Bookworm Room

Tweet “Who’s Thomas Sowell?” my daughter asked. “He’s a genius,” I replied. “Why?” “Because he has the rare gift of simplifying very complex ideas without dumbing them down.” See for yourself: After listening to Sowell, my blog’s motto seems appropriate:  “Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.” [...]

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Tweet Al Gore got a lot of mileage out of likening the slow accretion of anthropogenic climate change to a frog in cold water that was gradually being heated to boiling point. He contended that, just as the frogs were lulled by the gradual heat to be the point at which they’d fail to react [...]

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Tweet I added a little something to the Washington Free Beacon’s top story today:

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Tweet National Review Online had three articles this morning that I thought worth passing on.  The first two form a matched set, although I suspect it was inadvertent that NRO published them on the same day. We begin with Noemie Emery’s article explaining why Franklin Roosevelt was a singular phenomenon: Put aside the fact that [...]

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Tweet Danny Lemieux left a link to this video in the comments.  I think it deserves its own post.  You might also want to share it with your friends.  It’s studiously non-partisan, so one hopes it will make liberals thoughtful, rather than defensive. Incidentally, if any of your liberal friends think the answer is just [...]

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Tweet The Huffington Post is one of the ugliest websites I’ve ever seen.  I’m not talking about content (although I’ll get to that), but about its layout.  The left-most column (and that turns out to be a very clever pun on my part) actually has some visual stability, insofar as it allows the hapless visitor [...]

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Tweet Albert Einstein allegedly defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Austin O’Malley looked at the process of insanity: “A sane man often reasons from sound premises; an insane man commonly reasons as well, but the premises are unsound.” And Guy de Maupassant examined that peculiar phenomenon [...]

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Tweet ABC reports that President Obama treated two service men and two local barbers to a high-fat Father’s Day lunch (high-fat, at least, for Obama), and then left without paying the tab: Amid the bustle of President Obama’s surprise stop for barbecue Wednesday the White House apparently overlooked one key detail: the bill. Celebrating Father’s [...]

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Tweet I tend to shy away from predicting the future.  If I’m right, the future was probably so obvious that everyone else had the same prediction.  If I’m wrong, I should have known better, and I end up walking away sadly scraping the egg from my face. All morning, though, I’ve been toying with a [...]

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Tweet Women have been responsible for some pretty bad presidents.  Warren Harding leaps most easily to mind, since his was the first presidential election in which women participated, but women were also water carriers for JFK and Bill Clinton. The Barack Obama campaign clearly hoped to capitalize on women’s bad habit of voting for bad [...]

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Tweet This article that just appeared in Bloomberg.com, regarding Stockton-writ-California-writ-USA-writ-large’s pending bankruptcy, is just so absolutely jaw-dropping crazy…uh, no, wait….it isn’t really so crazy after all. Never mind. If Stockton Is Broke, Why Isn’t San Diego?: Steven Greenhut http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-02/if-stockton-is-broke-then-why-isn-t-san-diego-steven-greenhut.html Here’s the money take-away: referencing the fact that, for the past 20 years, city employees could [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet 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 — [...]

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Tweet Does history repeat itself? I fervently hope not. Ok, I have grudgingly thrown my support behind Mitt Romney. It’s not that I am excited about Romney as a candidate, but I am genuinely excited about the need to get Obama out of office before he does irreversible damage to this country. But, here is [...]

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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 Oh dear, it appears the CBO has turned a tad pessimistic about its earlier prognostications on the economy, stimulus and ObamaCare, heralded as dogma and chiseled in stone tablets on the alters of the Left’s Temple of Orthodoxy.   Drinks all around for the Bookworm Room denizens that correctly anticipated the outcomes cited herein. [...]

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Tweet Given this blog’s recent flogging of the China versus U.S. (“us”) question, here is  a primary example of how China may surpass the U.S. by becoming more business friendly as it decentralizes while the U.S. risks having to learn the lessons of socialist history all over again as our over-regulated economy grinds down to [...]

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Tweet Is our democracy germinating the seeds of its own destruction? Alexis de Toqueville warned, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” That day has come. It is not yet gone. Democracy  in ancient Athens lasted about 250 years. We in the [...]

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Tweet San Francisco is definitely up in the top five when it comes to “most Progressively governed cities in America.”  No surprise, then, that the city’s finances are in a shambles.  What is a surprise is the fact that, faced with a looming budget collapse, the City has suddenly discovered capitalist incentives:  it’s offering the [...]

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Tweet One of my all-time favorite economic historians is Harvard’s Niall Ferguson, who does a very good job dissecting the transatlantic political and economic cultures with characteristic British clarity in erudition. He’s not perfect, however: witness his bad judgment in affixing his name to a worn-out political rag like Newsweek. But, I digress… In this nonetheless [...]

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Tweet There’s an excellent article in the WSJ about the challenges that retiring baby boomers face as 401(k)s fail to meet their retirement needs. I don’t know if this can be accessed without an online subscription to the WSJ, so to summarize…buffeted by two major stock market crashes, most baby boomers on the cusp of [...]

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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 I was at my church this past weekend and was struck by the large number of college-graduate children that are now back living at home with their parents, out of work. The impression I have is that many of these kids still have no idea what they want to do with their lives. 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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