Bookworm Room

Tweet [UPDATE:  The school board stopped mulling and decided to act.] Last week, I wrote a long, ruminative post questioning how far a democracy must go to protect its minorities.  Stepping in, right on cue, the San Francisco School District, which is facing a disastrous budget shortfall, is considering a huge expansion in a program [...]

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Tweet I’m working on a post, but thought you all would find this interesting in the meantime: From AJ Strata, something that’s not just interesting, but is also terrifying:  the terrorists are out there and, having gotten the measure of our new president and his administration, they are massing for war. If you needed a [...]

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Tweet I have to admit that I’ve gotten to the point with President Obama that, whatever he’s for, I’m automatically against in the first instance, at least until I’ve had a chance to check it out.  Take, for example, his recent proposal for a “three-year freeze on discretionary, ‘non-security’ spending.“  My very first reaction was, [...]

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Tweet My daughter’s Spanish class has spent the last couple of days watching a movie.  I know many people who learned English by watching American television, so I don’t have a problem with using movies as a teaching device.  I do, however, have a big problem with the movie chosen — La Misma la Luna [...]

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Tweet This is a portmanteau post, filled with interesting things I read today, some of which come in neatly matched sets. Opening today’s San Francisco Moronicle, the first thing I saw was that an illegal teen’s arrest is causing a stir in San Francisco’s halls of power.  You see, San Francisco is a sanctuary city, [...]

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Tweet I’m having a minor mid-life crisis.  I’ve been a practicing lawyer for almost 23 years now.  I’m quite good at what I do, but I hate it.  And lately, it’s been getting harder and harder to flog myself into getting the work done and meeting the deadlines.  (Although I should assure any current or [...]

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Tweet I’m reading a very enjoyable novel right now that is completely tuned in to the way in which the Left operates, especially when it comes to the media and academia. The writer is completely tuned into the name calling that substitutes for informed debate. For example, when the book’s protagonist, Paul, learns that Leftists [...]

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Tweet When parents think about what a school should do for their children, they think in terms of the three “Rs,” plus a lovely layering of science, history, and other subjects that maketh a full (and employable) man.  The politically correct Nanny State, however, cares little for education and a great deal for ideology.  It [...]

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Tweet For reasons that make no sense to me, I don’t go to Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government site as often as I should.  Wait, I take that back.  I know precisely why I don’t go:  it’s an incredible repository of closely researched and factually supported articles detailing the way in which the Obami conduct themselves.  [...]

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Tweet No, my post title does not mean I’ve gone off my rocker and started supporting Kevin Jennings in his role as Safe Schools Czar.  Thanks to Terresa Monroe’s hard work, I’ve known for months exactly what kind of person Kevin Jennings, the “Safe School Czar” is.  He’s a career gay man who is devoted [...]

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Tweet When I was a very little girl, back in the hard drinking 1960s, an expression I frequently heard was that someone or something needed a bit of “the hair of the dog that bit you.”  I used to think that actually meant people would consume dog hair to cure their ills.  It was only [...]

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Tweet The UC regents voted for a steep increase in tuition.   Some have pointed to the unedifying spectacle of whining middle class students taking to the streets to protest the tuition increase, since they prefer to have California’s working class, most of whom will not attend the school, bear the financial burden.  Although I agree [...]

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Tweet I remain absolutely convinced that Obama, the boy genius of the left, is a product of affirmative action who is hiding his academic record because it is dismal.  If it weren’t dismal, he’d be showing it off.  Frankly, though, after thirty years of affirmative action, we expected nothing more from our academic institutions.  That’s [...]

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Tweet Yesterday, I noted two sterling examples of physical bravery in the battlefield.  I’d like, today, to pay homage to moral bravery in the face of both verbal and physical attacks.  Despite withering fire from her school and the community, and despite threat physical confrontations, knife threats and property attacks, conservative student Kristen Campbell has [...]

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Tweet Horrible story of what happens when political correctness and fear of a violent minority group culminate in a school that saw the administration look the other way for fear of offending those violent minority sensibilities. This, by the way, is how that paralyzing political correctness, a sensiblity that saps courage and morality, begins.

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Tweet We used to view ourselves as a shining City on the Hill, a nation that hadn’t always done right but that, more than any other nation, had changed the world’s concept of liberty — and that in the last century had saved more people from tyranny than any other nation in the history of [...]

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Tweet The conservative internet is appropriately riled by a video of New Jersey public school children singing a song to the Obama: Lyrics ======== Mmm, mmm, mm! Barack Hussein Obama He said that all must lend a hand [?] To make this country strong again Mmm, mmm, mm! Barack Hussein Obama He said we must [...]

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Tweet I pretty much have no words for how much I hated UC Berkeley.  And I see from Steve Crowder’s visit there that little has changed:

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Tweet I gave the post the above title because, in England, even a woman who is a convicted sexual predator gets to keep up her relationship with the victim: A public school music teacher was today jailed for lesbian sex with a 15-year-old pupil – but was given an astonishing green light to continue the [...]

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Tweet I am not at all pleased that Obama is going to descend upon an impressionable and captive audience on September 8.  While I don’t expect him to do much more than mouth “lame” platitudes about education and service (meaning, of course, service to liberal causes not, God forbid, military service), I’m offended on principle [...]

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Tweet My children, despite having one liberal parent and one conservative one, have come down firmly and absolutely on the side of conservatism.  They loath Obama.  Thank God, too, because Obama is going to use the power of the federal government to speak directly to America’s children, bypassing their parents as gatekeepers and intermediaries.  It’s [...]

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Tweet One of my main bases for hostility to teacher’s unions is that increasingly have nothing to do with their original goal, which was ensuring a living wage and decent working conditions for teachers.  (Not that they were always that effective at serving their original union mandate.  My father was a teacher and he did [...]

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Tweet When the San Francisco School Board voted to do away with the district’s JROTC program, program supporters (unsurprisingly, perhaps because of the military elements of JROTC) fought back.  And they won!

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Tweet Unlike many people, I was not shocked to learn that the LA Unified School District is paying teachers not to teach, although the $10 million price tag strikes me as just a tad unreasonable.  In the early 1970s, one of my teachers was a scary guy (not to mention a bad teacher).  Because of [...]

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Tweet Our school system is dealing with a very fluid situation, as information about the swine flu changes from minute to minute.  My sense, currently, is that it’s real, it’s out there, it’s spreading fast (as if it was November, not April) and, in the U.S., it’s not a very serious threat as compared to [...]

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