Bookworm Room

Simple language and documented facts create a powerful indictment of Obama’s presidency.

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BUDS trainees during Hell Week Special troops are, by definition, small in number.  If everyone could do what they do, they would be special.  They are made up of men with unusual mental and physical strength.  Again, by definition this is a subset of all men.  (No disrespect meant to the majority of men who [...]

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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 fight [...]

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It’s already old news to you that statistical data shows that Obama is the most polarizing president ever.  Much as I’d like to blame Obama, it seems that, rather than causing the polarization, he reflects it: One Gallup chart ranks presidents from Eisenhower to Obama on polarization during their third year in office. Obama is [...]

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I’m planning a trip this summer to Japan, a country about which I know nothing.  Actually that’s an overstatement.  I know some things:  it’s beautiful, historic, and clean (I love that part), and comes complete with great food and well-mannered people.  But that’s all I know. Toji Pagoda I don’t have this tabula rasa problem [...]

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Did you ever see Liar Liar?  In it, Jim Carrey (before he got pompous) plays an attorney who lies compulsively but, because of a spell his son places on him, is unable to tell a lie for 24 hours.  It’s a rather amusing movie especially the courtroom scenes. Sultan Knish clearly had a dream that [...]

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We tend to find what we’re looking for.  Since conservatives know that Obama comes from a socialist background, has advanced policies that are antithetical to capitalism, and has defeated opportunities and initiatives that are supportive of capitalism, we’re going to assume that, in any speech he gives, ordinary statements are actually code for a socialist [...]

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Clark S. Judge sent to Hugh Hewitt a great note analyzing what Obama really said during the SOTU.  I’m going to do something here that I almost never do, which is to reprint the note in its entirety at my own blog, albeit reformatted from the original.  Why?  Because the paragraph breaks vanished at Hugh [...]

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One of my father’s favorite stories concerned his niece, who lived on a farm in Israel.  Daddy was visiting there one day when he saw his niece, who was then about 5, playing with a wee little baby goat.   At this point in his narrative, Daddy would always stop and explain to the city-bred people [...]

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Obama has consistently handed out cash to the unions and his cronies, but he’s planning on stripping the military to its bare bones.  This is not the same as trimming the fat and increasing efficiency.  Instead, he envisions the American military in say, circa 1917 or 1941.  Yes, we won both those wars, but at [...]

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We can expect tomorrow night’s State of the Union address to be an action-packed hour (or so) of vitriol and self-pity.  Obama will cherry-pick a few numbers about the 1% and then whine about how he’s been trying really hard to destroy that same 1%, but that a vast array of insurmountable obstacles — Congress, [...]

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People are rightly protesting on religious grounds the fact that Obama has mandated that health care plans must cover birth control and morning after pills: Most healthcare plans will be required to cover birth control without charging co-pays or deductibles starting Aug. 1, the Obama administration announced Friday. The final regulation retains the approach federal [...]

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Yesterday, my sister emailed me a “cheer up” email that’s making the rounds.  It’s intended for women, who tend to feel more strongly than men do that the mirror is their enemy.  The tag line is “It isn’t just us who suffer changes over the years!”  The rest of the email is photos of former [...]

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Yes, that’s a wildly mixed, virtually unintelligible metaphor in my post title, but I can actually explain it.  Iran is pranking the U.S.  Considering the way in which we were assured that an Obama in the White House would inaugurate a new era of foreign policy, what the Iranians are doing is funny, but it’s [...]

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On Facebook the other day, one of my friends offered her services as an English tutor — and included a grammatical error in her offer.  Admittedly, it was an error that involved a usage that has been changing over time, but I still expect an English tutor to avoid this particular mistake.  Even if her [...]

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I’m very suspicious of “studies.”  As a liberal, I was ready to trust anything that came out of academia.  As a conservative, I’m suspicious of academia, because I know it’s more interested in specific outcomes than in the scientific method.  A good example of this is a survey that was sent around to Marin County [...]

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You’re not imagining it.  I haven’t had a dang thing to say about Barack Obama’s brazen constitutional violation, which was also an indirect repudiation of the 2010 mid-term elections.  His decision unilaterally to declare the Senate on a “recess” and then to make “recess” appointments has been analyzed to death and I agree with everyone:  [...]

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It is tempting, when reading the morning headlines, to think “Isn’t it a nasty coincidence that all this dislocation in the world happened during Barack Obama’s unusually weak presidency?  Couldn’t the Arab Spring have taken place while Bush was president?  And it’s just too bad that the Euro collapsed on his watch?”  And on and [...]

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There’s nothing like a Progressive who’s not worrying about reelection.  If you thought Barney Frank’s moobs were repellent, wait until you get a look inside Lynn Woolsey’s brain.  The 10-term House Democrat from Marin County is retiring this year, so she finally feels that she can speak freely.  It’s not pretty. For example, we learn [...]

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Well-known Leftists in the media and academia are puffing how scandal-free the Obama administration has been.  Michelle Malkin points out that the only way they can make that statement with a straight face is if they’re playing the three monkeys game:

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It doesn’t feel very merry if you watch Bill Whittle (but you should still watch): (Or view it here.)

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I am buried under laundry, house cleaning, caring for parent and children, organizing photos to be digitized (half price, thanks to a Groupon), getting out Christmas cards created and sent, and paying bills.  Coherent thought eludes me.  Cogent essays are an impossibility. But, all is not lost!  Even as I moulder intellectually, others are writing [...]

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I came of age in the post-Vietnam era.  Let me amend that:  I came of age in San Francisco in the post-Vietnam era.  Although Fleet Week, which started in the City about 20+ years ago has done a lot to turn things around, San Francisco has not been a military friendly city, and most definitely [...]

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“Facts are stubborn things.”  — John Adams. “Ideologues are even more stubborn than facts.”  — Bookworm A few nights ago, Mr. Bookworm watched the movie Shattered Glass with the children.  It’s a fairly good retelling of the way in which Stephen Glass, a young feature writer at The New Republic, wrote a series of fraudulent [...]

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A friend sent me a link to a post at Whatever, a blog that John Scalzi runs.  Scalzi, who describes himself as a “pinko commie socialist,” is interested — truly, not snarkily, interested — in the views Republicans/conservatives/libertarians currently hold when looking at the Republican primary field.  Having the luxury of my own blog, I [...]

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