Bookworm Room - Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

On Constitution Day, Leftists assault the Constitution

September 19, 2019 by Wolf Howling Leave a Comment

For most of America, September 17 was “Constitution Day.” For progressives, it was a day to launch a multi-pronged assault on the Constitution.

On September, 17, 1787, the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention signed their finished product, the Constitution, and released it to the states to consider for ratification. It would be a year before eleven states ratified the Constitution, passing it into law, and three years before all thirteen states ratified the Constitution. It would be four years before the states ratified ten of the first twelve proposed Amendments to the Constitution, creating the Bill of Rights. Regardless, it is the 17th of September that we commemorate as “Constitution Day.”

But not the progressive left. To the extent they spent any time at all referencing the Constitution this past week, it was to attack the Constitution. Call it “Un-Constitutional Day,” if you will. The most direct attack was an attack on originalism — the truism that the Constitution must be interpreted as closely as possible to its commonly understood meaning on the day it was signed in 1787. Next, the Left, through its house organ, the New York Times, launched an attack on due process, with Democratic candidates for President calling for Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh’s head. And the last attack, without doubt the most dangerous in the near term, was a renewed call in the New York Times to pack the Supreme Court with progressive ideologues. [Read more…]

Stephen Colbert echoes my claim that socialized medicine is like public school UPDATED

September 18, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

As I did, Stephen Colbert analogizes socialized medicine to public school, but he misses that this analogy reveals how bad socialized medicine will be.

A little background: On Friday, Scott Adams did a podcast in which he inquired whether there had been any critiques of the hybrid healthcare plan some Dem candidates are putting forward, which would see Medicare for All with an opt-out provision. (And I don’t know about you, but I think it’s profoundly un-American when the government graciously gives you permission to buy a product that has always been sold freely on the open market. It’s just as bad as Obamacare’s mandate that one has to buy a product, whether or not one wants it.)

I decided Adams was correct and took it upon myself to address this hybrid idea. You can read my post here, but I’ll summarize briefly. I started by challenging socialized medicine by making the following points: [Read more…]

New York Times proves again that Democrats are the party of poop

September 18, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

The NYTs’ piece about women’s alleged poop paranoia is another weapon in the Left’s ongoing war to shred women’s privacy and get men into women’s restrooms.

I have written several posts over the years about the Democrats being the party of poop, to which I’ve linked at the end of this post. Democrats can also claim the honor of having turned one of America’s most beautiful cities (that would be my hometown of San Francisco) into a literal sh*thole. And just today, the New York Times added another entry, one that’s more nefarious and less unintentionally humorous than people realize:

It is no exaggeration to say that the article is full of fecal matter. I put on gloves, sprayed myself with disinfectant, and glanced through it to discover the Left’s latest fecal fantasy. What I found was a lot of feminist silliness and an underlying message that women are victims buying into the patriarchy if they believe that they should be allowed to use the toilet without an audience, especially a male audience. [Read more…]

How you can tell that Proggies know transgenderism is a con UPDATED

September 17, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Even as Proggies push transgenderism, telling us a trans woman or man is a real woman or man, their own behavior shows they know this is a scam.

Leftists repeat endlessly that those people whom they call “transgender” are really the sex they claim to be, rather than the sex their genes cause them to be. A man named Julia Serano, who thinks he’s a woman, wrote an entire very, very long post entitled Debunking “Trans Women Are Not Women” Arguments to this effect.

I’m cherry-picking here, but the following is my understanding of a few of the arguments Serano makes to establish that he and those like him are women. I consider each nonsensical, but won’t debunk them now, because I have a different goal for this post: [Read more…]

Why Buttigieg’s and Biden’s healthcare plan is a bad thing (No. 17 Bookworm Podcast)

September 16, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Socialized medicine is bad and the “moderate” plan to have a public/private hybrid healthcare system only draws out the agony on the road to single payer.

