Bookworm Room

Tweet      I was wandering around my local Wal-Mart today thinking about how wonderful it is to have a place where people of limited means can buy high quality products (food, clothing, medicine, and just about anyting else you can think of) at very low prices.        So, why do so many people oppose having [...]

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Tweet      Bookworm is taking the weekend off, so  I’m hoping in with one of my questions.  I’ve been thinking a lot about hate speech and hate crimes since the Imus nonsense and the whole idea puzzles me.       Is hate a crime?  Senators Kennedy and Smith are introducing a new hate crimes bill.   NOW [...]

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Tweet I have too much on my plate today and too little time, but I just had to take a few minutes to follow-up on a theme that started with the British Marines and ended, so sadly, at VTech: passivity. Two of the best writers out there have written about the fact that our Western [...]

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Tweet Last week, when I paid my taxes, I had three thoughts jostling for primacy in my brain:  1.  I hate funding pork.  2.  I’m glad I live in a well-functioning country and my tax dollars help.  3.  Even though I’m scrupulous in obeying the law, I hope the IRS doesn’t hassle me.  Turns out [...]

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Tweet One of my clients made a very foolish mistake.  I was somewhat upset, although philosophical, because the consequences weren’t as bad as they could have been.  I learned yesterday that the opposing party made an even bigger mistake that completed negated what my client had done.  In twenty years, it has never happened before [...]

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Tweet One doesn’t even have to read the Supreme Court’s partial birth abortion decision to know that it is entirely consistent with the Left’s beloved Roe v. Wade.  Contrary to most people’s assumptions about Roe v. Wade, that case does not create an unfettered right to abortion.  Instead, it does a balancing act, looking at [...]

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Tweet Just a quick reminder that today marks the 101st anniversary of the great San Francisco earthquake.  Growing up in San Francisco, it infiltrated itself into my consciousness to become a date I never forget.

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Tweet At the Weekly Standard, Irwin Stelzer explains that, while we don’t know how deleterious global warming might be, we do know already how damaging, for the poor, efforts to stop global warming already are.  This is especially true for ethanol, which turns food crops into fuel.  Turns out the remedial steps might not just [...]

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Tweet Most of us envision mass killers as stone cold nut jobs, like Cho Seung Hui, who carried out Monday’s Virginia Tech carnage. By all accounts, he was an angry, lonely person, obsessed with violent death. Small wonder that, given the means and the opportunity, he would act out his vengeful fantasies. The same held [...]

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Tweet Give Obama twenty years and, with his native intelligence, he may yet prove himself.  Right now, though, he’s callow.  How callow?  Read Richard Baehr’s analysis of Obama’s “official” comments in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy to see.  I wouldn’t trust as ill-formed as Obama with the job of leading our country. Funnily [...]

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Tweet News is coming that Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech killer, had written ISMAIL-AX on his arm, which may have been a reference to the story of Abraham’s son Ishmael who, in Muslim Arab mythology, is believed to be the progenitor of all Arabs.  While that may well be true, it will take a whole [...]

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Tweet Little Bookworm used to leap out of bed every morning, anxious to go to school and work on whatever project was engaging her attention at the time.  After six months in public school, I struggle to wake her up as she pleads “Do I have to go to school today?”  It turns out that [...]

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Tweet Ralph Peters has written a great, straightforward analysis about the purpose and costs to society of terrorism.  I don’t know that it says anything we don’t already know, but it ties the threads together so beautifully that I think it’s definitely worth reading.  Here’s the intro, which I hope will have you wanting to [...]

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Tweet The deaths at Virginia Tech are a staggering tragedy. Thirty-two people got up and began an ordinary day, only to be cut down with terrible savagery. All of us are shaken. “How did it happen?” “How can something like that happen?” We try desperately to imbue this violence with meaning, whether it’s to look [...]

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Tweet My deepest condolences to the families of the 21 students killed at Virginia Tech. UPDATE: The most complete updating I’ve seen on this story is at Hot Air. It’s also the most disturbing, insofar as it claims that 32 (!) people are dead, and that the killer, searching for his girlfriend, lined a bunch [...]

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Tweet Little Bookworm went off to school today with her “motor project.” It began a month ago, when she came home with a small motor — a small cylinder with two wires sticking out the bottom and a little spindle coming out of the top. If you press the wires to the two ends of [...]

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Tweet Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.  The war ended 62 years ago, and the vast majority of the survivors and perpetrators are dead.  Why do we still care? Is it, as the Muslims want the world to believe, a Zionist ploy to garner the sympathy vote in world politics?  Aside from the fact that such [...]

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Tweet As I already knew from my legal contacts, as to fired S.F. U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan, there was nothing nefarious going on.  He was simply a bad manager (which has nothing to do with whether he was a good lawyer) and needed to be replaced: Newly released Justice Department documents on the firings of [...]

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Tweet I’d never heard of ABC’s Terry Moran but, aside from now having learned that he’s a co-anchor on Nightline, I figured he must be someone, because they’ve given him his own blog page. (Wooo-ey!) The powers that be at ABC might have done him more of a favor if they hadn’t given him his [...]

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Tweet This is a follow-up to my post a couple of days ago about my decision to read, in order, both Ann Coulter’s Godless : The Church of Liberalism and Susan Estrich’s Soulless : Ann Coulter and the Right Wing Church of Hate, with the latter meant to be a takedown of the former. I [...]

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Tweet I’m pleased to say that, as to both winners in this week’s Watcher of Weasel’s contest (council and non-council) are posts I voted for. I thought that they were that good and so, apparently, did everyone else. On the council side, the top two winners were Cheat-Seeking Missiles’ Don’t Know Your Enemy, a lucid, [...]

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Tweet Back in 1987, before the fall of Communism, I went to Czechoslovakia.  It was awful, something I would have realized then if I hadn’t been so hopelessly naive about the horrors of Communism.  Everything was shabby and dirty.  The food was vile.  The lodging was so primitive we stayed in one room with a [...]

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Tweet I’ve taken a news story and put the facts in a different order.  The story essentially starts with the last point, and organizes the facts based on that point.  I’ve put the last point last, because it’s an after-the-fact conclusion that should not color the report.  I wonder if you’ll agree with my understand of [...]

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Tweet There’s a big hoo-ha going on down in Burlingame, an affluent community south of San Francisco. It seems that 8th graders were reading a book that included descriptions of anal sex and, when a parent complained, the superintendent had the temerity, on moral grounds yet, to pull the book out of the classroom. He [...]

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Tweet I’m reading Ann Coulter’s Godless : The Church of Liberalism. I actually didn’t intend to check it out of the library when I first saw it. I can take Ann in small doses, because I think she’s very clever, and her observations are often spot-on. I also think she’s very mean, so I always [...]

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