Bookworm Room

Last year, an Oakland transit police officer, Johannes Mehserle, killed Oscar Grant, in a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station.  Grant was being, to put it mildly, obstreperous.  Mehserle’s defense is that he meant to taser Grant but, instead, shot him.  Video footage made at the time indicates that Mehserle did indeed make a terrible [...]

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Obama plans to use brute force legislation to turn America into a green economy.  To do this, he is going to use the government’s police and economic power to break the backs of the oil and coal industries.  It occurred to me that (at least) three other governments have used brute force to change their [...]

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I won’t be blogging until this afternoon, because I am going on a very exciting field trip with one of my children.  I’ll tell you about it later — assuming, of course, that it is as exciting as it promises to be.  If I’m bored out of my mind, you won’t hear a thing from [...]

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Thanks to the kind auspices of the Navy League, for two years running now I’ve enjoyed hospitality from the local Coast Guard, as they’ve taken us out on the Bay to enjoy the Blue Angel fly overs. Without exception, the crew members we’ve met have been lovely — generous with their time, and very gracious [...]

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As I’ve mentioned before, my PayPal blegs are not for the purpose of making me wealthy.  Instead, I use them to fund the blog and to support conservative and military causes.  My account is running kind of low right now so, just for the next few days, I’m going to include at the bottom of [...]

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When I was in high school, the song that was played at every pep rally and every sports events was We Are The Champions, an affirmative statement of superiority and the will to fight: My kids’ have a very different anthem, which is Black Eyed Peas’ I Gotta Feeling: I really like I Gotta Feeling.  [...]

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By now you’ve all read that Levi Johnston is backing off from the slanders he stated about the Palin family and, to give him credit, he’s doing so public.  What intrigued me was the fact that he attributed his lies to “youthful indiscretion.”  Aside from the fact that he told those lies less than two [...]

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Here’s a question:  Is it immoral to wish for someone’s death?  I’m just talking about wishing, rather than doing anything that would in any way hasten the other person’s death.  But can a moral person ever wish, really hard, for another person to die? UPDATE:  On the subject of wishing for deaths, I do consider [...]

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Jennifer Rubin succinctly sums up Obama’s foreign policy failures, which range from the merely foolish to the dangerously epic.

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Phibian, who is one one of my oldest blog friends, explains at Big Peace how the President’s entirely artificial time line for withdrawing from Afghanistan not only emboldens the Taliban (and makes a negotiated peace impossible), but also destroys all good efforts at future planning in that theater. If you like Phibian’s writing (and who [...]

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One of the things about insomnia is that weird thoughts enter your head in the dead of night.  Last night, I began compiling a mental list of popular songs that came out in the 20th century, all of which referenced things Japanese. The first, from 1920, is Kalmar & Ruby’s “So long, Ooh-long,” which seamlessly [...]

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Fantastic article about the blackmailer’s paradox and Israel’s chronic negotiation failures in dealing with the surrounding Muslim/Arab nations.  This feeds into the “for a nation filled with smart people, Israel sure acts dumb” paradox. Of course, when everyone hates you, so much so that they’re willing to warp the laws of their own land, perhaps [...]

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Getting my life back in order following a three day weekend.  Will blog later, I promise.

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A moment in Hebron with the IDF.  Please stick with the video to around the 50 second mark: Hat tip:  Sadie, who found it at The Muqata

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. . . you’ll want to check out Melissa Clouthier as she, Elizabeth Blackney, Dan Riehl and Steve Schippert take on RNC Chairman Steele, Obama’s Afghan strategy and the internecine warfare the Republicans always seem determined to fight.

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We are so blessed to live in America — and birthdays are about celebrating the blessings that came into our lives as the result of someone’s, or something’s, birth.  We may be going through a hard patch now, but our legacy of individual freedoms is a tough nut, and we’re not going to let it [...]

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I spent yesterday at the Marin County Fair.  It was, for the most part, a very pleasant experience and could have been any county fair, anywhere in America. The kids wanted to spend all their time on the midway, standing in long hot lines, spinning to the point of acute nausea, and being suspended upside [...]

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A matched quartet here, but only for the over 18 crowd, because the tie that binds these four is the disturbing issue of the Left and childhood sexuality: First. Second. Third. Fourth. UPDATE:  Mike suggested a Fifth. You know, I’m thinking that, quite possibly, there’s the germ of an American Thinker article in here.  If [...]

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The Council has spoken and it’s clear from the number of ties that we all recognized just how good the other members’ submissions were.  I had a terribly difficult time voting myself, since there were several posts to my mind that clearly deserved first place, Wolf Howlings’ great post about the Supreme Court decisions included.  [...]

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The Anchoress posted at her blog a semi-animated video by a self-avowed Marxist explaining why Marxism, not capitalism, will save the world.  I have to admit that I didn’t watch it.  It wasn’t the content that drove me away, it was the choppy visuals, which trigger migraines.  Having just beaten back a migraine, I wasn’t [...]

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If you’re still struggling a bit about which party should get your votes in November, this video might help: Hat tip:  Viral Footage

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Klavan’s always good, but he outdoes himself here:

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From Charles Krauthammer: President Obama’s National Security Strategy insists on calling the enemy — how else do you define those seeking your destruction? — “a loose network of violent extremists.” But this is utterly meaningless. This is not an anger-management therapy group gone rogue. These are people professing a powerful ideology rooted in a radical [...]

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Kim Priestap, who blogs at Up North Mommy, got an impassioned email from the Democratic Party, raving about Elena Kagan.  Does it rave about her brains?  No (although it mentions as an aside that she’s “among the best legal minds this country has to offer,” which is a depressing comment about legal minds in America).  [...]

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This is a priceless matched set:  Kagan’s critics have learned that, when she was Dean at Harvard Law School, she insisted that the school’s insurance provider pay for sex change operations.  Her approach to that subject may explain what happened to Markos “Kos” Moulitsas’ long lost twin brother.  What?  You didn’t know he had one?  [...]

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