Bookworm Room

Tweet Jonathan Last has as good a summation as any I’ve seen of the now open warfare between Barack Obama and his erstwhile ally, the fairly liberal American Catholic Church.  The article ends with an effort to understand why Obama would pick this battle, and why he would pick it now.  It’s certainly an interesting [...]

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Tweet Barbara Boxer has taken to the pages of the Huffington Post to explain why the administration’s mandate that all insurers provide birth control, including drugs that induce abortion, advances rather than restricts, religious freedom.  If you like Orwell’s Newspeak, Boxer’s writing is a thing of beauty and will certainly be a joy forever as [...]

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Tweet In the halcyon pre-Obama days, when Prop. 8 meant that gay marriage was a hot blogging issue, I argued that religion organizations, not the state, should be allowed to define what constitutes a “marriage,” with states confined to authorizing “civil unions.”  In that context, I commented upon the religious implications of the government mandating [...]

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Tweet A few days ago, writing with regard to the media’s decision to ignore the standing ovations Newt received during the last South Carolina debate, I asked “If the Press Ignores an Event, Does It Exist?“  The press, it turns out, wants to take that experiment in ignoring facts as far as it can go. [...]

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Tweet Here’s the lede: The great thing about living in San Francisco is that it is socially and culturally responsible. The bad thing is, a city that is so socially and culturally responsible can’t resist taking the bait when a fringe group tries to provoke a reaction. In a non-Bizarro world, one might think that [...]

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Tweet (Market Street, by Alfonso Jiminez) Market Street is San Francisco’s main drag.  There are other major streets in the City, but Market Street the one that starts just below Twin Peaks and travels diagonally northeast all the way to the Ferry Building.  It traverses the Castro District, the outer fringes of the Mission District, [...]

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Tweet Republican voters, struggling to decide which candidate will best handle the myriad problems facing America under the Obama regime — problems that include a stagnant economy, a collapsing Europe, a boiling Middle East, etc. — were treated to a New Hampshire debate that focused on . . . birth control.  A post-debate NYT op-ed [...]

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Tweet David Axelrod’s talk yesterday included a shout-out to the lovable Nancy Pelosi, whom he feels is unfairly maligned by the Rushes of this world.  Per David, Nancy is not an effete San Francisco liberal.  Instead, she’s a tough political operative — for all the right, i.e., Progressive, reasons, of course — who was trained [...]

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Tweet One of the Progressive tropes is that conservatives are anti-science.  As with everything emanating from the Left, not only is this untrue about conservatives, but it falsely implies that Progressives respect science.  One only needs to see the celebration about a defeated initiative in Mississippi to appreciate how deeply anti-science the Left can be: [...]

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Tweet During the gay marriage debate, I mentioned to a lawyer friend of mine that gay marriage would inevitably set up a church versus state conflict if a church refused to marry a gay couple — especially the Catholic Church, which counts marriage amongst its sacraments.  My lawyer friend came back with what he thought [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet I commented earlier that Focus on the Family handled the whole Tebow ad brilliantly, by letting the Left get hysterical in advance, only to be confronted by a completely innocuous ad in which Pam Tebow talks about times when she worried about Tim’s life.  With its preemptive frothing, the Left managed to show anyone [...]

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Tweet I think that Focus on the Family took a page out of Andrew Breitbart’s book.  They dangled a little information in front of the liberals, and then let them self-immolate.  In response to the notion that Tebow and his mom were going to make a pro-Life commercial, the Left went completely unhinged, with obscene [...]

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Tweet My views on abortion have changed mightily over the years.  The selfish, immature side of me still longs for a pro-choice label, but the mature, moral side of me has concluded that, subject to a few exceptions, pro-Life is the way to go.  I won’t expand on that right now, but you can see [...]

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Tweet Yesterday I wrote a long post about the fact that the abortion debate, at least on the pro-choice side, ignores social and medical advances that should make it a very different debate from the one that led to Roe v. Wade.  I think this is an important conversation, because of the fact that ObamaCare [...]

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Tweet I dreamed last night about the first ultrasound I had when I was pregnant with my daughter.  I was sixteen weeks pregnant, and had been throwing up non-stop for 15 1/2 of those sixteen weeks.  I was not happy.  I resented the parasite within me.  And then I saw the sonogram image and discovered [...]

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Tweet Sen.  Ben Nelson is mad.  How dare the voters (and, especially, the conservatives) attack him simply for changing his mind on health care: “This is all orchestrated,” Nelson said Sunday. “It’s so thinly disguised … it’s almost laughable. Nelson, the lone Democrat in Nebraska’s five-member congressional delegation, told The AP that a high-ranking Republican [...]

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Tweet Whether you are for or against gay marriage, Robert George issues a sound warning about the dangers that flow from letting the Supreme Court get its hands on the issue: It would be disastrous for the justices to do so [rule against California's Prop. 8 and, by extension, make gay marriage the law of [...]

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Tweet If you read Michelle Malkin, you already know about Zombie’s post exposing the unrepentant eugenicist past of John Holdren, Obama’s science czar.  Writing in the early 1970s, when the trendy concern was the population explosion (promising every a brutish Malthusian future), Holdren eagerly espoused a world order with forced abortions; mandatory sterliziation of those [...]

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Tweet The Left is tremendously excited about what they see as the hypocrisy behind the pro-Life movement because one of their own murdered George Tiller, a late-term abortion provider.  Their excitement isn’t surprising, since they seem incapable of separating a crazed individual from the vast majority of pro-Lifers, all of whom routinely condemn violence generally [...]

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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 On April 30, Daniel Henninger wrote a very good column about one of Obama’s pre-election gifts — his ability to prevaricate so smoothly that everyone listening ended up believing that Obama was agreeing with his or her point of view: Early in the campaign, in January 2007, a New York Times reporter wrote a [...]

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Tweet I’m ambivalent about abortion.  I grew up pro-choice, and have always accepted that, in certain situations, pregnancy is simply too burdensome.  When I was young, I set a very low standard for what constituted “burdensome.”  As I’ve grown older and had children of my own, that standard has become very high. No matter my [...]

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Tweet Conservatives have two stark choices right now:  they can self-destruct or they can create a workable paradigm for moving forward. The self-destruction possibility is playing out before our eyes.  Kathleen Parker fired the opening salvo with her screed about the evil oogedy-boogedy Christians that are tainting conservatism.  Charles Johnson is also taking potshots at [...]

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