Bookworm Room

Tweet This is London calling, and it’s not a place you want to go. First, from Melanie Phillips, we get a view into how the media, especially the British media, reported the war (hat tip: Crossing the Rubicon): In short, much of the most incendiary media coverage of this war seems to have been either [...]

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Tweet If ever a single article told you everything you need to know about the torch the old anti-War protestors carry for their youth, you have to read this editorial by Andrew Rosenthal, the NY Times’ Assistant Editor (so the editorial also tells you a lot about the NYT). In Rosenthal’s world view, protest is [...]

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Tweet I blogged earlier about how I was pleased that the California Legislature gutted SB 1437. This bill, as proposed, would have amended various Education Code provisions to require California schools, beginning in first grade, to teach positive lessons about homosexuals. In another post, I explained my position: I certainly do not believe that we [...]

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Tweet Well, it’s official: Popal’s defense will be that he’s crazy: A San Francisco judge ordered a detailed psychiatric report today on the 29-year-old Fremont man charged with 18 counts of attempted murder stemming from a hit- and-run rampage that prosecutors said was premeditated and involved a plan to kill a police officer. The defendant, [...]

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Tweet I blogged myself into exhaustion yesterday keeping up with the development (or, should I say, degradation) of the Popal story, as it went from being about random terror, to an Islamic perpetrator, to a crazy guy. Today, believe it or not, I should be working, not blogging. I’ll therefore leave the last word to [...]

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Tweet Yesterday, I heard on NPR that at least one of the soldiers charged with murdering an Iraqi man will not be subject to the death penalty. It was an interesting story in that it talked about the evidence, or lack thereof. At the heart of the case is a body so badly decomposed nothing [...]

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Tweet Laer has a funny story that would have us believe the Europeans are finally figuring out the threat against them.

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Tweet Gas prices are dropping (something I’ve already noticed at my local pumps): Gasoline prices are falling fast and could keep dropping for months. “The only place they have to go is down,” says Fred Rozell, gasoline analyst at the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS). “We’ll be closer to $2 than $3 come Thanksgiving.” Travel [...]

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Tweet Well, if the numbers at my stat counter are any indication, my 15 minutes of blogger fame are just about wrapping up.  I enjoyed it tremendously while it lasted, and do think I was a useful respository of information about an interesting, and possibly quite significant, story.  Now it’s back to normal, which is [...]

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Tweet If you don’t have the stomach to wade through the banal, silly comments at MoveOn.org in order to find the more sinister and distasteful anti-American, anti-Semitic comments that pepper that same site, take heart.  Some brave bloggers have stepped forward to do it for you.  Check out MoveOn.org, Please Move On!, but be prepared [...]

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Tweet I’m basking in the love of a good dog right now, but if you’re not, and you either (a) miss having a dog around or (b) merely admire them from a distance, check this out.

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Tweet Do you think electronic scanning at grocery stores has increased or decreased magazine sales?  In the pre-electronic age, when grocery stores had long lines, I used to read the magazines kept near check-out.  If what I was reading was interesting, and I wasn’t going to get a chance to finish it in-store, I’d toss [...]

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Tweet Today, we all know that the principle purpose behind journalism is pretty close to what it was at America’s inception — to spread rumors and bring down governments (something that becomes obvious when you read David McCullough’s biography about John Adams). Certainly, both of these are activities that the First Amendment protects, although they’re [...]

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Tweet A madman ran amok all over San Francisco today, targeting pedestrians with his car and deliberately running them over: As many as 14 people were injured this afternoon by a motorist who drove around San Francisco running them down before he was arrested, authorities said. Seven of those injured were in critical condition, police [...]

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Tweet The UN, in Resolution 1701, agreed to help pay for damages Lebanon sustained in the recent war, but has not even considered doing so for Israel.  You could argue that Lebanon is a non-combatant that got caught in the middle.  I think, though, this is a difficult argument to sustain considering that Lebanon created [...]

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Tweet Radical Islamists in England sought to blow up at least ten transatlantic flights. Britain’s so-called “moderate” Muslims did not condemn this manifest act of terror. Instead, they sought to be capitalize on it, in order to advance the same Muslim agenda the terrorists wanted to impose through mass murder: Islamists working within the system [...]

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Tweet Karr was a perverted poser, but Warren Steed Jeffs is the real thing — a genuinely bad guy — and he was just arrested.  If you’ve read or seen anything about the radical polygamist sect Jeffs headed, and about the horrible abuses he’s forced on young girls for years in the name of his [...]

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Tweet I never watched morning news shows and I stopped watching the network news about 20 years ago. All I know is what I read on the internet and in news magazines.  I have therefore been mercifully unaffected by the hoopla surrounding Katie Couric’s imminent ascendancy to the nightly news. This, however, which reports on [...]

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Tweet David Horowitz and Richard Poe have written a book about George Soros and the negative effect he’s having on American politics. It’s called The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party. FrontPage Magazine has interviewed Poe about the book. I can’t decide if Poe and [...]

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Tweet Andrew Bostom, who has written a detailed, erudite treatise entitled the Legacy of Jihad : Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, weighs in on the Fox reporters’ forced “conversion.” Forced conversions in Islamic history are not exceptional—they have been the norm, across three continents—Asia, Africa, and Europe—for over 13 centuries. Orders for [...]

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Tweet Here’s a bit of good news: An ambitious military sweep appears to be dramatically reducing Baghdad’s homicide rate, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Sunday — even as violence nationwide killed at least 80 people, including six U.S. soldiers in and around the capital. Last month, the Baghdad morgue received more than 1,800 bodies, a [...]

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Tweet My Mom was quite the packrat.  In addition to the Life magazine that I quoted from in the two previous posts (here and here), which was published at the end of the War, my Mom also saved the June 16, 1967 edition of Life magazine, which was written within days of the War’s abrupt [...]

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Tweet I’m still going through my 1967 Life magazine special edition about the 1967 war, and would like to highlight two more articles within the magazine, one about the refugee situation, one about Russia’s involvement in events. First, here, in its entirety, is Life’s, June 23, 1967 editorial, which is both clear-headed and prescient about [...]

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Tweet When my mother was going through her stuff, she came upon a 1967 issue of Life magazine entitled “Israel’s Swift Victory.” It’s a 100 page special edition, so I won’t attempt to retype all of it here. I’ll just cherry-pick my way through those bits of coverage I found most striking. What makes the [...]

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Tweet As part of a superb article about Hezbollah, the war with Israel, and the larger ramifications of that war and its outcome, Dan Gordon properly identifies Hezbollah and its goals: Hezb’allah is not your father’s terrorist organization. This is not a group of loosely affiliated cells of would-be hijackers or suicide bombers. Hezb’allah is [...]

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