Bookworm Room

Tweet I want a job at the New York Times.  It is clearly a place that pays people to be stupid.  David Brooks gives Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 a very nice review.  Coming Apart claims that there is a big divide between rich Americans and poor Americans.  I like [...]

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Tweet I’m not the most observant person in the world.  It was probably in around 1976 when I suddenly realized that the CBS nightly news, which my parents watched religiously, was no longer giving daily updates about the number of dead and wounded in Vietnam.  That information had provided a backdrop to my childhood dinners, [...]

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Tweet In last week’s Watcher’s Council vote, true courage took the lead, with The Mellow Jihadi’s moving post about Marine Lance Corporal Donald Hogan, who died in Afghanistan saving his comrades, winning first place.  Lots of other good stuff, too, so if you haven’t read these posts, you should: Council Winners *First place with 3 [...]

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Tweet Over the years, I’ve written more than 10,000 posts.  (Yeah, that’s a scary thought, isn’t it.)  They do tend to run together in my mind, but there are a few standouts.  These are the posts in which I felt that I offered an insight or analysis that is genuinely helpful to considering a serious [...]

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Tweet The choice before the Cambridge Debating Society was whether one should choose war to stop Iran from going nuclear, or simply accept a nuclear Iran.  Douglas Murray offers a devastating rebuttal to those who say, “Who cares if Iran goes nuclear?”  The 11 minute video starts out good and, halfway through, gets great: Hat [...]

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Tweet Barbara Boxer has taken to the pages of the Huffington Post to explain why the administration’s mandate that all insurers provide birth control, including drugs that induce abortion, advances rather than restricts, religious freedom.  If you like Orwell’s Newspeak, Boxer’s writing is a thing of beauty and will certainly be a joy forever as [...]

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Tweet It’s already old news to you that statistical data shows that Obama is the most polarizing president ever.  Much as I’d like to blame Obama, it seems that, rather than causing the polarization, he reflects it: One Gallup chart ranks presidents from Eisenhower to Obama on polarization during their third year in office. Obama [...]

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Tweet According to Barry Rubin, who has forgotten more about the Middle East than most people (including State Department employees) will know in a lifetime, Ron Paul is Wrong Paul when it comes to Iran.  First, what’s happened in the last decade is irrelevant, since Iran hatred long preceded that.  The real issue is whether [...]

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Tweet In the halcyon pre-Obama days, when Prop. 8 meant that gay marriage was a hot blogging issue, I argued that religion organizations, not the state, should be allowed to define what constitutes a “marriage,” with states confined to authorizing “civil unions.”  In that context, I commented upon the religious implications of the government mandating [...]

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Tweet I am really, really mad at Mr. Bookworm today.  If I’m completely honest with myself, it’s not that he did anything to me.  It’s that he has something I don’t have — namely, a good night of sleep under his belt.  I’m a fairly chronic insomniac, and he is not.  Last night was an [...]

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Tweet I don’t have an answer to the question in my post title.  All I have is some limited data showing that, while conservatives don’t like Romney, and favor either Gingrich or Santorum, they have a sneaking suspicion that only Romney can win. I’m thinking that sometimes, as the Victorians said, it’s possible to be [...]

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Tweet I’m planning a trip this summer to Japan, a country about which I know nothing.  Actually that’s an overstatement.  I know some things:  it’s beautiful, historic, and clean (I love that part), and comes complete with great food and well-mannered people.  But that’s all I know. Toji Pagoda I don’t have this tabula rasa [...]

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Tweet In the preceding post, I spoke about life sometimes being so ridiculous that it defies art.  In that vein, I found amusing these paired headlines from the online edition of today’s San Francisco Chronicle:

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Tweet I mentioned yesterday that we live in such strange times that it’s often difficult to distinguish fake news from real.  It occurred to me that, by making this statement, I missed the opportunity to alert you to a book full of fake news — very funny, sometimes prescient fake news. Tom Elia, who blogs [...]

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Tweet Despite the fact that Republicans are currently busy working the circular firing squad, making outside efforts to destroy them somewhat redundant, the Progressives/Democrats/Media/Usual Suspects aren’t taking any chances about the November 2012 election and have already brought out the big gun:  They’re crying racism. The racism claim that got the biggest headline this week [...]

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Tweet Did you ever see Liar Liar?  In it, Jim Carrey (before he got pompous) plays an attorney who lies compulsively but, because of a spell his son places on him, is unable to tell a lie for 24 hours.  It’s a rather amusing movie especially the courtroom scenes. Sultan Knish clearly had a dream [...]

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Tweet Liam Neeson’s flirting with converting to Islam, a religious quest made possible by the fact that the religion has great calls to prayer and everyone does it (at least in Muslim countries) — and, no, I’m not exaggerating when I belittle his expressed motive when he contemplates abandoning the Catholicism of his childhood in [...]

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Tweet In no particular order: Listen to Richard Epstein and John Yoo explain why ObamaCare is a more heinous government policy than any ever before imposed on the American people.  Pay special attention to Richard Epstein’s point about the dangers lurking in rule by waiver, which is antithetical to rule by law.  (This is in [...]

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Tweet Here’s a really bad idea:  name a United States Navy after Representative John Murtha (deceased), the man who cheerfully, and without any credible evidence, castigated American Marines as cold-blooded killers in the wake of the Haditha massacre.  The Marines, of course, were all exonerated but for Frank Wuterich, who accepted a slap on the [...]

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Tweet We tend to find what we’re looking for.  Since conservatives know that Obama comes from a socialist background, has advanced policies that are antithetical to capitalism, and has defeated opportunities and initiatives that are supportive of capitalism, we’re going to assume that, in any speech he gives, ordinary statements are actually code for a [...]

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Tweet I have family business to take care of this morning, so I won’t be blogging until this afternoon.  Fear not, though, as I still have very interesting stuff to recommend to you, personally selected by the crew at the Watcher’s Council: Council Submissions The Colossus of Rhodey – What the Gingrich South Carolina victory [...]

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Tweet Clark S. Judge sent to Hugh Hewitt a great note analyzing what Obama really said during the SOTU.  I’m going to do something here that I almost never do, which is to reprint the note in its entirety at my own blog, albeit reformatted from the original.  Why?  Because the paragraph breaks vanished at [...]

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Tweet I’m not surprised that there is a fair amount of rape in today’s military.  The facts on the ground readily explain, although they never excuse, it. To begin within, our troops have grown up and lived in a hypersexualized culture.  Up until a few decades ago, in movies and on TV screens, even married [...]

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Tweet I’ve been corresponding with a group of conservatives who are very strongly divided between Romney and Gingrich.  I’m pleased to say that, while the debate is substantively heated, it also never veers away from common decency and civility.  My latest contribution to the email string, right after mention of a brokered convention, was as [...]

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