We Americans like to believe that we have long life expectancies compared to the rest of the world.  After all, most of us are sure that we have the best health care in the world and we do not want for food. 

Confounding our expectations, it turns out that we don't do very well on life expectancy when compared to other countries - according to our government's own figures, we are only 48th in the world.  47 other countries have longer life expectancies than does the US (including almost all "developed" nations).  (Note that we only recently pulled ahead of Cuba, which is now 55th.)

Foul Rumsfeld's just announced a possible 5% US troop reduction in Iraq.  Being a numbers guy, this got me thinking: is this really a reduction, or just another game with numbers in order to placate The People?

A quick Google found this article from January 12, 2005.  Two interesting points can be seen:

1. At that time we had just increased the number of troops to 150,000 ahead of of the January 30 elections.  For last week's elections, we beefed up to 160,000 troops.  If the local Iraqi forces are actually getting more capable, then why would we need an extra 10,000 of our people this time?  Seems to me that either the situation is getting worse, or the Iraqi forces are getting less capable - in any case, the actual numbers are not a hopeful trend.

Courtesy of my good friends at NewsBusters, I see that the crack team of Groseclose and Milyo are once again touting their pretend science project that purports to identify and measure Liberal bias in the news media.  Basically, the paper claims to scientifically prove that The Drudge Report is neutral, Fox and the Washington Post are to the Right, and everything else is to the Left.

I was first introduced to this work roughly a year ago, when I was sent a link to their paper by a Right-leaning friend of mine.  I actually took the time to read the 29 pages in the hope that I might learn something - instead, it simply confirmed my hypothesis that the Right is science-challenged.

I am constantly amazed (and annoyed) when the Right claims that the US has been hijacked by the Left over the past few decades.  This is utter nonsense - the actual evidence indicates that we've moved far, far to the Right.

Consider the case of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States (1953-1961), Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, and a Republican.  Funny thing is, by today's standards, Ike would be a flaming liberal, to the Left of all recent serious contenders for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.