Bookworm Room

My daughter’s history teacher, when pressed by her students about Sunday’s health care vote, couldn’t keep her mouth shut.  (Keeping her mouth shut would have involved saying, “This is a history class, not a politics class.  You should ask your parents these questions.”)  Instead, she blithely opined that “all civilized societies have universal health care.” [...]

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I had an illuminating conversation with a neighbor this morning.  She’s very pleased that health care reform passed, because “we’ll all have insurance coverage now.”  This is an Ivy League educated woman, and that was her sole understanding of the monstrosity that just cleared Congress:  “We’ll all have insurance coverage now.”  The conversation got really [...]

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I indulged myself today by staying assiduously away from the computer.  If there was going to be a train crash, I didn’t want to see it happen.  What’s really irksome isn’t that Stupak is the usual Demo ho (pardon my language), but that he was willing to sell his soul for the political equivalent of [...]

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Stupak’s going to make his much awaited statement while I’m off working out.  So far, he’s had a spine and has distinguished himself from other Democrats by actually letting a principle guide him.  I suspect, though, that his 11:00 press conference will be a weasely explanation of why he’s caved completely on his pro-Life stance.  [...]

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Victor Davis Hanson sums everything up in one paragraph: The president is pushing legislation that a clear majority of the people dislike, and whose details neither he nor his supporters can explain in simple language. Its ends-justify-the-means passage will require legislative gymnastics that border on the unconstitutional, and in Orwellian fashion are designed to reassure [...]

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Family commitments meant that I spent, perhaps, 5 minutes at my computer this weekend.  That wasn’t what I’d planned, but that was what I ended up with.  In today’s news cycle, of course, two days can be the equivalent of two decades.  Certainly, when I turned the computer on this morning and checked out the [...]

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Pride can make us do very stupid things.  Once we’ve committed to something (a job, a marriage, a principle, whatever), and once we’ve touted that commitment to the world as the most wonderful thing evah, it is extremely difficult to stand up to that same world and admit “I made a mistake.” I’ve been thinking [...]

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Nancy is boasting that she’s got the votes.  We thought last fall that this was an empty boast, but it wasn’t.  We should, therefore, be very concerned that she makes this boast.  The Tea Party Patriots have put together an action email, telling you what you can do to help.  Here is the email in [...]

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Perhaps it really is true that Pelosi doesn’t have the votes for Obama Care.  After all, if she did, why would the Democrats be considering the “Slaughter Option” something that involves bypassing votes altogether: The Slaughter Solution is a plan by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), the Democratic chair of the powerful House Rules Committee and [...]

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The American Thinker spells it out: Richard Baehr, ace political watcher, thinks the odds are that Nancy Pelosi, through brute force, will get Obama Care through.  Once that happens, of course, it’s the law, and “reconciliation,” which is ostensibly meant to smooth away any lingering roughness, will die a’bornin’ Christopher Chantrill explains what government will [...]

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Here’s what I see going on and, please, correct me if I’m wrong: Reconciliation is a red herring.  Right now, the House is being promised that, if it votes on the Senate bill, the Senate will fix differences between the two bills through reconciliation.  So everyone is focusing on whether the Senate will indeed have [...]

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I believe more and more strongly that reconciliation is a red herring, meant to induce the House to pass the Senate bill.  Once that’s done, this so called “reconciliation,” an alleged second bill that will smooth away the differences between the two chambers (especially the House’s demand that abortion, which is part of the Senate [...]

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Obama is so insulated behind his compliant media and his worshipful staff, I wonder if he’s ever heard before the facts Ryan spells out so clearly here: My favorite line:  “Hiding spending does not reduce spending.”  Brilliant core statement about the myriad flaws in the bill.  Also, he drills in on the core difference between [...]

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Many pundits opined that Obama, being a bright guy, would learn from his myriad failures in 2009.  Over here at Bookworm Room, however, I repeatedly said that Obama is the type of malignant narcissist who will never learn from experience.  Unlike a social narcissist — that would be Clinton — who desperately craves approval and [...]

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James Taranto makes an interesting suggestion:  In the coming months, Obama is going to try to make Republicans look good so that, in November, one-party rule ends and he can tack to the center, more or less guaranteeing himself a second term. What do you think?  Does Taranto make a good case for this strategy [...]

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One of the bludgeons used to beat opponents of socialized medicine is the claim that everybody in Canada/England/Northern Europe/Etc., is soooo much happier with health care than we are.  A doctor friend of mine has been scouring the literature, and she’s discovered that this isn’t true.  Polls show that people in countries with socialized medicine [...]

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Rep. Lynn Woolsey is a liberal among liberals, a Leftist who calls affluent Marin County her home (and Marin voters have sent her back to D.C. over and over again, with about 70% of the vote).  She’s not a very bright woman, but I give her credit for focusing unerringly on what’s wrong with the [...]

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From Fox New’s Sunday Roundtable, this is Charles Krauthammer’s take on the profoundly corrupt process behind the health care bill, and the way this process reflects on Obama: It is a bribe, and that’s why it is so unpopular. Look, it’s not just a question of it depriving the Treasury of revenue. It’s question of [...]

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Last night, I went to hear Atul Gawande give a talk promoting his new book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.  The book’s premise is a simple one:  In an increasingly complex world, even experts benefit from a routine checklist that requires them to focus on the essentials necessary to their task.  The [...]

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This no-fly failure didn’t make the headlines because it wasn’t a terrorist, but it is just as revealing of the failures in our system.  Instead, of bomber, this no-fly failure involved someone engaged in germ warfare.  A person with drug resistant TB decided that his desire to fly trumped the safety of several hundred people [...]

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You can’t summarize the whole fiasco better than Mark Steyn did: We were told we had to do it because of the however many millions of uninsured, yet this bill will leave some 25 million Americans uninsured. On the other hand, millions of young fit healthy Americans in their first jobs who currently take the [...]

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Christmas dinner (which was lovely), included in a brief foray into discussing the Senate’s health care bill.  A liberal friend let loose with this terrific line after I said that the Senate had raided Medicare and Medicare Advantage to make the bill ostensibly revenue neutral:  “I don’t know anything about the bill, but I know [...]

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The holidays continue to make demands on me that take me away from my beloved computer and my blog.  I’ve managed to track enough news, though, to know that Reid managed to get his vote.  My question for you, and one I can’t answer myself, is this: Will the health care bill, even if it [...]

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It’s scary, but Mark Steyn is right: I’ve been saying for a year now, in NR and NRO, that the object for savvy Dems is to get this thing passed in whatever form because, once you do, there’s no going back. Kim Strassel in yesterday’s Journal gets it: So why the stubborn insistence on passing [...]

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The Heritage Foundation has an excellent summary of the way in which the Left has finally caught on to something the Right figured out long ago; namely, that it’s unconscionable (and probably unconstitutional) for the government to force citizens to buy a product from a private purveyor: Explaining why he would vote against the Senate [...]

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