Bookworm Room

Tweet If you’re old enough to have lived through the 1970s, you recognize my post title:  Gilda Radner’s famous character Roseanne Roseannadanna would let loose with a foolish tirade, and then wrap it up by saying “It’s always something — if it ain’t one thing, it’s another.”  Someone needs to resurrect that character, or at [...]

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Tweet If you feel like a little good news amidst the worries about fallout from Egypt, this might do the trick.

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Tweet The Enlightenment was born in Europe and, clearly, will die there too: Hat tip:  Small Dead Animals

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Tweet I really enjoyed the beginning of this opinion piece from the Guardian: When Barack Obama addressed a shocked nation in Tuscon, Arizona, yesterday, he deployed the only weapon left to a crippled presidency: the power of rhetorical cliche. He deployed it brilliantly. “Together we thrive,” he cried meaninglessly. “For all our imperfections, we are [...]

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Tweet Is there a cause and effect between hate speech and violence?  These tweeters are certain there is, and they believe that Palin should be tortured, given loathsome diseases and killed for having the temerity to engage in (unidentified) hate speech: Hat tip:  The Jawa Report

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Tweet I’ve been reminding people on facebook that censoring speech doesn’t censor ideas, it just allows governments to abuse people.  That’s a point that’s worth remembering. Garry Hamilton makes another excellent point about the relationship between speech and action.

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Tweet In the debate over the Ground Zero Mosque, the Left’s trump card has been the language in the First Amendment stating that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”  All of us correctly understand this to mean that government cannot create a state faith, nor can it dictate the religious tenets [...]

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Tweet The mosque debate in America has been instructive when it comes to Leftist rhetorical tactics.  Ordinary Americans make an argument — “the mosque is inappropriate on secular sacred ground.”  The Left then responds, not substantively, but with personal attacks — “you’re racist, Islamophobic, xenophobic and stupid.” If you think this approach to debate is [...]

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Tweet Sometimes, to their creator’s dismay, ideas take on a life of their own.  In the wake of Comedy Central’s decision to censor a South Park episode that didn’t actually draw Mohamed, but merely suggested the possibility of doing so, Molly Norris came up with the idea of “everybody draw Mohamed Day.” Then, terrified by [...]

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Tweet In 1931, Nancy Langhorne Astor’s son Robert Gould Shaw III was arrested for committing a homosexual act (in a park, I believe).  This was a continuation of a long-standing British public policy of prosecuting “sodomists.”  Arguably the most famous prosecution was that against Oscar Wilde, for public indecency.  The trial, scandal and imprisonment destroyed [...]

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Tweet In the early television era, one of the most innovative and imaginative shows around was Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.  Certain episodes were so compelling that they entered the popular imagination, and are familiar to anyone over 30.  One of the most brilliant episodes, shown in 1961, was It’s a Good Life, based upon [...]

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Tweet Unless you’ve been visiting some other planet somewhere in the universe, you already know about Comedy Central’s South Park debacle.  That’s the one, of course, that saw Comedy Central, the oh-so-hip-and-edgy (meaning often offensive) television station brutally censoring a South Park episode that implied that Mohamed was walking around wearing a bear suit — [...]

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Tweet Here’s a list of the biggest spenders in California politics for the past decade: These 15 groups spent more than a combined $1 billion over the past 10 years to influence public policy: – California Teachers Association: $211.8 million – California State Council of Service Employees: $107.4 million – Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of [...]

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Tweet I’m working on a post, but thought you all would find this interesting in the meantime: From AJ Strata, something that’s not just interesting, but is also terrifying:  the terrorists are out there and, having gotten the measure of our new president and his administration, they are massing for war. If you needed a [...]

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Tweet Alan Grayson, last heard of when he accused Republicans of backing a health care plan that told sick people to die, is at it again: Not everyone thinks imitation is the best form of flattery. In fact, U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson of Orlando took such offense at a parody website aimed at unseating him [...]

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Tweet You remember Prop. 8, don’t you?  That was the successful California ballot initiative that said that, in America, marriage is between a man and a woman.  Immediately after November 4, gay rights activists sued.  So far, the courts are being helpful.  A court in the Northern District of California just ordered the Prop. 8 [...]

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Tweet Twenty-four hours after the fact, the AP finally figured out that, maybe, just maybe, it’s worth reporting that the White House tried to freeze out a news organization that challenges it, and was stopped only because other news organizations realized that, if they let this one pass, they would forever be barred from voicing [...]

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Tweet All of us have been worried that the Obama Administration, working in tandem with a wildly Democratic Congress, wants to clamp down on freedom of speech.  Heck, in true Orwellian fashion, the House of Representatives has already taken myriad terms off the table for fear that they might be used against their Fearless (albeit [...]

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Tweet This is an interesting video, in which a police officer tells a protester to remove his anti-ObamaCare sign from public school property.  A “helpful” bystander explains that the Supreme Court has barred this type of speech.  Frankly, without doing even minimal research, I do not know what the rules are for protest when you’re [...]

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Tweet For the eight years of the Bush presidency, we saw almost non-stop protests. These protests were characterized by speakers being shouted down; fake blood; fake waterboarding; crude, obscene and violent picket signs, etc. Not the American way we said. Freedom of speech is one thing. Ugly, violent, obscene speech is something else. We need [...]

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Tweet A few days ago, I quoted from some representatives saying that those attending town halls are an ill-informed mob that must be ignored.  The editors at National Review nicely sum up the Democratic party attitude and its profoundly anti-democratic meaning (links omitted): President Obama likes to pose as the tribune of the common people, [...]

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Tweet Orwell understood the totalitarian mindset.  That’s why he invented Newspeak, a language with the specific goal of making anti-governmental thought impossible.  The Wikipedia article on the subject sums it up nicely: Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell‘s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it is described as being “the only language in [...]

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Tweet Sotomayor’s statements about judges (better if they’re female and minority) and their role (to make policy) have been disturbing.  It’s worth nothing though that, as James Taranto points out that, on at least one occasion Sotomayor came out strongly in favor of free speech, even though it was very ugly speech: Sotomayor Plays Against [...]

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Tweet The Brits turned Geert Wilders back at the border for daring to try to enter the country to show an anti-Islamic film.  Wilders isn’t too pure himself, since he advocates muzzling Islam, which just goes to show that Europeans fundamentally fail to understand free speech. (England once understood it, but a combination of leftism [...]

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Tweet Okay, I admit it.  I’m easy.  Call me “winsome” and write a thoughtful, well-informed, interesting article about the continuing resonance abortion has on the political process — even if it did not serve as the centerpiece of this last political campaign — and of course I’m going to link to the article.  In this [...]

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