Bookworm Room

Tweet It’s a nice hotel, but the live band and the vocal drunks on the plaza six stories below definitely detract from the ambiance. I will probably be incommunicado Saturday, so please open thread away.

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Tweet One of the big jokes in the blogosphere has been the fact that a Tea Party protest comprised in no small part of smiling grannies (a term I use with great love and respect) standing outside an Obama appearance, was met with riot police: Yesterday, I asked jokingly just how stupid those riot police [...]

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Tweet If you want to see what modern socialism looks like, look no further than Britain.  I cannot urge you strongly enough to read this article.  If it is the only thing you read this week, read this article.  Because I read the British papers daily, I can attest to the truth of every fact [...]

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Tweet This is my narrow but deep survey of this morning’s offerings.  (Aack!  Will this phone never stop ringing?  I wrote that first sentence more than half an hour ago and have been dealing with that devil’s instrument ever since.  Nor does that half hour include the time I’ve spent on the phone this morning [...]

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Tweet The next big thing on the political agenda is, again, immigration “reform.”  As someone said, it’s 2006 all over again, right down to the conveniently available, often Communist-provided signs. The matter might have sat around for a little longer, but Arizona pulled the trigger on debate by looking at its impressive levels of border [...]

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Tweet If you have a passing familiarity with both the original Star Trek and with Monty Python, this one’s for you:

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Tweet A brief history:  Obama promised that the health care debate was so important, it would be carried on C-SPAN.  That did not happen.  Obama promised that any proposed bill on health care would be placed on a website for public comment far in advance of the vote.  That did not happen.  Obama promised that [...]

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Tweet If you’re on the ball, this week you have the opportunity to bid on a great sounding book, get an iPad, and help Soldier’s Angels. Everyone’s wondering why multiple New Yorkers just walked by as a good Samaritan bled to death on the sidewalk in front of them.  The intelligentsia has jumped on the [...]

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Tweet Unless you’ve been visiting some other planet somewhere in the universe, you already know about Comedy Central’s South Park debacle.  That’s the one, of course, that saw Comedy Central, the oh-so-hip-and-edgy (meaning often offensive) television station brutally censoring a South Park episode that implied that Mohamed was walking around wearing a bear suit — [...]

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Tweet If you’ve been paying any attention at all to today’s news, you’ve already heard about the fact that Obama’s National Security Advisor Gen. James Jones told a “joke” that is premised on two Jewish merchants taking advantage of a dangerously dehydrated Talibani: I’d like to begin with a story that I think is true, [...]

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Tweet In the movie Wall-E, the little robot had a task, and it did the task, long after the task’s necessity had passed.  Like a funded bureaucrat, Wall-E just kept going and going and going. In California, the Department of Transportation was given a mandate and a task, and now, long after the money has [...]

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Tweet This is the cozy mansion New York Times‘ columnist Tom Friedman calls home: Judging by its size, it probably has a carbon footprint roughly equal to a small nation’s: As the July edition of the Washingtonian Magazine notes, Friedman lives in “a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel [...]

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Tweet “I sent the club a wire stating, ‘PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER.’” — Groucho Marx, quoting a telegram he sent to the Friar’s Club of Beverly Hills, as recounted in Groucho and Me (1959), p. 321. The Democratic [...]

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Tweet No wonder the Democratic establishment is so terrified of these Tea Partiers.  What they lack in violence, they make up in insight: Thanks, Earl, for sending this one along.

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Tweet UPDATE:  My son introduced me to this video, which I thought visually arresting.  The song also worked it’s way into my brain.  I couldn’t understand a single lyric, though, so I apologize if the lyrics for this song are in any way offensive.  (Don Quixote expressed great surprise that I’d put this song here, [...]

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Tweet At least one less extreme Democrat in San Francisco is very worried about the hardcore Leftism that has taken root and flourished in the City.  A City that was always to the lefter side of the political spectrum now has the potential to devolve into the kind of ideological Leftism that will destroy the [...]

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Tweet As they usually do, the Democrats have picked a non-violent party and tarred it with the extremist brush (that would be Democrats v. Tea Partiers), while ignoring and abasing themselves before a genuinely threatening movement (that would be Democrats v. radical Islamists).  And as always, Mark Steyn ties everything effortlessly together.  I particularly like [...]

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Tweet You’ll see a very effective video from Remember November here, and you’ll get a chance to sign up for an email service that will keep that memory alive.  My son watched the video and said “that’s creepy.”  He didn’t get the political references, but he sure caught the tone.

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Tweet Since I was traveling last week, I didn’t get a chance to post the winner’s for that week, and I haven’t yet posted the winner’s for this week.  As happens every week, I struggle mightily casting my vote, since the contributions are invariably good, and then I find myself in agreement with the majority.  [...]

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Tweet I’m all for reducing pollution, but we don’t need a trumped-up excuse like “climate change” in order to achieve a cleaner environment. Minimizing pollution is a legitimate goal which stands on its own merits; concocting hysterical disaster scenarios (such as those shown in An Inconvenient Truth) only serves to undermine any credibility the environmental [...]

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Tweet Yes, my friends, it’s matched set time again.  I just love pairing stories (or, here, a prescient video and a current story), for your enjoyment and edification. I’ll start first with a couple of stories that have their genesis in San Francisco and that have made it to the media this past week.  I’ve [...]

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Tweet I wrote yesterday about the softball players who were accused of being “not gay enough.”  I appreciate that the league in question has its rules — you must be gay — but the story still got me thinking about what constitutes being gay.  From there, of course, I started thinking about identity politics.  Let [...]

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Tweet I am, as you’ve all probably gathered by now, an almost excessively verbal person.  The old expression “She can talk the hind leg off a donkey” was invented with someone like me in mind.  Given the opportunity, I can sustain an entire conversation single-handedly.  (I think it might be called a monologue.)  The only [...]

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