Bookworm Room

Tweet I’ve now watched two episodes of Aaron Sorkin’s new show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Well, to be completely honest, I sort of watched two episodes, sinced I slept through most of the second. The show has the usual Sorkin trademarks — incredibly rapid-fire dialogue, some of it clever; a camera that likes [...]

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Tweet Mr. Bookworm came home from work yesterday quite excited. A friend had introduced him to one of those interactive online worlds, this one called Second Life. Here is how Second Life describes itself: Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, [...]

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Tweet Al-Zawahri has emerged has the newest spokesman for the “Bush lied, people died” meme.  Frankly, if I were a major party during a time of war, I’d kind of prefer to distance myself from the enemy’s rhetoric and I’d be deeply disturbed to find that the enemy is echoing mine.  In fact, moonbats are [...]

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Tweet Lovely, lovely writing from Jonah Goldberg [updated link that might actually work]: Every serious analysis of the Islamic world today describes a genuine tectonic shift in a vast civilization, an upheaval that cuts across social, religious and demographic lines. This phenomenon dwarfs transient issues such as the Iraq war. Are we to believe that [...]

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Tweet To switch from Malthus to Hobbes, if you want to to be depressed by communities in which life for the average citizen is nasty, short and brutish, read this rundown of late twentieth century death tolls in Muslim nations (sometimes with help from the holier than thou French and Russians).  Sadly, rather than resulting [...]

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Tweet This had me rolling on the floor laughing — NOT! This kind of “humor” is so puerile and obvious, not to mention being divorced from reality and completely illogical, that it staggers me that its creator not only gets paid to write this stuff, but that he has a prominent national forum.

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Tweet Jennifer Loven is a lady with a reputation — one that the Power Line team has carefully documented. I’m sure she comes by her biases honestly– her husband, after all, worked for Bill Clinton and advised John Kerry during his run for office. Coming by your biases honestly, though, is a completely different thing [...]

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Tweet Mike, at Mike’s America, has started a slogan contest for the upcoming elections. Check out what he’s posted, and start adding some comments of your own. As everyone knows, I’m no good at pithy, but I’d love to see what others come up with. This is especially true because I’ve often thought that, at [...]

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Tweet If you don’t get the reference in this great Day by Day cartoon, you have to read Olbermann’s latest defense of Clinton and attack on Bush. Here’s a link to the video and a transcript. Then, read Iowahawk’s satire. The only problem with the satire is that, when you have such an over the [...]

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Tweet I’d heard that people who had more children were more likely to be conservative. Indeed, I think I read in Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything that this is a logical outgrowth of the fact that Dems are pro-choice, are more likely to limit the number of children they have, [...]

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Tweet The reclusive Aga Khan, who is known for his wealth and race horses is, in fact, the spiritual leader of the Ismalis, the world’s second largest Shiite Muslim sect. He spoke to reporters recently. The NPR report is here. I assume there was more than this little bit on NPR, but it is interesting [...]

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Tweet Israel, which is that oddity, a free society in the Middle East, is finally figuring out that a free press is one thing, a corrupt, dishonest press another: The Government Press Office held a meeting with heads of foreign news agencies earlier this month to protest the doctoring of photographs of the recent Lebanon [...]

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Tweet I lost huge amounts of any sympathy I might have had for the Palestinian people when they voted overwhelmingly for Hamas. My sympathy continues low when I read polls about their fervent belief that everything would be wonderful if they could just destroy Israel. I’d therefore be lying, if I said I feel sorry [...]

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Tweet The media’s focus consistently has been on the number of American casualties. Since we’re Americans, and every American death is a tragedy, this is relevant and important information. However, since we’re in a war, it’s useful to know what hits the enemy has been taking. Here, the media has been much less helpful, ignoring [...]

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Tweet I’ve always been a big fan of those few (two, actually) Horatio Alger stories I could get my hands on — Ragged Dick and Mark, the Match Boy. They’re incredibly stilted novels, filled with heavy-handed moral messages, but they still have a wonderful innocent charm, a beautiful sense of a time long gone, and [...]

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Tweet A few Harry Truman quotations: “A President cannot always be popular.” “A president either is constantly on top of events or, if he hesitates, events will soon be on top of him. I never felt that I could let up for a moment. ” “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the [...]

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Tweet I really have to do some paying work, so I’ll just take a minute here to urge you to read Jonah Goldberg’s sterling column about context, torture and moral relativism.

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Tweet I’ve always been fascinated by history. It was only because Bezerkley Marxist teaching sucked the life out the subject that I didn’t get a Ph.D. in history. I’ve therefore had a well furnished mental backdrop about Islam’s continuous incursions against the West, including its final conquest of the Byzantine (Christian) Empire in 1453. That [...]

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Tweet I can’t remember where I read it, but a columnist I respect said that we can’t possibly go to war with Iran because Iran’s strategic location on the Persian Gulf means that it could choke off our oil supply.  Ed Lasky, however, thinks that is a 1970s view of oil needs and supplies, and [...]

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Tweet As part of a much longer article about the Democrat’s foolish faith in the NIE leak, J. Peter Mulhern, writing at American Thinker, offers this nicely phrased analysis about the willing fighters and the potential victims in our society: When you go to war your enemy will enlist people to fight you. You can’t [...]

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Tweet Now that the uproar over Chavez’s speech has ended, those who were at first a little embarrassed to see someone say at the UN what they’ve been saying everywhere else, have regrouped, and started agreeing with and echoing Chavez. The latest hit piece I read struck me as amusing, because, in a heavily joking [...]

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Tweet Here’s the incredible, thoughtful response from Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s President, to a loaded question from AP operative Jennifer Loven, who is married to a Democratic macher and who wouldn’t know an unbiased story if it bit her in the face: QUESTION: Thank you, sir. Even after hearing that one of the major conclusions of [...]

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Tweet Martin Luther King, 1963: And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold [...]

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Tweet I get a weekly email that lists shows in the Bay Area. It’s not a comprehensive list. If I had to analogize, I’d say it’s akin to a list of off-Broadway productions in New York. I found amusing these two shows: World Premiere of The War at Home at NCTC New Conservatory Theatre Center [...]

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Tweet In yesterday’s Best of the Web, there is a photoshopped picture of Osama Bin Laden.  It took me a minute to recognize that it was pasted over an August picture of Fidel Castro that the Cuban government released to prove that he’s still alive.  Am I only the who finds it ironic that the [...]

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