Bookworm Room

For almost a thousand years, Catholics around the world, as part of their mass, have taken responsibility before God for their own failings: Confíteor Deo omnipoténti et vobis, fratres, quia peccávi nimis cogitatióne, verbo, ópere et omissióne: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa. Ideo precor beátam Maríam semper Vírginem, omnes Angelos et Sanctos, et [...]

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Maybe what we see today is a final struggle for America between those that want to be free and those that don’t.

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I kept reading about Obama’s Rose Garden speech, but it wasn’t until this morning that I actually sat down and read the speech.  Aside from the obvious factual and ideological problems (not to mention how pedantic and vulgar it is in its expressions and ideas), what jumps out at me about the speech is the [...]

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The murderous frenzy unleashed on 9/11 is an awkward size.  Had it been smaller — a handful of people, or even a hundred people, killed at a mall or a hotel — we would have noted it as a tragedy powered by a crazy person (or two) in thrall to bad ideas.  We would have [...]

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As I do every year, I went with my family to our town’s Fourth of July Parade.  It’s a great parade, with all sorts of community groups participating, including the various chambers of commerce; Little League baseball teams; bagpipers (Marin is home to a thriving bagpipe community); an impressive selection of WWII vehicles from from [...]

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Every July 4th, I feel it’s incumbent upon me, as a freedom-loving blogger, to write something meaningful.  And every July 4th, I fail to do.  Somehow, instead of golden prose about our nation, I invariably end up posting a picture of a waving flag and wishing everyone a “Happy July 4th.”  It’s not the magnitude [...]

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Cheap fuel is an important key to peace, human welfare and prosperity. We have the key. The world can’t do without fuel and the scramble for world fuel resources lies at the root of most of our current geopolitical problems. The high price of fuel affects the environment (e.g., 3rd world deforestation) and the price [...]

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Here’s a good example of American imperialism, whereby rich and greedy American billionaires fund the sabotage of democratic institutions in foreign countries to further their own ideological and economic interests.     Via: smalldeadanimals.com.

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Whether or not one liked him, Ronald Reagan got “the vision thing.”  He had an extremely strong sense of America and her place in the world, and was never afraid to share that narrative.  America was the shining city on the hill, the bastion of true republican democracy, and the world leader in exporting freedom [...]

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Earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, market collapses, Middle Eastern turmoil . . . .  It’s been a busy week news-wise.  So you want to know what the hottest story is?  None of the above.  Per Allahpundit, the absolute hottest story is this video: The story behind the video is that the bigger boy, Casey Heynes, has [...]

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Hat tip:  The Glittering Eye

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My book club met last night to discuss Robert Merry’s A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent. As the subtitle says, the book is about the way in which Polk, during his one term presidency, enabled America to stretch from sea to shining sea.  [...]

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Chinese-born pianist Lang Lang plays an old, Korean-war vintage anti-American song, “Battle on Shangganling Mountain”, at Obama’s state dinner for Chinese President Hu-Jintao. The Chinese, of course, just loved it. I can just feel the respect our competitors in the world have for us, now that international relations have been “reset”. This will not end [...]

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Two interesting things rolled across my desk today, interesting because they address the same topic — dependence on Big Government — but reach diametrically opposite conclusions.  The first is a Dennis Prager column that examines why American conservatives are happier than American liberals.  This isn’t just Dennis’ opinion, by the way.  Instead, several recent polls [...]

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In Der Spiegel, of all places, one finds an article bemoaning, loudly and strongly, the profound mistake inherent in the Democrats’ Europeanization of America: The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve want to fix the United States economy by spending more money. But while that approach might work for Europe, it is risky for the [...]

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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 first ran this YouTube video three years ago, when Barack Obama, our nation’s first anti-American president, was still a theory, not a fact.  It bears watching now, as we witness Obama’s efforts to bring about a world without America:

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I was at my child’s school the other day, and happened to glance at the daily handout the children receive.  It had the usual special announcements and ended with “Today’s Patriotic Quotation.”  I was rather pleased to see that there was a patriotic quotation included (on a daily basis, yet).  Reading the quotation, though, just [...]

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Good ideas, thankfully, don’t just squirm away and die.  The best of them take on a life of their own.  This year’s good idea, one that has been in vogue for a while, but that is taking on heightened importance now, is the core nature of being an American.  My focus is on freedom, brought [...]

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As is always the case with an Andrew McCarthy article, he efficiently marshals vast numbers of relevants to make a compelling argument, with today’s argument being that Holder’s decision to “investigate” CIA interrogators is not merely a sop to the radical Left in the U.S., but is actually part of a larger effort to subordinate [...]

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I have two wonderful things for you to read on the subject of patriotism.  The first is from Zabrina, at Thought You’d Never Ask, in which she dispenses some words of wisdom to a child about to head off to college.  The second is from Jonah Goldberg, who explains why conservative Americans often don’t recognize [...]

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I asserted the other day that it was a “fact” that America built the greatest society the world has ever seen and Ozzie reasonably asked me to prove this was a fact and not merely my opinion. He has a point, but let’s see what facts we can offer. It is, of course, opinion that [...]

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Barack Obama has had a weird life, but not a bad one. Yes, his father abandoned him, but he’s certainly not the only person, of any race, to experience that. His mother loved him, his grandparents loved him, he grew up in the mellow, racially-mixed world of Hawaii (barring his Indonesian stint), he went to [...]

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I’ve been mentally debriefing myself in the 36 hours since my return from a fairly intense Disney vacation and wanted to share some of those thoughts with you. I’ve always loved Disneyland. When I was young, I was taken in by the apparent magic. I didn’t notice the motors and wires and paint. To me, [...]

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I had noticed today, when I checked out the British paper the Telegraph, an article in which people were asked to summarize their lives in six words. What I didn’t realize is that there is something of a meme going on out there, not in the internet so much as in the MSM. As Laer [...]

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