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 My father, alev ha-shalom,  had forgotten more about English — his third language — than most people will ever know.  In addition to reading novels and non-fiction for pleasure, he would amuse himself reading dictionaries, grammar books, and stories about the English language.  (In that last genre, my favorite was one called Word Origins and [...]

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Tweet The Left is excited:  two people were allegedly ejected from the RNC because they threw peanuts at a black CNN camera operator and said “this is how we feed the animals.”  Put aside the fact that this happened with two people out of thousands in attendance, and put aside the fact that they were [...]

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Tweet Black and Right has produced a brilliant video to help you understand how racism works in Obama’s America: As Homer Simpson would say, “It’s funny because it’s true.” Oh, wait! The fact that it’s true makes it singularly unfunny. Is this the way our nation is choosing its president? Will the bold American experiment [...]

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Tweet There used to be an old joke that the Jewish vote pivoted on each Jew asking himself this question “Is it good for the Jews?”  Not a very nice stereotype, but probably a true one — and true for any group in America, whether white, WASP, Jewish, Catholic, Asian, Baptist, Hindu, etc.  What’s sad, [...]

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Tweet It turns out that conservatives aren’t the only ones upset about the absence of diversity revealed in the choice of moderators for the presidential and vice-presidential debates.  Tavis Smiley, a black man who has made a career out of being concerned about racial quotas, notices that the best the MSM could do was come [...]

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Tweet Morgan Freeman, a man who lets his periodic acting roles as God and other authority figures go to his head, has now announced that it’s okay to castigate Barack Obama, because Obama isn’t really black.  Instead, he’s half white. It seems cavalier at this junction to point out that Morgan Freeman’s pale coffee skin [...]

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Tweet I’m finding some wonderful gems hidden in my inbox.  This one goes back to April, but is too good not to share now.  It’s a news story about the way in which the Swedish cultural elite — including the Minister of Culture — celebrate.  Here’s a hint about what you’ll see at the link:  [...]

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Tweet Despite any actual evidence, Elizabeth Warren sticks resolutely to her claim that she is 1/32 Native American. This is how crazy people think.  Do you know how I know that?  Because I just watched Bowfinger with the kids. Bowfinger, which was made in 1999, when one could still be at least a little bit [...]

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Tweet Ed Driscoll has the best wrap-up I’ve seen of the bombshell report that Barack Obama either told his literary agent that he was born in Kenya or, when she made a mistake to that effect, was happy to let that mistake sit around, uncorrected, until 2007. Ed’s point, like mine, is that this agency [...]

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Tweet For the MSM, the George Zimmerman thing has turned out to be a bust.  With the exception of the fact that Trayvon Martin is still dead, everything the MSM first reported about the case has proven to be untrue.  Right about now, you’d think that the media would be engaged in some soul-searching and [...]

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Tweet “Facts are stubborn things.” I love that quotation.  John Adams said it back in 1774 when he took on the unpopular job of defending the British troops charged with the killings in the event now known as the Boston Massacre.  Arguing off those same stubborn facts, Adams was able to get those troops acquitted. [...]

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Tweet Subject to a very few exceptions, I don’t see movies during their first runs in movie theaters.  Instead, I see them when they’re released on DVD.  That’s why I’m only watching The Help now. (The Help is a movie about black maids in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi.) Before I go any further [...]

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Tweet The usual crowd of race hustlers, including Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the New Black Panthers and Barack Obama, have been making as much hay as possible out of Trayvon Martin’s death.  Clearly, they think that this episode has ballot potential in November.  I can see only one way in which it does have that [...]

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Tweet Sequestered here on the Left Coast I hadn’t paid any attention to the Trayvon Martin murder.  Today, though, it forced itself into the forefront of my brain.  As the media spins the story, it’s a horrific case of a very wholesome, very young black man cruelly executed in a “safe,” “white” neighborhood by a [...]

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Tweet Jerry Brown has nominated Teveia Barnes to be the new commissioner for California’s Department of Financial Institutions.  This means that she is the ultimate regulatory authority for more than 300 California-chartered banks and other financial institutions. Barnes has an impressive resume, including a lengthy stint as associate general counsel and senior vice president at [...]

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Tweet When I was growing up, February boasted Lincoln’s birthday (February 16 12) and Washington’s birthday (February 22).  When I was no longer a child, those two distinct birthdays — one celebrating America’s first commander in chief and first president, and the other one celebrating the architect of our modern union and the leader of [...]

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Tweet It’s a family stuff day, so blogging has been light, and will continue to be so.  Fortunately, I’ve got friends who send me interesting things which I am so happy to pass on to you.  In no particular order: Wolf Howling has written a fascinating, scholarly dissertation examining the adversarial history of faith and [...]

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Tweet Duane Lester, whose main blogging home is All American Blogger, has come up with a brilliant idea.  He’s set up a site that simply lists all the things that are “racist” in Barack Obama’s America.  Here’s a snippet from Now Racist in the U.S.: Any Political Opposition to President Obama • “Articulate” • Asking Attorney [...]

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Tweet Despite the fact that Republicans are currently busy working the circular firing squad, making outside efforts to destroy them somewhat redundant, the Progressives/Democrats/Media/Usual Suspects aren’t taking any chances about the November 2012 election and have already brought out the big gun:  They’re crying racism. The racism claim that got the biggest headline this week [...]

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Tweet It’s not only conservatives who have noticed that the waning OWS movement was pretty much whiter than white.  Black activist preachers have noticed the same thing and are trying to mobilize their congregants to get out there to camp on sidewalks like homeless people along with the white drug-addicted, violent OWSers: The Rev. Harold [...]

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Tweet A few years ago, those in the know were telling us in no uncertain terms that the EU model was the future — and that America had better get used to playing second fiddle to the economic giant that a united Europe presented.  I found it hard to imagine that Europe would ever be [...]

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Tweet I regularly read James Taranto’s Best of the Web and always enjoy his “Life imitates the Onion” or “Life imitates South Park” shticks.  Imagine my surprise today, when I realized that, this time around, life is imitating a very silly satire I did at my blog almost exactly one year ago. In September 2010, [...]

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Tweet From 2007 through August 2011, daring to question or criticize Obama meant you were a racist.  Now, though, liberals are suggesting that Obama is so toxic he should just walk away from the job.  Holding them to their own standards, aren’t they being racist?  I mean, really, really racist? Please don’t scold me for [...]

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Tweet Kidkaroo, in a comment to my earlier post about the federal requirement that I racially classify my children, explains that, in today’s South Africa, racism is still alive and well — it just runs in the opposite direction from the old days: Down here in the “new” South Africa, we have something similar; I [...]

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