Bookworm Room

Tweet The first video has Andrew Klavan explaining Obamanomics.  The second video shows Obamanomics in action.  The first video is funny and depressing; the second video startled a nervous giggle out of me, but mostly made me deeply fearful for our future: UPDATE: I need to add another video to this mix, one that shows [...]

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Tweet Hat tip: Gateway Pundit, who has more details about the deficit and the Democrats’ role in creating it. If you have a Facebook or Twitter account, or write or contribute to a blog, please share this video.  It’s damning.

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Tweet Danny Lemieux left a link to this video in the comments.  I think it deserves its own post.  You might also want to share it with your friends.  It’s studiously non-partisan, so one hopes it will make liberals thoughtful, rather than defensive. Incidentally, if any of your liberal friends think the answer is just [...]

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I met a semi-retired petroleum engineer in Alberta that was working on the Canadian tar sands development. I asked him what he had heard regarding the size of the Bakken oil field. He indicated that, pessimistically, it contained 1x the reserves of Saudi Arabia, while the optimistic projection was 3x the Saudi oil reserves.

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Tweet A few days ago, I challenged at HuffPo post that saw a die-hard Progressive repeat economic talking points that have proven, rather consistently, to be failures in the real world.  I wish that, when I wrote that, I’d already read More Evidence On What Is Holding the Economy Back, at Economics One.  Using simple [...]

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Tweet I’ve heard and probably posted this story several times before (and it may originate with Arthur Brooks), but I liked the five points tacked on at the end so much, I’m sharing the whole thing with you once again: An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed [...]

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Tweet My local Marin paper recently ran a story that showed paralyzing stupidity on the part of both a bank and an individual couple.  The law favors the bank, which was insanely greedy and stupid, so Occupy Marin is stepping up to help the couple, which was also insanely greedy and stupid.  I feel for [...]

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Tweet The Huffington Post is one of the ugliest websites I’ve ever seen.  I’m not talking about content (although I’ll get to that), but about its layout.  The left-most column (and that turns out to be a very clever pun on my part) actually has some visual stability, insofar as it allows the hapless visitor [...]

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Tweet ABC reports that President Obama treated two service men and two local barbers to a high-fat Father’s Day lunch (high-fat, at least, for Obama), and then left without paying the tab: Amid the bustle of President Obama’s surprise stop for barbecue Wednesday the White House apparently overlooked one key detail: the bill. Celebrating Father’s [...]

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Tweet I have been following with interest the running comment thread on my post asking about whether electric cars are actually cleaner, or if they just shift pollution outside of the consumer’s view.  Very quickly, and probably inevitably, the post shifted to a cost-benefit analysis, which aimed to compare fossil fuel to alternative fuels.  Just [...]

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Tweet The New York Times has a long article about Edward Conard, a former Bains partner, who makes the case — a compelling one, I believe — that in America, the wealthy aren’t parasites, they’re economically useful.  In a stagnant, agrarian class society, the wealthy simply live at the top, feeding off the poor.  In [...]

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Tweet Ace manages to summarize in one short paragraph everything that’s wrong with the Obama administration’s approach to technology: I prefer the “Old” approach to emerging technology: We adopt new technology when it is better and cheaper than the old technology, not when it is worse and more expensive, with a government demanding we pay more for [...]

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Tweet The SF Comical sounds surprised by the fact that the Facebook IPO did not end California’s financial problems.  I think someone needs to watch Bill Whittle’s video, made roughly a year ago, but clearly pertinent today:

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Tweet There’s a famous story about Milton Friedman’s response when confronted with make-work projects: While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his [...]

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Tweet Does history repeat itself? I fervently hope not. Ok, I have grudgingly thrown my support behind Mitt Romney. It’s not that I am excited about Romney as a candidate, but I am genuinely excited about the need to get Obama out of office before he does irreversible damage to this country. But, here is [...]

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Tweet Here’s a Robert Samuelson article, “bye bye Keynes” that should give us all pause: the arguments he uses to write Keynes’ obituary are arguments that we all posited in our own excoriation of Keynes in years past, in response to a string of commentators, ranging from A to Z. I’ve been reviewing our last [...]

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Tweet John Hawkins has pulled together some excellent Milton Friedman quotations.  I’m embarrassed to admit that, growing up in my Left wing, liberal arts enclave, I’d never heard of Friedman.  I wonder if early exposure to his ideas (and his charm) would have lifted me out of the darkness sooner. My favorite quotation from the [...]

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Tweet What the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protestors don’t realize (yet) is that they have been suckered into becoming the agents of their own enslavement. Orwell had it so right in defining the Left because he was a man of the Left. The term “Orwellian” now refers to the Left’s use of terms to mean [...]

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Tweet A friend sent this: This helps to understand the US debt: • U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000 • Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000 • New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000 • National debt: $14,271,000,000,000 • Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000 Let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget. • Annual family income: $21,700 • Money the family [...]

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Tweet I’ve periodically mentioned here a visit I made many years ago to the Tenement Museum in New York.  Every time I mention it, I make the same point:  the museum demonstrates America’s social mobility because census records show that the tenement’s descendents all moved upwards economically.  Grandpa Guiseppe or Grandma Sadie might have had [...]

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Tweet A short time ago, my priest gave a sermon that addressed the deep sorrow and sense of worthlessness internalized by our parishioners that were unemployed. The point of the sermon, actually, was how the unemployed felt “useless” and demeaned for being unable to provide for their families, but that nobody in God’s family should [...]

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Tweet This picture showed up on my liberal friends’ posts at Facebook today: As for me, over the past two years, I’ve been spending my time looking at this picture, or ones very similar:

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Tweet It’s been a few days since Obama’s ridiculous “Pass this bill now” moment before Congress, but he’s taken the show on the road, so Mark Steyn still has lots to say on the subject: On Thursday night, the president told a Democratic fundraiser in Washington that the Pass My Jobs Bill bill would create [...]

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Tweet For those readers under 40 (and I know I have at least one), let me open this post by explaining what a Potemkin Village is.  The story goes (and it is a story) that when Catherine the Great traveled through late 18th century Russia, her lover and go-to guy Prince Gregori Potemkin would hasten [...]

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