Entries for August 2007

A couple of items in the nature of an update on my Creators Syndicate column on the widespread move by state governments to divest from companies that do business in Iran. Emanuel Lenain, the press counselor at the French Embassy, E-mailed me with a statement claiming that French investment in Iran is decreasing. Let me just present it without checking on its accuracy:

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has issued a report on racial preferences in law schools; the link above has links to the report and some excellent commentary. Drawing on the work of UCLA Prof. Richard Sander, it finds that racial preferences for blacks actually reduce the number of blacks who become lawyers. How? Well, start off with the fact that a relatively small percentage of blacks have high LSAT scores. Those scores turn out to be highly predictive of success at becoming a lawyer. The most selective law schools, employing racial preferences, take care to admit something like 5 to 10 percent of black applicants, in an attempt to approximate in their student body the black proportion of the population (which is 12 percent). That means that most black law students at that school come in with significantly lower LSAT scores than nonblack students.

Here is a very nice review of my book Our First Revolution, by Paul Mirengoff of Power Line, plus a link to a radio interview of me by Power Line's John Hinderaker. Thanks, Paul and John, for the review and interview, and for your excellent blogging in Power Line.

Here is my Creators Syndicate column for this week, entitled "Divest Iran."

Hispanics and Generations

I was fooling around with some demographic statistics last night and started with the following question: What percentage of the 18-and-under population is Hispanic? Table 15 from the Statistical Abstract of the United States gives the estimated total population and subdivision by race and Hispanic status by age for 2005. Aggregating the statistics, I found the following, with populations in thousands:

I don't follow professional football, so I don't know much more about Michael Vick than what I have read in the stories about his plea of guilty to federal charges of dogfighting. It's astonishing and saddening that a man would risk his $130 million football contract to engage in such behavior, which seems barbaric to almost all of us. Where did he even get the idea of doing this?

The Telegraph website has put together an excellent tribute to W. F. Deedes, who died last week at 94 after a career in journalism that began in 1931 and continued through a column on Darfur published August 3. Deedes, whom I wrote about previously in this blog, covered Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and was evidently the inspiration for the central character Boot in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, in my opinion the best novel about journalism ever written. Deedes started off his career at a time when reporters abroad communicated to the home desk by cryptic telegrams, which Waugh brilliantly spoofs. The Telegraph ' s tribute, on its website, contains quick links to all sorts of interesting articles new and old.

KARL ROVE

My U.S. News column this week is an assessment of Karl Rove's work on politics and public policy.

Corrected 8/14/07. Mike Huckabee was left off of the Iowa straw poll results when a previous version of the story was posted.

You've undoubtedly already heard the results of the Ames, Iowa, Republican straw poll. The numbers are as follows.

I'll start off with some comments on the finish of each of the candidates.

The Associated Press quotes Sen. Dick Durbin as saying in Baghdad that American-led forces were "making some measurable progress, but it's slow going." And not enough to suit Durbin. "As our troops show some progress toward security, the government of this nation is moving in the opposite direction. This is really unsustainable with the American people," Durbin said in an interview with National Public Radio. Durbin is a hyperpartisan Democrat, as one might expect of a party whip in the Senate. And he seems to be preparing to support a withdrawal resolution or amendment after Gen. David Petraeus reports in mid-September. But it's significant that he feels the need to concede that the military is making progress and that the surge, at least to some extent, is working, as more Americans seem to believe.