Bookworm Room

Tweet The liberal press and “economists” such as Paul Krugman are so excited:  Obama is looking to FDR for guidance.  Before Obama gets too carried away with that notion, conservatives should send him copies of Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man : a New History of the Great Depression, in which she compellingly explains how FDR’s [...]

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Tweet The very first time I met Sol Shankman, at my wedding, many years ago, he told me that he’d walked the length of the California coast.  I didn’t realize that this wasn’t the only walking he’d done.  Nor did I know, when I saw him a few years ago for his 90th birthday, that [...]

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Tweet (It will give you a sense of just how busy my weekend was that it took me two days to do this one post!) A very popular bumper sticker in Marin since 2003 is one that has the phrase “Endless War” in blue type, with the “less” then crossed out with a red line, [...]

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Tweet I was reading Powerline the other day and discovered that I’m not the only one to have noticed that when Obama signals that he’s following precisely in Bush’s footsteps, whether making policy or appointing people, the same decisions that were derided as evil or stupid under Bush’s aegis are hailed as wise, temperate and [...]

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Tweet I’m tempted to blog about the horrors in Mumbai, but I think, other than sending my heartfelt prayers to the victims and their families, I’ll concentrate on what this day means in America: We live in a land of unprecedented wealth and freedom, and I am blessed to share in it.  I am deeply [...]

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Tweet If I get a few free minutes today, I know what I’ll be reading, from the Watcher’s Council: Council Submissions Mere Rhetoric – Obama’s Top NSA And CIA Picks: Harsh On Israel, Sympathetic To Iran And Hezbollah Soccer Dad – Well, duh The Colossus of Rhodey – Culture of Whine (a rant) The Glittering [...]

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Tweet Remember how Toni Morrison said Bill Clinton was the first black president? As Obama’s team shapes up, isn’t he beginning to look like the first black Clinton?

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Tweet Tomorrow, I’ll be spending most of the day in transit, and it’s unclear to me at this point how much blogging I’ll be able to sneak in once I arrive at my ultimate destination.  So, before I lose access to my computer, I wanted to put together a list of things that make me [...]

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Tweet The head of the UN General Assembly just called Israel an “apartheid” state.  In other words, Israel is emblematic of evil in the world.  I’ve finally realized what the problem is:  Israel has a mixed population. Think about it:  Iraq expelled her Jews and hounded her Christians into obscurity.  Saudi Arabia makes it illegal [...]

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Tweet Over at FrontPage Magazine, you can read an interview with Martin Durkin, describing Britain’s staggering social decline during its long years as a welfare state.  It was a slow decline at first.  When I lived there in the early 1980s, it still wasn’t clear that it was hovering on the verge of breaking entirely [...]

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Tweet What’s amazing is that the Progressives, those who tout themselves as the most humanitarianly sensitive people in the history of the world, urge Israel and America to shuck off their Zionist imposed binders and get friendly with these people.

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Tweet Conservatives have two stark choices right now:  they can self-destruct or they can create a workable paradigm for moving forward. The self-destruction possibility is playing out before our eyes.  Kathleen Parker fired the opening salvo with her screed about the evil oogedy-boogedy Christians that are tainting conservatism.  Charles Johnson is also taking potshots at [...]

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Tweet Here’s the story: A security guard shot and killed a man wielding two Samurai swords Sunday on the grounds of a Scientology building in Hollywood, police said. The unidentified man approached three guards around noon in the parking lot of the Scientology Celebrity Centre, Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Terry S. Hara said. The [...]

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Tweet This was a long, long weekend and it will be followed by a short week (as we leave to visit the conservative branch of the family on Wednesday). Tomorrow, I head off early in the a.m. for my client’s, and won’t be able to blog until the afternoon.  This is, therefore, an open thread. [...]

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Tweet In England, across all spectrums of society, more and more people are having Down Syndrome babies.

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Tweet Issues concerning Obama, although not Obama himself, won in the Watcher’s Council this week.  The winning Council post, Joshua Pundit’s The Afghanistan Blues looks at the problem Obama got for himself with that region; and the winning non-Council post, Paul Kengor’s How the Academic Left Elected Obama, examines the mindset in American universities and [...]

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Tweet In the old days, when work dried up in one geographic area, unemployed people migrated, often with tremendous difficulty, to another area.  Think of the great Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s, or the enormous Black movement from South to North during the Jim Crow years.  People, being adaptable, followed the jobs. What strikes [...]

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Tweet Is this a recommendation for Obama’s education advisor? Darling-Hammond, a teacher-friendly educator, has been tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to head his transition team on education policy. I thought education was supposed to benefit the children. I’m feeling a little sour on the subject right now because I went to the elementary school science [...]

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Tweet Conservatives touted it as a joke.  Liberals are wacky enough to take it seriously.

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Tweet Obama finally came out from hiding to talk a bit about the economy.  One of my liberal friends found this the most exciting aspect of his speech: “We’ll be working out the details in the weeks ahead, but it will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jumpstart job creation in America and lay the [...]

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Tweet For reasons best known to herself, Hillary will probably say yes to State, even thought she’ll be the third, not the first, woman to fill that position, and even though no Secretary of State has ever used that post as a springboard to the White House.  Nutroots will be furious because of her support [...]

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Tweet News about Michael Jackson, everybody’s favorite example of someone who loves plastic surgery and little boys.

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Tweet There were two articles in today’s SF Chron that piqued my interest. The first was about the way in which San Francisco is trying to turn itself in America’s electric car city.  I appreciate that this will make the City quieter and better smelling.  However, to the extent it’s supposed to help aid America [...]

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Tweet For years, I’ve argued to anyone who cared to listen, that the need for PC goop, sensitivity training and hyper sexual harassment laws coincided very precisely with the decline in manners.  I don’t have any data to support this, just common sense.  In the old, mannered days, good manners dictated a few huge do-nots:  [...]

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Tweet BrianE, thanks for the reminder of one of the great moments in TV comedy.  When WKRP in Cincinnati was good, it was about as good as TV gets:

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