Bookworm Room

Tweet Hi, DQ here. Dagon posted a comment to another entry so interesting I thought I'd post a new entry on it. In response to my question as to what he would do, Dagon said: [C]omplete independence from middle-east oil; a consistent foreign policy which advocates human rights everywhere and not just where it’s financially [...]

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Tweet This is a terrible tragedy: U.S. forces killed two Iraqi women — one of them about to give birth — when the troops shot at a car that failed to stop at an observation post in a city north of Baghdad, Iraqi officials and relatives said Wednesday. Nabiha Nisaif Jassim, 35, was being raced [...]

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Tweet I've been rather conspicuously silent about the whole Haditha thing. Until facts come out, rather than rumor, I don't really have anything to say. During times of war, even in the best regulated military, soldiers have been known to do some pretty awful things. You can't take young men, arm them, and drop them [...]

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Tweet In the West, courtesy of modern birth control, when most of us have children, it's because we want them.  They, after all, didn't ask to be born.  To me, this means that we have obligations to them far beyond the material ones of food, shelter and clothing, and even beyond the less tangible one [...]

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Tweet Four against one is a totally unfair fight, especially if those on the four side are armed with guns, while the loner is armed only with a pocketknife.  Oh!  Did I mention that the lone fighter is an ex-Marine?  With those facts, the fight's outcome is a foregone conclusion:  Ex-Marine — one bruise and [...]

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Tweet Gotta run, and this is it for the day, but I leave with some thoughts for those in the Left-ward side of the world:  Why is it that, the more the jihadists kill or maim us, the more you get apologetic, not angry?  Aren't we the victims here?  I thought of that in connection [...]

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Tweet The following is from a Reuters news article. Here's a paragraph from about two-thirds into the article: The Netherlands, which already has liberal policies on soft drugs, prostitution and gay marriage, was shocked by the plan. Here's the issue that so shocked the Dutch: Dutch pedophiles are launching a political party to push for [...]

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Tweet People bound and determined to hasten the destruction of Israel will always say "I'm not anti-Semitic; just anti-Zionist." Dennis Prager exposes this lie for what it is. This is just one strand of the argument: Judaism has always consisted of three components: God, Torah and Israel, roughly translated as faith, practice and peoplehood. And [...]

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Tweet Laer, of Cheat-Seeking Missiles, took May off to work with his wife to help promote her campaign against illegal drug use.  One of the fruits of this labor is a new website called The Drug Report.  It's a compilation of drug-related news, with a lot of stories about people who serve as horrible examples.  [...]

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Tweet Attention California voters:  National Review has now run an online editorial explaining why Prop. 82, which promises universal preschool for 4 year olds, is such a bad idea.  Read it, then Vote no on June 6.

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Tweet Don Quixote, with his usual politeness, kindness and razor intelligence, disagreed with my saying that Harry Reid was himself being racist when he called racist the "English is the official American language" initiative. For one thing, DQ pointed out, rightly, that there's no mileage in throwing the phrase "racist" around with the same abandon [...]

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Tweet I wrote here about my Dad's Italian POWs in North Africa, and how charming they were.  One of the things he found especially memorably was how they coaxed gardens out of the desert.  Since it's Memorial Day, it's probably no coincidence that I found this NPR story, complete with amazing pictures, about people (soliders, [...]

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Tweet American Thinker has a funny post about the fact that workers employed by multi-millionaire Dianne Feinstein, when doing landscaping work outside of her new home in San Francisco, inadvertently stripped to dirt a beautiful garden that was part of a public staircase.  As Thomas Lifson points out Public stairs running up hillsides are common [...]

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Tweet I won't be blogging today — family and all that — but I haven't forgotten that today is Memorial Day.  Wishing all of you a happy one, and one where we appreciate how, since the start of this Nation, there is so much our military has done for us.  I should add, too, that [...]

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Tweet I'm petite. Shopping has always been a problem for me, something that hasn't been helped by the fact that, style-wise, most petite departments seem to stock clothes for 80 year old grandmothers. Apparently I won't even have to worry any more about that insult to my sensibilities. Stores are phasing out their petite clothes [...]

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Tweet Go here for very good news about the Pope, and very bad news about the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Poland.  What makes it so bad on a continent that's been wallowing in resurgent anti-Semitism?  This time, it seems to come, not from the Left and the growing Muslim factions that characterize the new European [...]

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Tweet If you want to get at least one sure laugh today, go here.

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Tweet I'd earlier vowed not to see Munich because I can't abide Steven Spielberg movies. My husband, however, had ordered it from Netflix and, when he begged me to watch it with him, I yielded. I managed to last for an hour an a half (just a little more than half the movie). Sitting down [...]

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Tweet I can't resist including here, in its entirety, Mark Steyn's comment on The Corner about the more insane aspects of the immigration law Congress is trying to foist on us: But how about some of you natives piling on [he was responding to comments by The Corner's British ex-pats]? I assumed NR's transplanted British [...]

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Tweet [Another bumped reminder about the carnival.] Working through Blog Carnival, I've decided to go crazy and have a carnival of my own. The goal of this first edition to have people submit posts describing their political conversion to conservatism. You can also submit articles to me, and I'll create a blogsite to house them [...]

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Tweet It's not uncommon to liken the world envisioned by Islamic fundamentalists to a medieval world, where women are shrouded in heavy draperies and are second class citizens; where beheading and torture are the punishments of choice; and where there is supposed to be one universal religion (with Jews as the universal scapegoat). Just recently, [...]

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Tweet The Opinion Journal's Best of the Web found this great obituary in London's Daily Telegraph: Lieutenant-Commander John Wellham, who has died aged 87, was the last surviving pilot of the Fleet Air Arm raid on the Italian fleet at Taranto. . . . Wellham remembered meeting a barrage balloon at 4,000 ft and thinking [...]

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Tweet This Memorial Day, the MSM, as usual, will focus vigorously on the ones who didn't make it, or who barely made it. I will say a prayer for them too, but, as does the WSJ, I'll also remember the ones who do make it, and who every day display their courage, competence and patriotism: [...]

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Tweet Sorry for the blog silence.  True to my bookworm credentials, I spent the last seven hours (4 last night; 3 this morning) devouring a nine hundred page novel, The Bronze Horseman.  I'll recommend it, although with the strong caveat that it's a girl book.  It's about the Siege of Leningrad, but told, not from [...]

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Tweet Steve Inskeep interviewed Tony Snow on NPR.  It was an interesting display of style.  Inskeep was on the attack:  You deflect questions by actually focusing on what reporters say, rather than what they mean.  (Implicit was the "How dare you?")  Are you hiding information from us?  Will you hide information from us?  Why won't [...]

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