(If you prefer listening over reading, the companion podcast to this post is embedded below, or you can listen to it at Libsyn or at Apple podcasts. I’m trying to make a go of my podcasting so, if you like the podcasts, please share them with your friends and on social media. Giving my podcast good ratings helps too.)

In Scott Adams’ Friday podcast, he noted that, while he’s aware of many attacks on Bernie’s and Warren’s “Medicare for All” plan (aka socialized medicine in an already debt-burdened society), he hasn’t heard challenges to a slightly different plan coming from others, most notably Biden and Buttigieg. This alternative Democrat healthcare plan promises “free Medicare for everyone who wants it,” while allowing those who prefer private insurance to opt-out and buy their own insurance.

To Adams, this second plan sounded kind of like the free market, with insurers competing with the government for customers. If the government could squeeze a low price out of drug manufacturers, Adams posited, wouldn’t that mean insurance companies could do so too? He hastened to add that he was just thinking out loud, rather than advocating for this “Medicare for All Lite.”

I’m glad Adams was just advocating and not thinking. When you start thinking about it, you realize that this is a recipe for worse care than we have now, plus increasing health care inequality for the American people.

Before going further, I should begin with my two strong biases against socialized medicine, because these biases inform my belief that even a hybrid system is a bad system: My first bias is that I don’t believe medical care is a right. I think it’s a wonderful thing. I’m tremendously grateful I live in modern times because I didn’t die from a massive cyst in my 20s or during childbirth. I’m also not consigned to a wheelchair or in perpetual pain from joint problems, nor am I rendered dysfunctional by chronic migraine syndrome, nor am I legally blind. Modern medicine has been very good to me. [Read more…]

The Iran Question & The Lindsey Graham Answer

September 15, 2019 by Wolf Howling Leave a Comment

What is Iran hoping to accomplish with the attack on Saudi oil facilities? And what should be the response?

The “mad mullahs” of Iran are the single most destabilizing influence in the Middle East and Iran is the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism. But while the mad mullahs have, since the 1979 Revolution, always been hyper-aggressive, pushing murder, mayhem and kidnapping to the very limit of what they can get away with on the international stage, what the mad mullahs haven’t been, until now at least, is suicidal. Did that just change with an attack on one of the world’s largest oil refineries?

In brief, Saudi Arabia runs the world’s largest oil processing facility at Abqaiq, which is responsible for 5% of the world’s oil and gas supplies. On Saturday, either Iran or an Iranian proxy attached it, using either drones or missiles. The fires have since been put out but the damage remains to be fully assessed. This is, any way you look at it, a profound escalation of the war in the Middle East, one that directly threatens the global economy. [Read more…]

No. 16 Bookworm Podcast: With Trump, stop listening and start paying attention (BUMPED)

September 14, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

If listening to Trump irks you, stop listening and start focusing on his accomplishments. Next, do the same for the Dem candidates. Then vote for Trump.

When I’m bored, I watch video compilations showing how to do things better. Each video has 20-30 clips showing clever tricks for doing anything better (cleaning, packing, cooking, etc.). The videos are “show and tell,” without narration, but with a music soundtrack. These soundtracks are always horrible.

This video, viewed over 270,000,000 times, shows both the useful information and the horrible music:

The bad music doesn’t make me avoid the content. Instead, I mute the music.

There’s a point to his seemingly irrelevant anecdote: When NeverTrumpers start wittering on about about Trump’s latest bombastic tweet or speech, or another act of boastful puffery, I want to tell them to do as I do with my life-hacking videos: Turn off the sound and just focus on the content — the content, in this case, being his achievements in office.

It occurred to me that this would be an interesting test to apply as well to the top Democrat candidates, each of whom functions at three different levels: (1) Promises to the base; (2) personal style; and (3) actual accomplishments. [Read more…]

Operation Encore: Veterans making beautiful music together

September 14, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

I wish that Operation Encore, a group that helps veterans make music, had been around in my Dad’s time, for I think it would have made him happy.

