Bookworm Room

We spent the day in and around Dubrovnik, in Croatia, on the northeastern edge of the Adriatic, roughly across the waters from Venice. If you like your history old, Dubrovnik is the perfect place to visit, because it is a gem-like medieval walled city. The current version of the city started in the 12th century [...]

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Danny and CM have been doing the heavy lifting today, so let me just jump in with a quick hit.  I plan on doing a longer piece sometime on today’s song lyrics, but one current song worries me and I wonder if I worry needlessly.   Picture a teenage girl who has just broken up with her [...]

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The Irish love good humor. Democrats, not necessarily. That’s probably why Alicia Colon felt a need to contribute this expose of O’bama’s brilliant sense of humor to an Irish paper (the Irish Examiner). http://www.irishexaminerusa.com/mt/2011/07/19/the_unbelievable_brilliance_of.hml [h/t James Taranto’s “Best of the Web” in the Wall Street Journal) Here’s a teaser: “Obama’s latest faux pas was picked [...]

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An interesting news item today relates how Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel got very testy with an interviewer when she asked him why he is sending his two children to a private rather than a public school. I’m not particularly dismayed at Emanuel for resenting the question—New Jersey Governor Christie recently told a radio talk-show caller that [...]

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We arrived in Rome late Tuesday night, but didn’t have to board our cruise ship until 3 pm on Wednesday. The question, of course, was what to do with our morning. We elected to pay a small fortune to hire a private driver so that we could squeeze in a visit to Ostia Antica. The [...]

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Here’s a bit of good news: public sector retirees in Central Falls, RI are being asked to “give back” some of their retirement benefits because…there’s no money!   http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/us/20centralfalls.html?partner=rss&emc=rss I suspect that many of those affected will have precious few other retirement benefits to fall back upon. This will hurt!   I venture that most [...]

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Conservatives think in terms of individuals, liberals think in terms of groups.   That is one of my key takeaways from Kevin Jackson’s autobiographical “The Big Black Lie: How I Learned The Truth About The Democrat Party“. Jackson, black conservative and founder of The Black Sphere blog, grew up in Texas with one foot in [...]

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We’ve had some interesting comments in the last day or so.  JJ has suggested we might have to scrap our government and start over.  Y-man has pointed out that democracy is not the only form of government around.  Moose and others have suggested that eventually the United States may no longer be United. Personally, I’d [...]

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During our many days in London, my husband remarked to the kids that London  has a long history.  I thought about that and realized that he’s half right. Yes, it has a long history, but so does every other inhabited place on earth. What distinguishes the British is that they’ve memorialized their history, in words, [...]

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First of all, welcome!  Please make yourselves at home and join in the fun.  Second, don’t be concerned if your first comment does not appear at once.  The first time you comment, that comment goes into a “pending” queue until the author of that post approves it.  Once that comment is approved, your future comments [...]

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I’m opposed to term limits.  I mention this because jj made a spirited and persuasive argument in favor of limits in a comment to a recent thread.  I’m opposed on both practical and philosophical grounds. As a practical matter, you don’t want an amateur deploying troops in Afganistan.  You don’t want an amateur building a [...]

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I just had an odd thought.  Republicans have drawn a line in the sand:  no new taxes, no restoration of the old tax levels, all deficit reduction must be accomplished by budget cuts.  This is a fairly extreme position.  While most Americans aren’t eager to have tax increases, I think most reasonably feel that the [...]

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Over on Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds links to John Hawkins’ (at Right Wing News) contention that conservative blogs are having a tough go, especially in light of the left’s increasing dominance of the blogosphere. However, Reynolds think one commentor’s response to the post is worth noting: Smaller blogs don’t need to be high-readership affairs to have a profound effect [...]

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From Canada’s National Post comes a fitting epitaph for our country’s demise:   “The real story of Reckless Endangerment is more a story of democracy corrupted than it is a story of financial fraud. It is a story of America’s great wounding of herself. And even now, with this book, the full account is not [...]

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San Francisco police shot and killed a man last night. http://www.ktvu.com/video/28575181/index.html The man was running away.  If you didn’t know the facts, would you think it is more likely that the police shot an unarmed man for no reason or that they shot an armed man who was shooting over his back at them as [...]

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Sadie suggested we discuss the debt ceiling.  I’m no expert and haven’t followed the matter that closely, but I have some random thoughts to get the conversation started. 1.  The budget is like a patient in need of a life-saving operation.  Those on the far right argue against raising the debt ceiling at all.  This [...]

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I live in a small town of 12,000 people that has a very inviting and walkable downtown. I strolled to the bank yesterday and noticed that a couple of young people had set up a Lyndon LaRouche “Impeach Obama” table directly across the street from the town’s busiest restaurant. As I passed their table, the [...]

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We spent several delightful hours at the British Museum today. It is an amazing treasure house full of the treasures dug up from the earth or salvaged from the garbage heaps of the non-Western world. That last point is important. I heard someone at the museum claim that the British had “stolen” the archeological findings [...]

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Who likes really good, erudite, amusing writing from a milblogger? (At this point, all of you should be waving your hands in the air and hollering “I do! I do!”) Assuming I’ve correctly anticipated your response, I’ve got good news for you. One of my long time military Internet friends has started blogging, at a [...]

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First try at inserting a YouTube video, that is both funny and relevant to our discussion (sort of):  

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Zach’s claim that blacks still vote for Democrats “because many Republicans won’t even support the simple justice of laws guaranteeing equal access to public accommodations” is the purest form of nonsense, of course.  There is zero chance that Republicans would take away equal access even if they completely controlled all three branches of the Federal [...]

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DQ asks a very good question: what is the endgame of the Left?   Our alphabet soup group tries to address another good question: why do black people so reliably vote Democrat?   Our responses were many, but they included the argument that poor people have been cultivated by big government design to become enslaved [...]

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I’ve recently read Primetime Propaganda, The True Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, by Ben Shapiro, about which more in a later post or two.  It’s a good book, though it practically ignores whole areas of television programming, those areas that now dominate the ratings and tend to be the least political  – [...]

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I’ve now had three full days in London, which is enough time to form some impressions.  First, it’s a much cleaner city than I remember from 30 years ago.  The cars burn their fuel more cleanly, the tube trains and buses are new and shiny, the underground is cleaner and better organized now that everything [...]

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Interesting item from the New York Times today about a “mischaracterization” (what we knucklewalkers call a “lie”) Obama made during the 2008 campaign. The lede: “The White House on Wednesday declined to challenge an account in a new book that suggests that President Obama in his campaign to overhaul American health care, mischaracterized a central anecdote about [...]

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