Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.
My son asked me how Valentine’s Day began. I explained that, a long time ago, there was a man named Valentine who was known for his kindness to young couples who wished to get married (and he may have given doweries to poor girls so they could marry). He was
Continue readingI wonder where she’ll go from here? It’s a tough (impossible?) act to follow. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the last of seven installments of the boy wizard’s adventures, will be published July 21, authorJ.K. Rowling said Thursday. Rowling announced the publication date on her Web site.
Continue readingIn a peculiar way, I’m becoming very fond of David Denby, one of The New Yorker‘s resident movie reviewers. It’s clear that he aspires to be another Frank Rich — Rich, of course, being the former New York Times‘ theater critic who made the leap to ultra liberal political op-ed
Continue readingI’ve become very fond of David Denby’s movie reviews in the New Yorker, largely because he can’t resist letting his politics leak out all over the place. I’ve blogged before about his slobbering praise for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and his compulsion to use Garrison Keilor’s Prairie Home Companion
Continue readingMy mother and I put our heads together tonight and began bemoaning the absence of charm in our modern world. The subject came up when, a propos something in our conversation, I quoted a line from “Singing in the Rain.” We fell silent a moment as we thought of that
Continue readingAlthough we didn’t ask for it, TiVo decided to record Airport, the 1970 airport disaster movie that started a whole genre of movies about burning buildings and sinking ships, and goodness knows what. I’d never seen it before, although I’ve seen seen Airplane several times. As you know, Airplane, which
Continue readingI don’t ordinarily read Time Magazine, since I decided years ago, even before my political transformation, that it held little interest for me. (Although I distinctly remember, in 1982, a “hip” young man I worked with castigating it as a conservative mag fit only for parents.) The only reason I
Continue readingSince I have a sometimes embarrassing fondness for romance novels (Mr. Bookworm teases me a lot), I’ve written about romance novels before (once about British chick-lit, which I think is demeaning to women; and once about the conservative morals underpinning American romances). I was therefore intrigued when AP did a
Continue readingWhen two people leave me messages saying I must, absolutely must, read a movie review, I take that seriously. I therefore headed over to the Washington Post and read the review for Ant Bully. I can now tell you that you must, absolutely must, read the Ant Bully review. Even
Continue readingI can’t decide if this is the beginning of the end for any hope of normal society in Holland, or if it is an appropriate event in a free society, which allows issues to be aired and decided upon by the voters: A Dutch court refused Monday to ban a
Continue readingOne of today’s most emailed NPR stories discusses a book by Robert Jensen, a professor of media ethics and journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. In his book, Jensen purports to explain why all white people are in fact racists. I haven’t listened to the story, nor have
Continue readingThe New York Times has come up with an editorial that contains a perfect bootstrapping argument, one that works off the premise it is supposed to prove. It's an almost impressive piece of dishonest rhetoric, whether or not one agrees with the sentiment expressed. The context for this amazing piece
Continue readingNPR's Fresh Air recently did a replay of a 1996 interview with Tiny Tim (born Herbert B. Khaury), who died only a few months after the interview. It's quite amazing. Tiny Tim was a complete nut, but also a true musical savant, with an encylopedic knowledge of old American music,
Continue readingThe West Wing, the now defunct NBC show, is the ne plus ultra illustration of how Democrats think the world should be run. Indeed, you can amuse yourself with a list of top Left Wing scenes culled from all of the show's episodes. Last night, though, I was struck by
Continue readingI'm intransigently hostile to a great deal of modern pop music, because I consider it ugly, crude, vulgar, violent and hypersexualized. (I feel like saying here, "But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?) I don't even like Radio Disney because, although it presents the slighter
Continue reading