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Michael Barone, the master of voting statistics, gives us lost of food for thought with his column in WSJ today.
In 1950, when I was in kindergarten in Detroit, the city had a population of (rounded off) 1,850,000. Today the latest census estimate for Detroit is 886,000, less than half as many. In 1950, the population of the U.S. was 150 million. Today the latest census estimate for the nation is 301 million, more than twice as many. People in America move around. But not just randomly. … … Demography is destiny. When I was in kindergarten in 1950, Detroit was the nation’s fifth largest metro area, with 3,170,000 people. Now it ranks 11th and is soon to be overtaken by Phoenix, which had 331,000 people in 1950. In the close 1960 election, in which electoral votes were based on the 1950 Census, Michigan cast 20 votes for John Kennedy and Arizona cast four votes for Richard Nixon; New York cast 45 votes for Kennedy and Florida cast 10 votes for Nixon. In 2012, Michigan will likely have 16 electoral votes and Arizona 12; New York will have 29 votes and Florida 29. That’s the kind of political change demographics makes over the years.
A series of good blog posts follows.
Power Line post on Edwards’ poverty program and Jim Lileks.
Captain picks up on Lileks and then gives us a good post on the French election.
Ed Morrissey, who is the captain of Captains Quarters, linked to his post on E. J. Dionne at the blog Heading Right.
May Month’s selection highlights the poverty created by the Soviets.
Under communism, in contrast, industrialization accompanied falling agricultural productivity. Almost all Russians were still family farmers in 1928. Stalin seized their land, launching a deadly famine that killed about 7 million. Agricultural collectivization slashed total food production, but the government drastically increased quotas to feed industrial workers and pay for exports. As Robert Conquest explains, collectivizing agriculture was the opposite of progress:
[A]gricultural production had been drastically reduced, and the peasants driven off by the millions to death and exile, with those who stayed reduced, in their own view, to serfs. But the State now controlled grain production, however reduced in quantity. And collective farming had prevailed.
Stalin’s idea of “economic growth,†in other words, was shifting production from agriculture to other sectors – and mangling the former in the process. Genius it was not. If official statistics had properly counted agricultural output, Stalin’s policies would have correctly been seen as a catastrophe.
While on the subject of the Soviet Union, we have a book review from Saturday’s WSJ. The book is by Pickerhead’s favorite author Vasily Grossman.
No people have been put to the tests of suffering the way Russians have. They have never known anything approaching decent government. Czars or commissars, their leaders have always treated them as if they were a conquered nation. Even now, after the fall of communism, things for them remain impressively dreary. I not long ago asked a formidable expert on Russia whom we were supposed to root for among those contending for power in the country. With only thieves, thugs and former KGB men seeking leadership, he replied, there is no one to root for. Business, in other words, as usual.
Literature has been the only, if of course vastly insufficient, Russian compensation. The barbarity of the nation’s conditions has, somehow, produced a great literature studded with magnificent literary subjects. From Pushkin through Solzhenitsyn — with Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Mandelstam, Babel, Akhmatova, Pasternak and many others in between — great Russian novelists and poets have never been in short supply.
One Russian writer who until only recently slipped through my own net is Vasily Grossman (1904-64), author of a novel called “Life and Fate,” which was written under the direct influence of “War and Peace.” The first I had heard of this book was six or so months ago from my friend Frederic Raphael, the English novelist and screenwriter, a man never given to overstatement. “It’s a masterpiece,” he said, and, upon investigation, this assessment turns out to be precisely correct. …
Thomas Sowell says some scandals are more equal than others.
Mark Steyn reviews a book for WSJ. The book – “Can We Trust the BBC.”
… When a chap writes a book called “Can We Trust the BBC?” I think it’s a safe assumption that the answer is unlikely to be “yes.” So I trust you won’t regard it as a plot spoiler if I reveal that, at the end of his brisk tome, Robin Aitken (a Beeb journalist for 25 years) reveals that, no, you cannot trust the BBC, at least not if you’re of a broadly conservative disposition. On the European Union, on the Iraq war, on Northern Ireland, on Islam, on America, the BBC trends not merely well to the left of the Conservative Party but well to the left of Tony Blair’s New Labour. …
Carpe Diem posts on seasonal gas price increases.
Some environmental folks have gone round the bend. Jim Taranto with details.
Not everyone on the left is nuts. The Nation found a global warming denier, Alexander Cockburn.
In a couple of hundred years historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet’s rapid downward slide. Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church sold indulgences