Image credit: Screen grab from Operation Encore donor page

A friend of mine recently introduced me to a very creative – and I mean that word literally – a very creative outreach program for veterans. It’s called Operation Encore. I could make a total hash trying to explain the concept to you, but why would I do that when Operation Encore has a perfectly good description of its purpose?

Operation Encore is a non-profit veterans organization that provides opportunities for veteran and active duty singer-songwriters and musicians to take their music to the next level through artist development, professional recording, and industry-focused educational services. We seek out talent from across the military and veteran communities to produce and highlight their original music and provide opportunities to showcase their talents and advance their careers. OE has been featured on numerous print, television, and radio media outlets and has played live shows across the country and overseas. As we advance the careers of our artists, we also help bridge the gap between the public perception of veterans and reality by using the powerful medium of their original music.

[Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 9/13/19 — the post-Democratic debate illustrated edition

September 13, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

I had hoped to have a mountain of Democratic debate posters, but I only have a hill’s worth. It’s all good, though, and there’s other good commentary too.

[Read more…]

Democrats’ Perfectly Clear Formulaic Non-Answer

September 13, 2019 by Wolf Howling Leave a Comment

When you hear a Democrat presidential candidate say “Let me make this perfectly clear” . . . you are about to hear a lie at worst, a non-answer at best.

Elizabeth Warren in particular, but several of the proggies on stage last night, all exhibited the same verbal tic. When they were about to lie by omission or refuse to answer a question, they began their response with some variant of “Let me make this perfectly clear . . .” What followed was clearly NOT an answer to whatever question was asked. The formula was to follow “Let me make this perfectly clear” with some sort of re-direction — often several meaningless personal anecdotes — then the big, flourishing, holier-than-evil-conservatives and bad-orange-man finish.

Exhibit one: Sitting Bull, when asked whether she will admit her health care plan will drive up middle class taxes:

WARREN: So, let’s be clear about health care. And let’s actually start where [the] vice president did. We all owe a huge debt to President Obama, who fundamentally transformed health care in America and committed this country to health care for every human being.

(APPLAUSE)

And now the question is, how best can we improve on it? And I believe the best way we can do that is we make sure that everybody gets covered by health care at the lowest possible cost. How do we pay for it? We pay for it, those at the very top, the richest individuals and the biggest corporations, are going to pay more. And middle-class families are going to pay less. That’s how this is going to work.

[Read more…]

The New & . . . Well, NEW Progressive Constitution

September 11, 2019 by Wolf Howling Leave a Comment

With Rep. Clyburn admitting that the proggies don’t like our Constitution as is, it’s time to take a look at what they want in a constitution.

Let’s face it. Progressives have gone a long way to making our Constitution a dead letter already. But as Rep. Clyburn makes clear in the video below, they are not yet wholly satisfied with the result. Work remains to be done.

What progressives want is nothing more than permanent power. That would be impossible to accomplish were they starting from scratch, but clearly they aren’t. A lot of the most important groundwork has already been laid over the past century. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at the state of our Constitution today, how it has already been altered, and how it would look once the proggies are done rewriting it. [Read more…]

September 11, 2001: The day the world turned upside down

September 11, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

On September 11, terrorists not only killed 2,996 Americans, they recreated America, turning our world permanently upside down.

When the British surrendered at Yorktown, myth long held that that the assembled British fifes and drums played a popular song called The World Turned Upside Down:

If buttercups buzz’d after the bee,
If boats were on land, churches on sea,
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows,
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse,
If the mamas sold their babies
To the gypsies for half a crown;
If summer were spring and the other way round,
Then all the world would be upside down.

Although it’s probable that this never happened, it made sense: The mightiest country in the world suffered defeat at the hands of its own rag-tag revolutionaries. The world was upside down, indeed!

