Bookworm Room

Tweet A friend send me a link to to this poster:

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Tweet I wrote a few days ago about the fact that the State of California Department of Education has gone after the Kentfield School District in Marin County, because the District’s food program relies on PTA volunteers, rather than on paid union members.  Our local paper has an update on the story say that, for [...]

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Tweet I hate the smell of cigarette smoke.  Hate it!  Hate it!  Hate it!  That hatred is entirely separate from hating the way cigarettes harm people’s health. Even if they were healthy, the smell would disgust me. Having said that, I hate even more ordinances that prevent people from smoking cigarettes in their own homes.  [...]

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Tweet One of the things that unites conservatives is an abiding dislike of government inefficiency. Government is just about the only entity that can take two of your dollars (not two of its dollars, but two of yours) and then make them do the work of one, or maybe none. Every government project seems to [...]

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Tweet I left for vacation a day or two after the whole Chick-Fil-A/free speech matter arose.  I was aware of it, through my minimal contact with the internet, but obviously couldn’t comment upon it.  The one goold thing about waiting so long, though, is that others provide the perfect commentary.  In this case, the “other” [...]

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the government will screw up through indifference and people will die. Not because government is “bad” or that the people in government are “bad”, but because people are people and government can never be better than our collective human nature.

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Tweet Gay Patriot posted the other day about yet another anti-Walmart protest.  His point was that the protesters, rather than being excited about real paying jobs coming to L.A., insisted that they would be better off with some hypothetical Mom and Pop jobs that might arise if they protested Walmart with sufficient vigor: Last week, [...]

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Tweet [UPDATE:  Since I wrote this post, there is now reason to believe that Roberts issue his opinion for the wrong reasons, not the right ones.  If I were to rewrite this post today, I would be less charitable to the man.  Nevertheless, putting aside Roberts' motives, I stand by the substance of my post, [...]

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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 DQ raise very important points about the power of language. The examples of “austerity” and “stimulus” certainly need to be addressed. But, let me address another problematic term: “government spending”. Far too many people seem to equate government spending (syn. taxes, benefits, welfare, rebates, investments, stimuli, grants, outlays, funding, etc.) with “free” money. All [...]

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Tweet I’ve been suffering from an ear worm for the past few days.  Every time I read the headlines, I hear President Gerald Ford’s voice in my head.  He’s always saying the same thing, too: A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything [...]

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“The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you), the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money”, writes Strassel.

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Tweet Students, not normally a personally wealthy group, are all for redistributing other people’s money.  Apparently, though, they draw the line at redistributing the fruits of their own labors: The next step is to get the students to listen to Jon Lovitz’s F-Bomb laden rant and understand that, whether we’re talking grades or money, it [...]

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Tweet (Image by Luigi Novi) The Marin County Republican Party, which last year hosted the late, great Andrew Breitbart, was able to entice John Stossel to come visit as part of his book tour for No, They Can’t: Why Government Fails-But Individuals Succeed. To no one’s surprise, during his half hour talk (followed by a [...]

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Tweet These aren’t new points, but I like the way Krauthammer expressed them, as part of a longer article about the problems with ObamaCare and the fact that those problems, after going underground for a year, have burst into the light again: Serendipitously, the recently issued regulation on contraceptivecoverage has allowed us to see exactly [...]

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Tweet A video that illustrates why the Democrats’ recurrent analogy between mandatory car insurance and mandatory health insurance works perfectly — works perfectly, that is, if you want to show the absurdity of mandatory insurance.

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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 I own (or, rather, the bank and I own) a nice lot here in Marin County.  I’ve got a pretty back yard with views of hills and water.  When the trees at the back of my property get too tall, I hire a reputable tree trimming company to cut them down.  That sounds perfectly [...]

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Tweet In the wake of the horrific child abuse scandal roiling Penn State, many have been trying to understand how Sandusky’s predatory behavior could have continued unchecked for so long.  The focal point of this “how could this happen” question is the fact that Mike McQueary actually witnessed an assault.  Rather than rearranging Sandusky’s face, [...]

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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 Don Quixote asked me at lunch today what I thought of the Wall Street Protests.  In one way, I think they’re utterly stupid.  After all, how seriously can you take people who storm Wall Street with this particular list of demands? Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met [...]

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Tweet When I was a little girl, one of the refrains in my life was “get your cotton-pickin’ fingers out of that.”  I didn’t mean to be destructive.  I was always certain I could make things better.  I had bald Barbies, because I was pretty sure I could make their hair look better.  I had [...]

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Tweet I’m working on a settlement statement in a very depressing divorce case (divorce cases, which I work on as infrequently as possible, are always depressing, but this one is worse than most), so blogging will suffer today.  Nevertheless, I wanted to share with you a matched set about government overreach: At the White House [...]

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