-
Divesting From Iran
Tweet Share on Facebook August 30, 2007 Comment (2)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:
-
Blacks and Law School Discrimination
Tweet Share on Facebook August 29, 2007 Comment (16)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.
-
Our First Revolution
Tweet Share on Facebook August 27, 2007 CommentHere 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:
-
Michael Vick, a True Virginian
Tweet Share on Facebook August 22, 2007 Comment (1)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?
-
They Don't Make Journalists Like This Anymore
Tweet Share on Facebook August 20, 2007 CommentThe 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.
-
The Iowa GOP Straw Poll
Tweet Share on Facebook August 13, 2007 CommentCorrected 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.
Mitt Romney 4,516 32% Mike Huckabee 2,587 18% Sam Brownback 2,192 15% Tom Tancredo 1,961 14% Ron Paul 1,305 9% Tommy Thompson 1,039 7% Fred Thompson 203 1% Rudy Giuliani 183 1% Duncan Hunter 174 1% John McCain 101 1% John Cox 41 0% Total votes 14,302 I'll start off with some comments on the finish of each of the candidates.
-
Is the Surge Working? (continued)
Tweet Share on Facebook August 9, 2007 CommentThe 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.
-
The Bridge Collapse (continued)
Tweet Share on Facebook August 9, 2007 CommentThe New York Times reports that an engineering firm hired by the Minnesota Department of Transportation to investigate the I-35W bridge collapse has identified a design defect. I'm not sure I understand the article, either because of my inadequate understanding of engineering or because it's confusingly written, or both; but here are some extracts:
-
A Turn in Opinion?
Tweet Share on Facebook August 7, 2007 CommentIn my Creators Syndicate column this week, I argued that we may be seeing a turn in opinion on Iraq. I singled out the "A War We Just Might Win" opinion article by Brookings Institution scholars Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack and cited some CBS/New York Times poll numbers.
-
Bridge Inspection and Testing
Tweet Share on Facebook August 6, 2007 Comment (4)Ed Morrissey had two interesting posts over the weekend on bridges, first on inspection techniques and next on nondestructive testing. It appears that inspecting bridges is as much an art as a science. You can’t tear down a bridge to test it; you have to make inferences from observations that are in some cases not at all metric. A bridge inspector has to search for signs that would indicate, under current engineering knowledge and theory, that a bridge is in danger of collapse.