We Americans got a renewed taste of the world turning upside down on September 11, 2001, although this time we weren’t on the victorious end of that turning wheel. For us, it was a break-point, or hinge point, in history . . . and unlike our Revolutionary War, nothing good came out of it.

Over the years, I’ve written repeatedly published the memorial posts I wrote for Lt. Brian Ahearn, Lauren Catuzzi, and Rick Rescorla. After all these years of reading my own words, in addition to actually knowing Lauren, I sometimes confuse myself and believe, for just a moment, that I knew Brian Ahearn and Rick Rescorla as well. I didn’t, of course, but I wish I had. [Read more…]

Andrew Johnson, Democrat, set the stage for today’s racial strife

September 9, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Democrat Andrew Johnson was one of America’s worst presidents, for he set the stage for the racial strife that today’s Democrats encourage and exploit.

Yesterday afternoon, I joined a friend for a dog walking expedition. As we were walking along, we talked about the racial divisions the Left has stoked in America.

“This is all Andrew Johnson’s fault,” I said.

“Wah?” asked my companion.

“Yeah, Andrew Johnson. The moment that Johnson, a Democrat, was sworn in as president after Lincoln’s assassination, he set about undoing the racial component of Reconstruction. The military hung onto its strength in the South, which is why there are so many military bases still operating there. Politically, though, Johnson and his administration backed away from every effort to reform Southern culture. This meant that the losers in the war got to continue their previous behavior of denying blacks all civil rights. In other words, Johnson enabled the defeated Southerners to reduce blacks to a perfect simulacrum of slavery, only this was arguably even worse than actual slavery, for it denied blacks the food and shelter (no matter how meager) that slave owners once provided, while adding in chronic racial terrorism. [Read more…]

No. 15 Bookworm Podcast — the consenting chicken edition

September 8, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

I’m not normally focused on or inspired by the thought of chicken sex, but a video out of Spain about roosters raping hens changed all that.

A friend and I play a game. He sends me headlines and asks me to guess whether they’re real headlines about actual events or satirical headlines from sites such as the Babylon Bee. Showing both how crazy the Left has become and just how darn good the Babylon Bee is, I’m wrong at least half the time.

This post/podcast is about the most recent headline my friend showed me: “Vegan activists separate chickens from cockerels on Spanish farm ‘so the hens aren’t raped’ because they do not give ‘consent’ in video released by ‘anti-specist [sic], transfeminist’ group.”

“Definitely Babylon Bee,” I said.

“Nope,” he replied. “It’s from the Daily Mail. It’s real.”

According to the Daily Mail, a Catalanian Spanish-language vegan group called Almas Veganas (translated as Vegan Souls) released the video. But I do the group an injustice. It’s not just about veganism. Instead, its members are also “anti-speciesist” and “transfeminist.”

If you’re not in the know, anti-speciesist means that they believe humans are wrong to rank animals in a hierarchy, insisting instead that all animals, including humans, are created equal. To be transfeminist means believing that women’s liberation must encompass liberating transgender women (i.e., men who believe they’re women). [Read more…]

The new world order has Karl Marx rolling in his grave

September 7, 2019 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Karl Marx heralded a new world order made up of a brotherhood of man. He would be shocked and dismayed to see which brotherhood sits atop this new world.

I spent time on the phone today with a British friend who voted for Brexit and who is heartbroken and angry about the way in which Parliament has worked assiduously to undercut the will of the people. I pointed to Daniel Hannan’s article promising the MPs are beclowning themselves and that Brexit will happen, but she doesn’t believe it.

My friend’s anger goes far beyond the fact that Britain is still anchored to the EU. What infuriates her is that Parliament has proven that she no longer lives in a representative democracy. She can go to her polling place and cast a vote, but once her MP walks across the threshold of the Parliament building, his first allegiance is to the EU’s and Britain’s bureaucracies. In other words, voters have no say in their own governance. [Read more…]