Entries for December 28, 2006

The Census Bureau has issued its population estimates for the states for July 1, 2006, and they make for interesting reading. Over the decade, 2000-06, growth has been much higher in the West (9.7 percent) and the South (8.8 percent) than in the Midwest (2.8 percent) and the East (2.1 percent). In 2000 there were more people in the Midwest than in the West; in 2006 it was the other way around. And in 2006 there were more than twice as many people in the South as in the East. The regional breakdown looks like this, with populations rounded off to the nearest thousand, and with tenths of a percentage indicated:

The invaluable Daniel Pipes is suspending his column for three months while he teaches at Pepperdine University in Malibu, but his final column of the year, "The West Could Lose," is very much worth reading. I wish I had paid more attention to Daniel, and also to Steven Emerson, before September 11, for they were two prophets whose words went unheeded. I'm temperamentally an optimist; Daniel is temperamentally a pessimist, and as a scholar fluent in Arabic and with a deep knowledge of Islam, he finds plenty to be pessimistic about.

Gerald Ford, 38th president of the United States, has died at age 93. He lived longer than any other American president, just a few months longer than Ronald Reagan. The longest-living previous presidents were John Adams and Herbert Hoover, who both died at 90. Hoover lived for 31 years after leaving office, Ford for 29 years. Hoover and Ford were both defeated by Democrats, but they responded very differently. Hoover bitterly opposed Franklin Roosevelt; Ford became friends with Jimmy Carter. Ford served longer in Congress than any other president: 25 years (it would be 26 years if you counted his year's service as vice president, in which capacity he was president of the Senate, but by the same token that would mean that Lyndon Johnson served 27 years). He was House minority leader from 1965 until he was confirmed as vice president in 1973.