Bookworm Room

Okay, I’ll admit that my post title is awkward, but it sums up what California State Senator Mark Leno is trying to do in California public schools:  namely, put a person’s sexuality front and center, with a tag-on coda about the person’s actual accomplishments.  This isn’t the first time a gay California legislator has tried [...]

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My mother is very old.  This means that she no longer actively contributes to society.  Her working and child-rearing days are over.  She lives off of her diminishing savings, a small pension and her social security checks.  In a utilitarian world, she has no value.  Because — thankfully — we haven’t yet reached that moral [...]

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Posting will be light today, as my Mom has been hospitalized with a recurring condition, so I have to go take care of that.  I’m optimistic that she’ll be back in her own home by this evening, but it’s still a concern.  The morning after, therefore, is less than thrilling. As for the night before, [...]

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The Muslims, the UN, the Europeans, the Left — they all imagine a world without Israel as a world that will be peaceful and calm.  Doubtful.  Very doubtful. What we know for certain is that a world without Israel is a less rich world — not in terms of wealth, but it terms of applied [...]

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There’s a fiery debate over whether Republicans won or lost the budget round over discretionary spending.  Good examples of the pros and cons on that debate are Peter Wehner (Boehner did great) and Dick Morris (Boehner was a spaghetti-spined disaster). What do you think?

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I started blogging in 2004, right before the election, and was hooked.  After years of churning out legal briefs, it was an endless pleasure to write about politics, pop culture, education, social issues, national security, the media, and whatever else caught my attention.  It was wonderful, too, to develop a new writing style, one that [...]

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Even though my computer crash meant reading approximately 24 articles on my iPhone (oy, my eyes!), I still managed to be very impressed by this past week’s entries at the Watcher’s Council.  Here are the winners: Council Winners *First place with 1 2/3 votes! –GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD-The Little Satan Posse Second place *t* with 1 1/3 [...]

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I have two notices and two requests.  On the notice side: First, I’m going to be including automatically at the end of future posts links to my book.  (This post has such a notice, although I’d be delighted if any of you can come up with something jazzier, although still short.)  It’s a logical thing [...]

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Obama has already thrown his hat in the ring.  Democrats therefore have a “payee” for their political donations.  The money can start rolling in instantly. Republicans, however, don’t know yet who is going to be opposing Obama.  Pawlenty?  Trump?  Palin?  Bachmann?  Paul?  Cain?  An as yet unknown candidate? The fact that we’ll only have a [...]

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Looking back over the past few weeks, one can see a little history play out: People rose up against Gaddafi.  The West dithered. The tide was in favor of the Libya rebels.  The West dithered. The tide turned in Gaddafi’s favor.  The West — i.e., a few NATO states plus Obama — intervened. Obama was [...]

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DQ again.  Sometime, I’m going to do a post on pop lyrics, on how the young men pine for the love of a young lady while the young ladies are sluts.  But one song so stands out as downright scary that it can’t wait.    We all know that rap lyrics are filthy and misogynistic.  But I’m talking [...]

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To get from my house to the freeway, one needs to drive down a fairly well traveled four lane access road (two lanes in each direction) that’s a little over a mile long.  The speed limit on the road varies between 30 and 35 miles an hour.  There are three short traffic lights.  If you’re [...]

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My son asked me “Is Princeton a good school?”  I didn’t quite know how to answer that.  It’s an old school.  It’s a school with a great reputation.  It’s expensive.  It has its pick of the nation’s best students.  It also employs Paul Krugman and Peter Singer. What!?  You don’t know who Peter Singer is, [...]

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The malware that hit me yesterday left my operating system dysfunctional, although it didn’t touch my data.  The whole experience falls into the “incredibly inconvenient” category, which is so much better than the “devastating” or “disastrous” categories.  I’m limping along right now with bizarre settings (e.g., I can’t confuse the CPU that I have a [...]

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I don’t know how many Bookwormroom readers follow American Idol, but the American Idol crowd is all abuzz at the voting out of Pia Toscano last night. Ms. Toscano has an amazing voice, probably the best of all of the candidates. Nearly everyone is shocked that she is gone. I’m not. She may have been the best [...]

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Bruce McQuain, of the always thought-provoking and very economically libertarian QandO blog, has an interesting post that provides a good overview of just how many large natural gas resources there are in the U.S. and the world. http://www.qando.net/?p=10647   Add to that our vaste coal and oil resources…   Folks, there is absolutely no excuse [...]

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My computer got attacked by malware this morning — andy iPhone is not conducive to blogging. I hope to have my computer back working tonight, but I’m not optimistic. Until I’m back in business, feel free to use this as an open thread. Also, check out the stellar submissions at WatcherofWeasels.org

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DQ here.  My wife works for the government.  She received an e-mail today from the Dan Tangherlini, Assistant Secretary for Management, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Performance Officer, U.S. Department of the Treasury.  The message related to the possible shut down of the government and it began with the following paragraph: Throughout the discussions about funding [...]

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I know that we have been round and round on climate issues in our always edifying Bookworm Room discussions, so here is an interesting lecture that I found at our friends at Flopping Aces. The lecturer, Prof. Courtillot, professor of geophysics at the University of Paris, does an excellent job summarizing both historical data and [...]

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Here’s J.E. Dyer about the administration’s threat to cut off pay to active duty military: The possibility that the military will be required to continue on duty without pay also highlights one of the important differences between the military and the rest of the federal government.  The government can’t require its civilian work force to [...]

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For a while there, my “retweet” button, located near the top of posts, vanished.  My wonderful web master has now reinstated it.  If you’re a Twitter user and if you like a particular post, please think about re-tweeting it.  It’s a simple act (two clicks of the button), but it does great things for traffic.

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My sister was cleaning out her closets and found and sent to me an old Life book, The World’s Great Religions (Special Edition for Young Readers), published in 1958.  The section on “Customs and Sections in Islam” makes for some interesting reading: Today, most Moslems can afford only one wife and family.  Many daughters are [...]

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I’m not saying Obama is drunk.  I’m not saying he’s had a puff of pot or a smidgen of smack since his college days.  I’m just saying that the following photo, from April 5, 2011 on Wikimedia Commons, might give us a good idea of what Obama looked like back in the day when he [...]

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I agree completely with Michael, who blogs at Political Commentator and is a Watcher’s Council member: He’s a very solid speaker, sounding more controlled and stable than the gal interviewing him.

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If you’re old enough to have lived through the 1970s, you recognize my post title:  Gilda Radner’s famous character Roseanne Roseannadanna would let loose with a foolish tirade, and then wrap it up by saying “It’s always something — if it ain’t one thing, it’s another.”  Someone needs to resurrect that character, or at least [...]

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