Bookworm Room

Tweet During the past week, whenever I found myself alone in the car during good drive-time talk radio (i.e., Rush), I did something unusual:  I didn’t listen.  Instead, I turned to mindless pop music.  I was thinking about this peculiar behavior on my part, because I truly love Rush.  I think he’s a radio genius, [...]

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Tweet I’m still reading scattered posts castigating Mitt Romney for being a bad candidate or running a bad campaign.  I understand the need to analyze failures to identify remediable errors, but we’re making a huge mistake focusing on the end of the campaign, rather than the beginning.  One could say the beginning of the campaign [...]

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Tweet Paul Scott challenged us to look at what Eric Garland, a Progressive blogger, has to say and to take it seriously as a way to win the White House.  Paul is right — we cannot make a convincing argument unless we know what our opponent in the argument believes.  Insulting Paul doesn’t make us [...]

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Tweet Bill Whittle explains very clearly why it’s a mistake in this election for those who dislike Obama to a protest vote for a third party, or not vote at all, in order to protest the fact that Republicans are so far from perfect.  It’s a principled stand, certainly, but it is also one that [...]

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Tweet A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the fact that “the most brilliant president ever” doesn’t know the difference between an endorser and an endorsee.  As you may recall, an Abraham Lincoln impersonator showed up at Obama’s campaign event, leading Obama to say “‘My homeboy from Illinois,’ Obama said, ‘and an outstanding Republican [...]

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Tweet I am very, very proud of an old friend of mine.  Like me, he’s a conservative in Marin.  Unlike me, he’s burst out of the political closet.  Tim Amyx will now be blogging on a weekly basis at the Mill Valley Patch, a local Marin online publication that comes out of one of Marin’s [...]

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Tweet I’ve been corresponding with a group of conservatives who are very strongly divided between Romney and Gingrich.  I’m pleased to say that, while the debate is substantively heated, it also never veers away from common decency and civility.  My latest contribution to the email string, right after mention of a brokered convention, was as [...]

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Tweet We all met Navy One when he was just one of us — a guy who wrote delightful, interesting comments on my blog.  When Navy One decided to try his hand at blogging, he took that same charm and . . . well, the rest is history, as The Mellow Jihadi, launched just this [...]

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Tweet For conservatives and libertarians, the movie icons might be High Noon or True Grit.  For Liberals, the defining anthem is John Lennon’s “Imagine“. Why is there such a fundamental gulf between ourselves and Liberals, to the point where we find ourselves simply talking past each other? Can this gulf ever be bridged? I came [...]

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Tweet I attended a family gathering not long ago, liberally populated with Liberal in-laws,  in which the mood was decidedly sour. Discussions revolved around the poor job market, employment uncertainty and health insurance. In conversations, a lot of resentment was directed at corporations, CEOs and their “disgusting and greedy” profits, salaries, benefits and bonuses. I [...]

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Tweet Democrats are the friends of big business, Conservatives are the friends of small business. Democrat government inevitably ratchets its way to corruptocracy. If you don’t agree with this, can we at least agree that Democrats favor highly regulated economies and societies and conservatives don’t? Let me explain with two examples. 1) The Wall Street [...]

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Tweet We are a family of tea drinkers.  As dedicated tea drinkers, we like good tea, which usually means loose leaf tea.  Loose leaf tea, in turn, means special tea makers.  Our favorite is the Adagio Ingenuitea Teapot, which makes one perfect cup of tea at a time.  The only downside of the Ingenuitea maker [...]

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Tweet Vanderleun, who blogs at the wonderful American Digest, put me on to a liberal Massachusetts blog that tells its readers to suck it up and vote for Coakley: Let’s get this out of the way.  You might not want to vote for Martha Coakley.  You might think she deserves what’s she’s getting after an [...]

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Tweet It wasn’t a huge turn-out, but it was an imaginative, committed, informed turn-out — and that, in the long run, will matter a great deal.  Check out The City Square for photographs of yesterday’s “Sick-In” in San Francisco protesting PelosiCare.

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Tweet In the wake of the 2008 election, Republicans and conservatives were paralyzed.  They’d been trounced, not so much by sweeper percentages (that is, the elections were all just over the slightly 50% mark), but by huge numbers of elections in which Democrats edged out Republicans by those few percentage marks.  If there are 100 [...]

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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 Zhombre forwarded this email to me.  I think it’s right on the money: If a conservative doesn’t like guns, he doesn`t buy one. If a liberal doesn’t like guns, he wants all guns outlawed. If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn`t eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat [...]

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Tweet The nature of conservatism is to be . . . well, conservative.  We don’t throw paint on people.  We don’t burn figures in effigy.  We don’t bite off fingers.  We put our heads down and do our jobs.  So when two million conservatives (and independents) take the time, the energy and the money to [...]

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Tweet Five People in a Kitchen By Danny Lemieux Part I: We need focus! We were just five concerned Americans meeting in a middle class Chicagoland suburb on a cold spring day. Our point for this meeting was not to gripe. It was to see if we could identify constructive solutions to the Democrat Left’s [...]

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Tweet One of my ongoing themes here is the fact that I keep my conservatism very, very low key.  Most situations in my life don’t involve politics, but when politics come up, I’m quite careful.  I have no wish to be savaged.  Jim Miller, who lives in and writes about an equally liberal environment — [...]

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Tweet The gal who started the Marin conservative gatherings that I’ve had the pleasure of attending sent out a broadcast email reminding all conservatives, especially those trapped in blue communities, that it’s not enough to sit at home, read the blogs and complain.  We have to work towards a change in 2010.  If we wait [...]

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Tweet The San Francisco Chronicle ran an article today touting the demise of the GOP in California: With their registrations sinking and their political clout withering, California Republicans have come out of the November election in danger of slipping into political irrelevance across much of the state. [snip] Since 2004, Republican registration has dropped by [...]

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Tweet Ymarsakar brought to my attention a post I wrote over three years ago.  I’m reprinting a slightly edited version here, not just because I think it describes well the Arab psyche that drives so much of current international politics (and fears) today, but also because I think it does a good job of describing [...]

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Tweet Conservatives are regrouping and trying to come up with approaches to remarket themselves to Americans.  Quin Hillyer thinks it’s too late.  He may well be right, but I’m not taking a defeatist attitude.  The problem is that, once we give up, he’ll definitely be right. As it is, we have an election in two [...]

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Tweet I’m getting emails from committed conservatives who are unhappy right now, feeling that the air has gone out of the election balloon.  I’m looking at things a different way. The ACORN registration fraud has inflated the numbers of registered Democrats.  Given that some people registered as Dems 72 times, there is no way that [...]

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