• Well, in the Coast Guard the officers stay nice and dry on land, while the enlisted people head out to sea in all sorts of weather.


• In the Army, the officers stand behind the troops and shout, "Attack!"


• In the Navy, the officers stand on the bridge and steer the ship into action.


• In the Marine Corps, the officers stand in front of the troops and shout, "Attack!"


• And in the Air Force? Well, the officers go off to battle in their pretty flight suits, flying their expensive toys, while the enlisted people head for the club for a long one.

SAFIRE: On Saturday night, I stuffed myself on lamb chops and potato pancakes at a holiday party at the home of Don and Joyce Rumsfeld.

As a discussion of US politics grows longer, the probability of a liberal or progressive being called a 'Bush-Hater' approaches one. Once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever called someone a Bush Hater has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.

after adjusting for inflation and quality changes, computers contributed over half of the economy's growth in the second quarter. But, by another measure, computers accounted for less than a tenth of it...

In actual dollars, investment in computers edged up by a meager $6.7 billion to an annualized $93.5 billion in the second quarter.

The original report for the second quarter, by contrast, showed in inflation-adjusted terms that same category of investment surged by $35.8 billion to $354.9 billion, or close to half of the growth in GDP.

As the BEA noted in a recent article, the use of 1996 dollars significantly overstates the impact of computers on the economy "during the last half of the 1990s when computers experienced explosive growth and during the second and third quarters of 2003, when computer sales accelerated."

• Bush has significantly less support from Democrats than Ronald Reagan did. Even Bill Clinton, hated by so many Republicans, had more friends among members of the opposition party. Without greater support among Democrats, Bush cannot win in a landslide.


• It's very hard to pull off a landslide when you're not likely to win three of the five largest states. In 2000, Bush wasn't even competitive in California, New York or Illinois. He lost all three states by more than 12 percent. That's 109 electoral votes in just those states.


• Finally, nearly every national poll shows the country is more polarized than it has been in decades. As in 2000, we're still very much a 50-50 nation. (See the forthcoming book, The Two Americas by pollster Stan Greenberg.) Indeed, it's been nearly 16 years since any presidential candidate even won a majority of the vote. A blowout of 1972 or 1984 proportions would require an extraordinary set of circumstances that are not present today.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor more or less completed her ideological journey toward judicial activism yesterday when she cast the deciding vote upholding the McCain-Feingold restrictions on campaign speech... And, of course, Ms. O'Connor wrote the court's opinion this year upholding the use of race in university admissions in the University of Michigan case. (emphasis added)