Bookworm Room

For years at this blog (and others) when we’ve written about Europe’s problems, we’ve focused primarily, not on the economy, but on those Muslim immigrants.  One of the things that we talked about a lot was the fact that these same Muslim immigrants subsisted largely on public benefits. This little tidbit emerged with force during [...]

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A few stories from England’s Daily Mail, all showing that the country is not in the best of health.  Each of these stories highlights, not the horrible things individuals can do, because those crimes transcend national boundaries, but the way in which England has rendered itself unable to react in any way to the insults [...]

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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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The mosque debate in America has been instructive when it comes to Leftist rhetorical tactics.  Ordinary Americans make an argument — “the mosque is inappropriate on secular sacred ground.”  The Left then responds, not substantively, but with personal attacks — “you’re racist, Islamophobic, xenophobic and stupid.” If you think this approach to debate is limited [...]

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[Note from Bookworm:  As of now, the video embed of Pete Stark you'll see in the post below has only 97 hits.  It should have a million hits.  Pete Stark is, and always has been, an exceptionally nasty piece of work.  However, Democratic acts in Washington make it clear that what he says is what [...]

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For the past two days, I’ve been gathering links that I’ve meant to use in stand-alone posts.  That’s clearly not going to happen, though, so let me pass the links onto you, in the hope that you find them as interesting as I did. Here’s something of a public service announcement:  if you post your [...]

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I’ve never understood hunger strikes.  That is, I’ve never found them a compelling means of moral persuasion.  To me, they’re a form of emotional blackmail in lieu of reasoned argument.  Still, that doesn’t stop their popularity, and some Berkeley students are now abstaining from food to protest an Arizona law that gives Arizona law enforcement [...]

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The next big thing on the political agenda is, again, immigration “reform.”  As someone said, it’s 2006 all over again, right down to the conveniently available, often Communist-provided signs. The matter might have sat around for a little longer, but Arizona pulled the trigger on debate by looking at its impressive levels of border crime [...]

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I had a most fascinating (and surprisingly polite) discussion with a liberal the other day regarding illegal immigrants. My friend kept arguing that we owe the illegal immigrants in our country citizenship, welfare, health care, education, etc., because they’re here and we can’t humanely deny them access to those benefits. I argued that, if we [...]

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My daughter’s Spanish class has spent the last couple of days watching a movie.  I know many people who learned English by watching American television, so I don’t have a problem with using movies as a teaching device.  I do, however, have a big problem with the movie chosen — La Misma la Luna — [...]

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I received the following email, which I pass on to you directly: Hello CLEC and friends, I am the leader of a group that is gathering signatures to get a petition on the November 2010 ballot in Novato [California].  We have over 50% of the signatures we need.  The group is called “Citizens for Legal [...]

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No matter how the NYT tries to spin it, the message is clear here:  the burden that illegal aliens created on the dialysis clinic [thanks, Quisp, for clarifying that for me] in a 117 year old charitable hospital serving Georgia’s poor, forced the hospital clinic to close. With ObamaCare almost a done deal (gee, thanks [...]

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It happened there and it can happen here.  As for me, I’m stodgy, and like our national character just fine.  I want a slow, controlled flow of immigrants to ensure that they adapt to our norms, and not we to theirs.

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On April 30, Daniel Henninger wrote a very good column about one of Obama’s pre-election gifts — his ability to prevaricate so smoothly that everyone listening ended up believing that Obama was agreeing with his or her point of view: Early in the campaign, in January 2007, a New York Times reporter wrote a story [...]

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San Francisco recently abandoned its policy of giving refuge to illegal immigrants if they were juvenile offenders.  Now, unsurprisingly, we learn that criminals were taking advantage of the City’s useful idiot policy and playing it for all it was worth.  You see, almost a third of the so-called “juvenile” offenders the City was protecting were, [...]

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England currently has an immigration policy that lets in just about everybody — especially two-bit terrorists from Pakistan and points nearby.  England does have some limits, however.  It refuses to allow Gurkha veterans — you know, the ones who fought and were willing to die for England — into the country, nor does it provide [...]

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As a California tax payer, my taxes have, for years, been paying for college educations for illegal immigrants.  I certainly admire anyone who is able to work hard and get into college, but I have a fundamental objection to paying my hard earned money so that someone who is in America illegally can get a [...]

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One of the things few people realize Tony Blair’s government did to England was to open the floodgates to virtually unlimited immigration.  Get a load of these numbers: Between 1982 and 1997, Britain added about 50,000 new immigrants per year. In 2004, a peak year, after a few years of Labour’s open borders approach, Britain [...]

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I don’t have actual knowledge here.  I’m just wondering. The lede from the AP is that the number of uninsured dropped by more than a million people last year: The number of people without health insurance fell by more than 1 million in 2007, the first annual decline since the Bush administration took office, the [...]

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Back in 1989, Bay Area locals were stunned to learn of a horrific massacre up in Sonoma County: [Ramon] Salcido, now 47, used a gun and knife to murder his wife, Angela Richards Salcido, 24; their daughters, 4-year-old Sofia and 22-month-old Teresa; his mother-in-law, Marion Richards, 47; her daughters, 12-year-old Ruth and 8-year-old Maria; and [...]

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It’s a tragedy, but it’s also an interesting look at England today, since this is a story that could not possibly have happened at any time other than the first decade of the 21st Century: Britain’s first Muslim peer, Lord Ahmed [a Muslim peer is an entirely new thing in England], is being investigated over [...]

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It turns out that Barack Obama might have been on to something with his bitterness speech. In case you’ve forgotten, he said: You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them — like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years [...]

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Last night, I was discussing with my mother the British woman I met in Florida who said that the situation in England, vis a vis Muslims, is much worse than even the papers describe. Aside from pointing to political correctness as the culprit, I also also laid the blame, as did the British woman, on [...]

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