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Who's in the Military?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 31, 2006 Comment (16)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:
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Shifts in the Tide
Tweet Share on Facebook October 30, 2006 CommentA couple of polls suggest shifts in the tide in House races—shifts in both directions.
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A Dose of Policy
Tweet Share on Facebook October 30, 2006 Comment (101)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.
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An Interview With President Bush
Tweet Share on Facebook October 25, 2006 CommentThis 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.
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The House Elections
Tweet Share on Facebook October 24, 2006 Comment (108)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.
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That NIE Leak Last Month
Tweet Share on Facebook October 20, 2006 Comment (18)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.
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300 Million
Tweet Share on Facebook October 17, 2006 Comment (32)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.
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Monday Musings
Tweet Share on Facebook October 16, 2006 CommentStart with the brilliant blog post on our most underestimated president, Ulysses S. Grant, from chicagoboyz's Lexington Green.
Here's some more discussion of the Iraqi oil trust proposal, which I (and, apparently, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton) have been pushing for three years. Here is a list of possible objections to the idea by economist Megan McArdle. And some good answers from Ilya Solmin of the Volokh Conspiracy. It seems to me that the problems of determining who's eligible and of setting up a reliable banking system should be readily solvable. And I don't think a payment in the magnitude of $500per person per year is going to discourage many people from working. More likely, many will use it and the guarantee of similar cash flow in the future as capital to set up businesses.
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What Is Kim Jong Il Up To?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 13, 2006 Comment (17)I have no answer to that question. But here are a couple of interesting articles that address it. Thomas Lifson of the American Thinker blog thinks Kim Jong Il is in desperate straits, threatened with a rebellion by the North Korean military. He argues that trade sanctions, like those Japan just announced, will push the military to oust Kim. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute takes a more somber view. He sees the North Korean regime as "revisionist":
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Mark Warner Bows Out
Tweet Share on Facebook October 12, 2006 CommentMark Warner announced this morning that he's not running for president. As Prince Metternich asked when informed that the Russian ambassador had suddenly dropped dead, "What can have been his motive?" I suppose it was a calculation that he was just not going to overtake Hillary Rodham Clinton. And that the time, money, and effort required over the next 27 months or so were just not worth it. Warner has a fortune, made after he won a cellphone lottery, but not, I think, a big enough fortune to finance a presidential campaign.
