Bookworm Room

Tweet I spend ridiculous amounts of my time trying to convince my children that, while “Give me that!” and “May I have that, please”, mean the same thing, their chances of success are much greater with the second phrase.  I repeat ad nauseum that it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.  People [...]

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Tweet For the past four years, conservatives have been fighting a relentlessly rearguard, defensive action.  For those same four years, conservatives have lost every rearguard, defensive action that they’ve fought.  Or if they haven’t actually lost, the best that they’ve managed is a stalemate that stalls Progressivism, but doesn’t advance conservative values.  Even the stunning [...]

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Tweet I promise that this post will be about what Sheldon Adelson had to say in an interview with Alana Goodman of Commentary Magazine.  Before I get there, though, I need to begin with a little story of my own. Readers of my newsletter know that I had lunch last week with seven other conservative [...]

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Tweet I’m still reading scattered posts castigating Mitt Romney for being a bad candidate or running a bad campaign.  I understand the need to analyze failures to identify remediable errors, but we’re making a huge mistake focusing on the end of the campaign, rather than the beginning.  One could say the beginning of the campaign [...]

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Tweet My forte is spotting problems, not finding solutions.  Thankfully, when I put out a call for suggestions, many of you responded.  This post sets out practical list ways to get conservative messaging past the media gatekeepers that so effectively insulted Romney, praised Obama, and squelched or promoted news stories depending upon whether they help [...]

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Tweet Maybe I’m in denial, but I’m feeling less depressed than I felt last night and this morning.  Part of my more sanguine attitude is based upon a Taranto principle, which is that Obama now owns the events of the next four years: Obama has spent the past four years explaining away his failings by [...]

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Tweet This video is making the rounds, and it should.  Except for the frantic music, which I found a bit exhausting, it is a brilliant dissection of Obama’s failures, followed by a simple explanation of conservativism’s virtues.  Please watch it, and then send it along to your friends: Hat tip:  Kim Priestap

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Tweet Don Quixote forwarded a bunch of clever posters to me.  I’m sharing my favorites with you:

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Tweet Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri is refusing to step down, despite the fact that everyone in the Republican/conservative establishment, from the RNC, to Rush, to Mark Levin, to Ann Coulter, to every major blog known to conservativism, is hollering that he must leave. Akin’s arrogance and selfishness is depressing.  Or is it? Maybe, just [...]

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Tweet I haven’t yet had the chance to see whether this app works (since I have an iPhone, not an android) but, if it does, it’s a wonderful thing: If you like what you see, you can get the free download here.

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Tweet Yesterday, I wrote about incrementalism.  My point was that it took conservatives decades to get into this mess and that we have to expect it to take decades to get out of the mess.  Reversing ObamaCare was never going to be the magic moment that reversed a trend that started with Roosevelt, and that [...]

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Tweet One of my favorite blogfriends sent me a link to John Yoo’s article excoriating Justice Robert’s decision in the harshest terms.  Yoo states plainly that the decision spells the end of individualism in America, since it expands the government’s taxing power to encompass everything.  Those who seek a silver lining (or ponies or lemonade) [...]

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Tweet We met Cyrus Massoumi three and a half years ago, when he got in trouble with the Tamalpais School District for a vaguely conservative rant that was mostly immature and non-violently antisemitic.  My take back then: Mostly, it’s a work that’s badly in need of an editor’s pencil, not a psychiatrist.  The kid is [...]

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Tweet This article that just appeared in Bloomberg.com, regarding Stockton-writ-California-writ-USA-writ-large’s pending bankruptcy, is just so absolutely jaw-dropping crazy…uh, no, wait….it isn’t really so crazy after all. Never mind. If Stockton Is Broke, Why Isn’t San Diego?: Steven Greenhut http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-02/if-stockton-is-broke-then-why-isn-t-san-diego-steven-greenhut.html Here’s the money take-away: referencing the fact that, for the past 20 years, city employees could [...]

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Tweet 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. [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet “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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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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. [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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, [...]

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