Bookworm Room

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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A few days ago, writing with regard to the media’s decision to ignore the standing ovations Newt received during the last South Carolina debate, I asked “If the Press Ignores an Event, Does It Exist?“  The press, it turns out, wants to take that experiment in ignoring facts as far as it can go. Today, [...]

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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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We all know the philosophical question that asks, “If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The media is trying a variation on this question by asking, “If we completely ignore a fact, so that no one hears about it, does the fact [...]

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Ever since Obama became president, the war dead have vanished.  During the Bush presidency, enemy deaths filled that papers as we were accused of mass slaughter; during the Obama presidency, I think our troops are just out there having nice cups of tea with the bad guys, because none of the latter seem to be [...]

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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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As you already know, I’m sure, the Ultra-Orthodox in Jerusalem are fighting hard to segregate men and women in public spaces in Jerusalem.  I posted about the fact that Mr. Bookworm analogized this small group, which is fighting against a democratic, egalitarian government, to the sharia law that exists across large segments of the Muslim [...]

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You remember Ilario Pantano, don’t you?  Well, maybe not.   It’s been a long time now since the media savaged his reputation, selling him to Americans as a cold-blooded killer, a story that ran endlessly on newspaper front pages and in TV headlines.  Interestingly, the media was pretty quiet when the report came out clearing Pantano [...]

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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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As I was up early, I listened to KSFO’s Brian Sussman show.  A man called in, identified himself as someone who works at the Port of Oakland, and described with some amusement the eight or so luxury buses that pulled up, disgorging a bunch of people in their 30s and 40s, completely with mass-produced signs, [...]

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It’s an old story:  A man and a woman meet at work and they hit it off.  They’re both married, although not to each other.  One lunch turns into two, two into three, and eventually they’ve got a pattern.  For years, they get together two or three times a week as regularly as clockwork, share [...]

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Rush let ‘er rip against the media this morning regarding its utter failure to investigate any aspect of Obama’s life, even as it subjects Republican candidates to the most invasive investigations and demeaning tactics imaginable.   It’s a long riff, but every bit of it is interesting, and you’ll probably be nodding your head and saying [...]

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Normally, if I stumbled across a political hit piece rife with unsubstantiated accusations, I wouldn’t include it in any serious discussion at my blog.  Depending on its target, I might read it with a certain amount of pleasure, and I might even provide a link for you guys, along with a warning that the linked [...]

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Antisemitism in connection with OWS was a no-brainer.  The Left is antisemitic.  It has been since Marx.  Hitler institutionalized it to deadly effect.  Stalin was less methodical than Hitler, but he made Judaism illegal and instituted various pogroms within his own party to drive out, imprison or kill Jews. No matter how many Jews are [...]

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We know two pivotal facts about Operation Fast & Furious, aka the Gunwalker scandal: The U.S. Justice Department arranged for thousands of American weapons to cross our Southern border, knowingly placed them in Mexican criminal hands, and sat back and watched while hundreds of Mexicans and some Americans (including border patrol officers) were then killed [...]

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I do love the way my liberal Facebook friends make me aware of things I wouldn’t otherwise notice.  One of those things is a Matt Miller op-ed in the Washington Post, which imagines the perfect speech a dream independent candidate would give.  As Miller describes it: This is one columnist’s stab at what a candidate [...]

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One of the hallmarks of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Nazi Revolution (because, although the ballot was used in 1932, it was a revolution), the Hussein Iraq takeover (which was also a form of revolution), and other totalitarian takeovers is that the paranoid leadership style inherent in totalitarianism invariably means that the revolution [...]

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Apparently a video of her employees gleefully cuddling up to the Muslim Brotherhood, all the while trashing conservatives, Tea Partiers, and Jews, was the infamous straw that broke the NPR camel’s back:  Vivian Schiller just got fired.  (Although NPR is already phrasing it as a resignation — a forced resignation, I assume.)  I doubt that [...]

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I never liked Jean-Luc Godard movies.  I go to movies to be entertained, not bored.  He failed my simple test. Aside from being (in my mind) a boring film maker, it turns out that he is, as well, a deep, blatant, vicious antisemite.  Of course, if you’re a New York Times consumer, you’d never know [...]

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I was very surprised to see an AP wire story reporting that Islamic militants (as opposed to mere “militants” or “insurgents”) were holding “Christians” (as opposed to mere “people”) hostage.  Even more surprising, the AP reported that the Islamic militants were probably affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq, an entity one apparently couldn’t acknowledge during [...]

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It turns out that Iowahawk isn’t the only gifted satirist in the conservative community.  Zombie’s got the goods on O’Donnell (satirically, of course).

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If you haven’t already, please read Steve Schippert’s guest post on this blog about the animating anti-American forces driving WikiLeaks.  If you don’t have time to click on over, here’s the money quote: Wikileaks is a small cabal of people who, in their own site description, “Publishes and comments on leaked documents alleging government and [...]

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Two of my absolute favorite political writers, Peter Wehner and Jennifer Rubin, have chastised O’Donnell for her recently reported constitutional error.  I think that, perhaps, they’re being unfair.  It’s clear from reading the news reports that the Constitutional portion of the debate was intended to be a pile-up on O’Donnell: Also during the debate, O’Donnell [...]

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