Bookworm Room

Tweet One of the scarier moments in my life occurred back in 1987, when I was traveling with my mother in still-Communist Prague.  We’d originally planned to stay there six days, but a three-day taste of Communism — the shabbiness, the sullen people, the dirty air, the vile food — was all we could stand.  [...]

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Tweet Obama has not had a good week vis a vis Poland.  First, he insulted Lech Walesa; then he managed to insult the entire nation.  In the old days, before we got PC, we would have told a Polish joke . . . about Obama.  (Here’s an old, un-PC joke:  What do you get when [...]

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Tweet To date, I haven’t been paying that much attention to the Obama administration’s Big Government effort to keep America’s young down on the farms, now that they’ve seen TV.  Or can see TV . . . or should see TV, since the Obama administration is barring farm kids from actually working on the farm: [...]

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Tweet At YID with LID, you get to see proof of something we all knew intuitively:  Obama is now and long has been a Marxist. The problem is that this news, which ought to be staggering, doesn’t matter.  Even if one strips away the MSM’s reflexive denial about Obama’s Marxism, the fact that he is [...]

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Tweet Because our government isn’t yet doing enough, or costing enough, or interfering sufficiently in our lives, three researchers at the University of California San Francisco now recommend that the government should regulate sugar, just as it does alcohol and tobacco: A new commentary published online in the Feb. 1 issue of Nature says sugar is just [...]

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Tweet Mom’s in the hospital again and suffering greatly, not in body, but in mind. She’s mildly delusional, and very paranoid, angry and anxious. I can’t imagine how grim it is to live in her head. I slipped away for an hour and had lunch with Don Quixote. Our conversation turned to evil. I believe [...]

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Tweet Andy Stern, who led the SEIU to its current status as a statist political powerhouse, has a lengthy op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, touting the wonders of China’s economic model.  His basic point:  China’s recent economic surge shows that government should control the economy.  To support this premise, he points, not to [...]

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Tweet My mother, who gets a lot of her news from the MSM, is nevertheless slowly becoming aware of the Solyndra scandal — not just the fact that a big solar panel company went bankrupt, but that it went bankrupt at great cost to her, because the Obama administration had bet the farm (or should [...]

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Tweet I warned people close to me (mother, sister, etc.) that Obama was a socialist and they laughed at me and (quite lovingly, because they’re my mom and my sister) called me “extreme.”  I wonder if they would have laughed at Al Sharpton too, now that he’s finally let the cat out of the bag: [...]

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Tweet The American intelligentsia has a love affair with Communism that will not die.  The dead Soviets, the dead Hungarians, Czechs, Albanians, Poles, Bulgarians, etc., the dead Chinese, the dead Koreans, the dead Africans, the dead Cambodians, the dead Vietnamese, the dead Cubans, and the dead Latin Americans are all irrelevant.  Those are just mistakes [...]

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Tweet Since the beginning, climate change skeptics have said that the hysteria of the man-made global warming movement, aside from being based on manifestly shoddy and often dishonest science, was in fact a Leftist political gambit.  The Communists, having failed to win the world over with a Cold War had regrouped and were seeking to [...]

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Tweet There is a lot of talk about whether, looking ahead to the 2010 elections, we’re looking at 1980, or 1994, or 1932 or some other American political year that I can’t even think of right now.  I actually think we’re looking at a different year altogether:  1989.  As you may recall, 1989 was a [...]

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Tweet One of my favorite books, and one I highly recommend, is Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism. The title is self-explanatory, so I won’t belabor what you’ll find when you read it. I mention it here because I believe it was in that book that I read that, from the 1950s [...]

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Tweet Tom Elia links to an utterly fatuous statement from a 25 year old Obama supporter (who nevertheless gets a bully pulpit in a WaPo blog), saying that killing the profit motive will have no effect whatsoever on pharmaceutical innovation.  In the face of such stupidity, I have to drag out my family history once [...]

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Tweet Obama said today, “I will change the world.”  Cal Thomas reminds us that he means it: Is socialism too strong a word [for Obama's end goal]? Consider one of its definitions from dictionary.com and tell me it is something other than Obama’s economic philosophy: “A theory or system of social reform which contemplates a [...]

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Tweet In four paragraphs, Mark Steyn hones in on Obama’s core communist ethos: The Senator and his doting Obots in the media have gone to great lengths to obscure what Barack Obama does when he’s not being a symbol: his voting record, his friends, his patrons, his life outside the soft-focus memoirs is deemed non-relevant [...]

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Tweet We all recognize that, as to the average American, Obama’s friendship with Bill Ayers is a big yawn.  Who cares that, as Obama said, Ayers bombed when Obama was 8?  Who cares, as Obama refuses to admit, that Ayers has never repented and, indeed, wishes he’d done more?  Who cares that Obama’s friend Ayers [...]

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Tweet I carpooled to a soccer game today.  The driver, who is someone I don’t know very well, is a very charming man who is quite obviously a potential Obama voter.  He wasn’t quite sure about me and, since he was a very civil individual, he never came out and either insulted McCain or lauded [...]

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Tweet Even thought I didn’t and couldn’t post yesterday, it didn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention.  I have a whole bunch of links I want to share with you.  I won’t take too much time on any one link, because I have only a short time before the Mom stuff starts again (summer, you know), [...]

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Tweet Obama was caught during his speech to minority journalists making noises that sounded remarkably like reparations talk: “I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged,” the Democratic presidential hopeful said. “I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it’s Native Americans or African-American issues [...]

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Tweet I never thought about it, but I was running my house like a commune.  The kids had chores to do, of course, but the incentive was the greater good, my approbation, and an allowance that, in their minds, had no relationship to the tasks demanded.  The kids did not find these incentives inspiring, and [...]

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Tweet I highly (really highly) recommend that you read Paul Kengor’s piece in today’s American Thinker, Return of the Dupes and the Anti-Anti-Communists. In it, he describes a struggle I remember well from the 1970s (when I became politically aware during the end of the Vietnam era) through the 1990s (during which time I was [...]

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Tweet There was a round-up of illegal aliens in Marin County. The story included the obligatory reference to the children who had to watch their parents being arrested for illegal activity: Wilson said children watched while their parents and other adults were taken away by authorities. Some were removed while accompanying children to the school [...]

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Tweet My father was a very angry man. At whichever job he had, he was pretty darn certain that management was out to get him. At stores, he knew he was being cheated. My mother always attributed this anger, not to the poverty and dislocation of his youth (placed in an orphanage at 5, refugee [...]

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Tweet In an earlier post, I asked how America in the 60s managed to swing over to and completely accept its enemy’s way of defining the situation. That is, the logical American point of view should have been that we were defeating Communism, which is an evil scourge that was trying to take over the [...]

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