Bookworm Room

Tweet Justice Sotomayor came to San Francisco and inadvertently made the case that affirmative action terribly unfair — and, moreover, that people are right if they believe, not that it gives qualified minorities a chance, but that it handicaps non-minorities at the expense of any minorities, qualified or not. Let me unpack that first sentence.  [...]

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Tweet Kim Priestap, who blogs at Up North Mommy, got an impassioned email from the Democratic Party, raving about Elena Kagan.  Does it rave about her brains?  No (although it mentions as an aside that she’s “among the best legal minds this country has to offer,” which is a depressing comment about legal minds in [...]

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Tweet Turns out that Hispanics, who are probably as misinformed as Eric Holder about the actual contents of the Arizona immigration law, are opposed to it in vast numbers.  I don’t get it.  When the illegal immigrants pour into American communities, bringing with them all their pathologies (gangs, drugs, alcoholism, violence, and poverty), they’re not [...]

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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 I wrote yesterday about the softball players who were accused of being “not gay enough.”  I appreciate that the league in question has its rules — you must be gay — but the story still got me thinking about what constitutes being gay.  From there, of course, I started thinking about identity politics.  Let [...]

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Tweet In my previous post, I talked about the way in which the Left desperately tries to cubby-hole people, events and ideas, without any real understanding of what lies beneath those labels.  Seconds after I finished writing that post, I read this newspaper article, which sounds like a parody, but isn’t: All Steven Apilado, LaRon [...]

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Tweet I’m reading a very enjoyable novel right now that is completely tuned in to the way in which the Left operates, especially when it comes to the media and academia. The writer is completely tuned into the name calling that substitutes for informed debate. For example, when the book’s protagonist, Paul, learns that Leftists [...]

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Tweet The UC regents voted for a steep increase in tuition.   Some have pointed to the unedifying spectacle of whining middle class students taking to the streets to protest the tuition increase, since they prefer to have California’s working class, most of whom will not attend the school, bear the financial burden.  Although I agree [...]

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Tweet We’re getting near the tail-end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month that requires dawn to dusk fasting.  Now, I’m a gal who enjoys noshing during the day, so I’m not thrilled about abstaining from food and drink for 10 hours.  I’d be especially unhappy if it was a hot day, ’cause any type of [...]

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Tweet Here’s a bad, almost cruel, joke, but nevertheless a pointed and important one: Two men met on the street.  One looked very angry. “What’s the problem?” asked the first man of his friend. “I’m r-r-really a-a-ngry,” he stuttered.  “I app-ap-applied for a j-j-job as an an-an-announcer at the-the-the r-r-r-radio s-s-station and they t-t-turned me-me-me [...]

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Tweet Willie Brown is one of the smartest politicians out there.  He’s been in the business since the 1960s and, not coincidentally, has broken a whole lot of color barriers.  While he is a die-hard Democrat, he’s also nobody’s fool.  Here’s his take on the Gates kerfuffle. America got a good look at the Chicago [...]

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Tweet You can’t read a blog, attend a press conference, read a paper, or even think about Sotomayor without those 32 words popping into your head: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t [...]

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Tweet I keep seeing headlines all over the place to the effect that Republican Senators will be afraid to vote against the first proposed Hispanic justice.  This may certainly be true for Senators, who are a weaselly, unprincipled bunch, I suspect, though, that for many voters Obama himself is causing the bloom to depart the [...]

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Tweet Identity politics turns people into one dimensional characters, who must act out a set script.  If you’re black or Hispanic, you must be a Democrat, even if you oppose abortion, take a jaundiced view of gay marriage, and want school choice.  If you’re a woman, you must support equal pay for comparable work, even [...]

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Tweet Is it only me, or is there a wonderful lunatic charm to Blago?  I adored the way in which he appointed a megalomaniac black man to the Senate, forcing Reid either to seat someone he normally wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, or risk opprobrium as a racist.  Likewise, I really enjoyed Blago’s [...]

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Tweet I hate identity politics. I hate the fact that currently powerful identity groups are lining up to tap into the goods flowing from the Obama administration. I hate the fact that Jews fail to recognize that there is a delightful secular element to American Christmas and that their little dears are not going to [...]

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Tweet I’ve said before that I am not a racist — I’m a classist or values-ist.  Always have been.  I don’t care about your external color or sexuality or whatever; I do care about the beliefs you bring to the table. What this means is that I’m pretty hostile to identity politics.  I never felt [...]

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Tweet It turns out that Barack Obama might have been on to something with his bitterness speech. In case you’ve forgotten, he said: You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them — like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 [...]

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Tweet At American Thinker, James Edmund Pennington definitively explodes the myth that Obama is a “post-racial” candidate. In other words, Geraldine Ferraro had it absolutely right when she said, without any of Pennington’s careful analysis, that Obama ascended as quickly as he did solely because of his race. And as Pennington points out, that ascension [...]

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Tweet What do you do when the person who matches you in the external identity calculus — say, she’s a woman and you’re a woman — proves not to be the women’s champion you hoped? Even worse, what do you do when the person who is the champion you hoped, doesn’t match you in external [...]

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Tweet My post title imagines what I bet a lot of the older generation of Jewish Americans will think when they learn about the latest campaign tactics from the party that knows how to do identity politics. Steve Cohen, whose name is a giveaway as to his Jewishness, is running for reelection in Tennessee’s 9th [...]

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Tweet I’ve never been able to read Philip Roth’s novels because I cannot stand his navel gazing (or should I say penis-gazing?) characters. They are, for me, profoundly uninteresting — I find them infantile and narcissistic in their concerns. Perhaps my the problem with his writing is his thinking. Why do I say this? Because [...]

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Tweet John McWhorter, who supports Obama, has pointed out what he sees as a profound problem with the Obama campaign, which is the way identity politics has made it impossible to treat Obama as an adult, rather than a child, for fear of being called “racist”: Yet there is an element of surprise, a tincture [...]

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Tweet JL tipped me off to a Time Magazine web page about Super Tuesday which inadvertently distills in a nutshell the difference between how Republicans and Democrats approach the election.  Here is how Time reports the Fox News National Exit Poll results: GOP Results Republicans: McCain 40, Romney 36, Huckabee 18 Evangelicals: Huckabee 33, McCain [...]

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Tweet I caught a minute of Mike Gallagher today, and he was talking about the fact that Republicans are more critical of Republican candidates than Democrats are critical of Democratic candidates. It occurred to me that, at least in this election cycle, that may be because there are real, substantive differences between the Republican candidates. [...]

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