Bookworm Room

Tweet My father was a very angry man. At whichever job he had, he was pretty darn certain that management was out to get him. At stores, he knew he was being cheated. My mother always attributed this anger, not to the poverty and dislocation of his youth (placed in an orphanage at 5, refugee [...]

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Tweet I recall hearing a guest on talk radio (I forget which show) saying that a recession is defined by very specific economic indicators — and that, despite the loose use of the word “recession” by uninformed media types, those economic indicators were not present. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given that the economy is growing, [...]

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Tweet Here is a message from the NRA: Anti-gun hysteria has reached a fever pitch in the Golden State. The California Assembly is considering a bill (Assembly Bill 2062) this session that, if passed, will have dire consequences for California’s law-abiding gun owners. AB2062 is scheduled to be heard on Wednesday, May 7 in the [...]

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Tweet At Paragraph Farmer, Patrick has taken apart a liberal newspaper’s endorsement for Barack Obama, exposing just a few of the logical fallacies and factual errors it contains.  Patrick’s post actually makes for very scary reading, because this is not just one little editorial board but is, instead, thinking representative of a large part of [...]

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Tweet The most un-rev Jeremiah Wright elaborated today on his various statements during an appearance at the National Press Club. What he had to say was most enlightening since, when he wasn’t prevaricating or deflecting a point with self-deprecating humor, he sounded pretty ugly. Here are a few things that caught my attention: MODERATOR: What [...]

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Tweet The sign at the baseball game said “Mike’s Lemonade $7.00.” So, when Christopher Ratt asked his 7 year old son what drink he’d like, and the boy said Lemonade, Ratt ponied up the money. It was only later in the game that a security guard noticed the bottle in the boy’s hand and asked [...]

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Tweet Sorry for the silence. I get my internet through the same company that gives us our cable TV. Last week, Mr. Bookworm ordered High Definition service, which requires a new box. The box never came, but they disconnected us from Turner Classic Movies, which is really the only channel I ever really watch. Yesterday [...]

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Tweet I got pretty nauseous watching this one.  The villagers insist that no babies were harmed in the making of this bizarre religious ritual, but the mere fact that these villagers doing the throwing must themselves have been thrown as infants is itself a good indication that it causes brain damage.  Let me just say [...]

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Tweet I got this wonderful Mama Cass song stuck in my head after hearing it on the radio Saturday.  Perhaps if I pass it to your brain, it will leave mine.  It’s a great song, but there’s only so much musical perseveration one can take:

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Tweet The New York Times again gave a forum to Jimmy Carter. This time Carter defends his immoral, illegal decision to consort with terrorists, something that would be objectionable if the ordinary private citizen were to do it, but that rises to outrageous levels of indecency when a former President does the same thing. Carter’s [...]

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Tweet San Francisco is a very crowded little city. Although it covers only about seven 49 square miles (it’s a little square about 7 miles on each side), it’s the fourth most populous City in California, with almost 800,000 people crammed into that little space. Interestingly, though, San Francisco did not end up going the [...]

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Tweet Marin is about as liberal a community as one can possibly find.  That means that the analyst for the local political newspaper is a liberal too.  Right now, he’s a very depressed liberal, since he’s absolutely certain that the Democrats are imploding, leading to the inevitability of a McCain victory: Arizona Sen. McCain will [...]

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Tweet Honest to God, I really do wonder sometimes if the garden-variety fusion betwen Islamic and Arabic culture is salvageable: A teenage Iraqi girl who fell in love with a British soldier when he was in Basra was murdered by her father in an “honour killing”, it was revealed today. Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, was suffocated [...]

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Tweet ….but you wouldn’t listen.  You had to go ahead and do it anyway, and only now, when things are getting serious, are you figuring it out yourself.  These are words parents say to teenagers, and conservatives say to liberals.  In teenage land, you end up with pregnancies, STDs, and substance abuse.  In liberal land, [...]

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Tweet I already knew that UC Berkeley was going to host a “scholarly” conference aimed at reconstructing Islamophobia. The promotional material, complete with the names of radical Islamist speakers, made it pretty clear that the conference’s focus would be on whitewashing Islam, as opposed to addressing a canker in one of the world’s major religions. [...]

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Tweet I didn’t know about it, but in 1945, a celebrated dogfight occurred over Germany, with an American pilot, James Finnegan, shooting down Germany’s top ace, Gen. Adolf Galland.  Here’s what happened in the air 63 years ago: In an interview Mr. Finnegan gave 12 years ago for a Web site devoted to Galland’s career [...]

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Tweet WARNING: British bloggers — do not write about this story. In England, a convoluted case played out in which the government froze funds in British banks that were to be sent to Al Qaeda, the funds’ owners challenged that action, and the court held against the government. As a result of this successful court [...]

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Tweet Blech.

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Tweet It’s always disheartening when some liberal political body, long after conservative tocsins have been ringing a frantic warning, suddenly — and too late — realizes that the warning was in fact valid. For example, conservatives kept saying that biofuels would cause food shortages, a thought liberals pooh-poohed. Now that there are actual food shortages, [...]

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Tweet You all know Aesop’s class tale of the race between the tortoise and the hare: At the starting gate, the hare picks up so much speed that it soon vanishes completely, while the tortoise plods on behind. Within sight of the finish line, however, when the hare looks backwards and realizes that the tortoise [...]

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Tweet Greenies are always encouraging people to abandon their cars and opt for alternative, group transportation, such as buses, trains, carpools, etc.  In the San Francisco Bay Area, one of those alternative forms of transportation is the ferry. Up in Marin, if they use the ferry, drivers can avoid endless traffic jams over the Golden [...]

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Tweet I have been an Ella Fitzgerald fan for decades. To my mind, there are few pleasures greater than hearing Ella sing one of the classics from the heyday of American popular music. I was therefore delighted to see the graceful homage the guys at Power Line paid to her today, the anniversary of her [...]

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Tweet Sadly, the Watcher of Weasels suffered some sort of catastrophic technical failure and was unable to fulfill the ordinary Watcher functions this week. At Joshuapundit, however, Freedom Fighter has kindly taken the time to assemble links to the articles the Council Members would have voted on, had there been a vote, so you can [...]

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Tweet In America, we think of historical Europe as a place were voiceless mastered were ruled by high-handed aristocrats. We assume that those days are over, wiped away by war, revolution, and the simple passage of time. The European Union, however, periodically provides timely reminders that Europe is still ruled by high-handed authoritarian figures who [...]

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Tweet Please study the above photo very carefully. Doesn’t that look like a nice room? You can see that it’s fairly spacious and well fitted out, with nice colors, lots of light, and pretty curtains? I bet a lot of dorm students are looking at it enviously, as are a lot of kids who are [...]

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