Bookworm Room

There is a quality to real leaders called a “command presence”. You know the type: they walk into a room and by their force of presence, command of the facts, unshaken confidence and leadership qualities, they capture the narrative and control the agenda. That command presence is a necessary mark of a good leader. In [...]

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Yay, there’s another Sarah Palin in American politics. Mia B. Love – mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah. Those of you that have read my posts and comments (whether you agree or disagree) know that I am a huge Sarah Palin fan. Frankly, there is a certain breed of all-American women that I hugely admire in [...]

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“Blue” sent me an email today, asking if he could post an older American Thinker article of mine at a new conservative forum.  I said yes, and very much appreciated his courtesy in asking before posting.  Here is the site — Conservative Talk Forums — and here is the page with my old article.

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We have an odd family friend. Fundamentally, she is a nice person and sports a very unconventional view of the world that occasionally emotes great insights into the human condition. She has a major flaw, however, one that she admits as a character flaw: she is an unabashed hater. Despite her husband, kids and friends [...]

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Last night, after Andrew Breitbart had already left to catch his plane, a few of us hung around to chat and to try to answer one question:  what was the takeaway from Breitbart’s talk?  Eat their eyeballs?  Women’s dominance in the Tea Party means that men are eunuchs?  The fact that the Tea Party needs [...]

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In America, each side of the political aisle routinely accuses the other of engaging in “scare” tactics.  Each side is right.  Doomsday scenarios are how you engage an increasingly distracted population.  My question for you is, when it comes to predicting doomsday scenarios to engage the population, which side is more accurate? I’ve got three [...]

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Most of us here in the Bookworm Room express a healthy skepticism of “experts” in general. Most of us revel in our ability to think and discourse critically for ourselves, while others lament that socially-anointed “experts” are not solemnly revered through incense, incantations and burnt offerings made before the Temple of Orthodoxy. Ah well. Age [...]

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Democrats are the friends of big business, Conservatives are the friends of small business. Democrat government inevitably ratchets its way to corruptocracy. If you don’t agree with this, can we at least agree that Democrats favor highly regulated economies and societies and conservatives don’t? Let me explain with two examples. 1) The Wall Street Journal [...]

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Yesterday I mentioned John Hawkin’s post explaining why he is sponsoring HomoCon.  I thought a nice companion piece would be Nick Gillespie’s post reprinting the HomoCon platform, a platform I think that all conservatives will find agreeable. Remember (as if you, my dear readers, ever forget):  Unlike the statists/regressives/so-called liberals, we are not the party [...]

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One of the things that I try to understand is the Great Divide between today’s Liberals and conservatives that has left us talking past one another on policy issues. Frankly, I have concluded that discussion with Liberals is often futile because we attribute different meanings to words and concepts. One of those concepts, I suspect, [...]

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Yesterday, weary and depressed, I linked to Charles Krauthammer’s most recent post, one that has him posit a Machiavellian Obama who has succeeded in laying the groundwork, not only for the transformation and, inevitably destruction of America, but also for his own reelection, so that he can cement his gains irrevocably.  A youthful reader, Zurvan, [...]

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Last week, Townhall Magazine came out with a fun list of the 100 Americans it believes the Left hates most.  You’ll recognize almost every name, as each person mentioned is a prominent conservative. David Swindle, who manages David Horowitz’s News Real Blog, realized something, however:  Townhall‘s algorithm seemed to be based a bit more on [...]

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I confess that I really like Book’s aphorism, “Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.” I like it because it works. I have used it numerous times with Liberal-Lefties and I could see that it (miraculously) forced them to think. Another one for the ages is Maggie [...]

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The dodo, as you may recall, is extinct.  I wonder, though, how many people remember why the dodo became extinct.  It was because, lacking any serious natural predators in their homeland of Mauritius, the dodos were a bit too friendly to incoming colonists (and their animals), and simply allowed themselves to be eaten into oblivion: [...]

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This will refresh you: Here’s a little helpful information about the faces behind the Governor, and the Left’s unhinged response to those Americans. The text is below the fold.

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Yesterday, I took to heart Mark Steyn’s warning that this is the beginning of the end.  Health care is the wedge, and Democrats were willing to engage in long-term strategies — including the sacrifice of a few Democratic political careers — to make it happen.  Bruce Kesler, however, actually sees cause for hope in the [...]

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In the wake of the 2008 election, Republicans and conservatives were paralyzed.  They’d been trounced, not so much by sweeper percentages (that is, the elections were all just over the slightly 50% mark), but by huge numbers of elections in which Democrats edged out Republicans by those few percentage marks.  If there are 100 races, [...]

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Zhombre forwarded this email to me.  I think it’s right on the money: If a conservative doesn’t like guns, he doesn`t buy one. If a liberal doesn’t like guns, he wants all guns outlawed. If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn`t eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products [...]

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I watched this short video that I found at Michelle Malkin’s site: As I watched this video, I had this very weird feeling that something was deeply, deeply wrong with this protest.  It looks wrong. I’m a child of the Vietnam era, and I’ve managed to keep my eye on the news — and the [...]

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The nature of conservatism is to be . . . well, conservative.  We don’t throw paint on people.  We don’t burn figures in effigy.  We don’t bite off fingers.  We put our heads down and do our jobs.  So when two million conservatives (and independents) take the time, the energy and the money to converge [...]

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Bookworm is right that I’ve been on vacation from all things blog-related for some time now, but I’m happy to come back and see what interesting discussions we can stir up while she’s on a well-deserved vacation. As always, I’ll just throw topics out there and rely on the Bookwormroom’s intelligent and thoughtful readers to [...]

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Five People in a Kitchen By Danny Lemieux Part I: We need focus! We were just five concerned Americans meeting in a middle class Chicagoland suburb on a cold spring day. Our point for this meeting was not to gripe. It was to see if we could identify constructive solutions to the Democrat Left’s hold [...]

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One of my ongoing themes here is the fact that I keep my conservatism very, very low key.  Most situations in my life don’t involve politics, but when politics come up, I’m quite careful.  I have no wish to be savaged.  Jim Miller, who lives in and writes about an equally liberal environment — the [...]

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The gal who started the Marin conservative gatherings that I’ve had the pleasure of attending sent out a broadcast email reminding all conservatives, especially those trapped in blue communities, that it’s not enough to sit at home, read the blogs and complain.  We have to work towards a change in 2010.  If we wait to [...]

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Ymarsakar brought to my attention a post I wrote over three years ago.  I’m reprinting a slightly edited version here, not just because I think it describes well the Arab psyche that drives so much of current international politics (and fears) today, but also because I think it does a good job of describing the [...]

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