Oval Office, I have found him to be much more articulate and forceful in that setting than he often is in press conferences or in taking questions from traveling reporters. The interview was on the record, so we are posting MP3 audio recordings of the whole hour. I think you'll find it compelling listening. It's the closest thing many people will get to spending an hour or so in the Oval Office with the 43rd president. We've also posted the full text transcript.

People are always asking me, Which party is going to win the House elections? The answer is, I don't know. We have very many more publicly released polls than we used to have, and therefore more basis for making estimates. But they're still just estimates, subject to error. I've had a pretty good, but far from perfect, record of predicting election results in the past.

Where did that selective leak of the National Intelligence Estimate come from? Well, it's beginning to look like it came from a Democratic staffer on the House Intelligence Committee.

Today the Census Bureau reported that there are now 300 million people in the United States. The number now, as I clicked onto the Census website, is 300,000,492. That is, by the way, 4.58 percent of estimated world population. We're more like 5 percent than 4 percent of the world now. One out of every 22 people in the world lives in the United States.