Bookworm Room

Tweet In an earlier post, I ranted about the nasty vapidity that characterizes the “posters” my liberal friends put up on Facebook whenever an election draws near.  I also mentioned that my conservative friends consistently post more substantive articles and images.  This one, from my brother-in-law, manages to be both pithy and substantive.  It packs [...]

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Tweet I thought about Margaret Thatcher today.  Lord knows, she was something.  Brilliant, indomitable, focused, feisty, witty, and absolutely convinced of her right-ness and righteousness.  She was the un-RINO.  Her unswerving commitment to her principles enabled her to turn England around.  We forget that sometimes, because the Labor party managed to take her legacy and [...]

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Tweet One of the things I find most distasteful about ObamaCare is its requirement that employers must provide insurance coverage for their employees’ children through their 26th year.  I don’t find this just economically wrong, I find it cosmically, morally wrong that our federal government has officially extended childhood until citizens are 26.  I cannot [...]

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Tweet Case in point: Here’s the biographical information Peterffy included with the video, which he plans to spend several million dollars running in swing states: Thomas Peterffy grew up in socialist Hungary. Despite the fact that he could not speak English when he immigrated to the United States in 1956, Thomas fulfilled the American dream. [...]

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Tweet I caught exactly one minute of Rush today, during which he mentioned a commentator who had said that the only reason that critics called Obama a “socialist” was because the “L” word had lost its power to scare people.  Rush disagreed, saying something along the lines of “words have meaning,” which is why people [...]

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Tweet Paul Harvey recorded this in 1965: Here’s the transcript (which I haven’t personally vetted): If I were the Devil . . . I mean, if I were the Prince of Darkness, I would of course, want to engulf the whole earth in darkness. I would have a third of its real estate and four-fifths [...]

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Tweet It’s a family stuff day, so blogging has been light, and will continue to be so.  Fortunately, I’ve got friends who send me interesting things which I am so happy to pass on to you.  In no particular order: Wolf Howling has written a fascinating, scholarly dissertation examining the adversarial history of faith and [...]

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Tweet I am really, really mad at Mr. Bookworm today.  If I’m completely honest with myself, it’s not that he did anything to me.  It’s that he has something I don’t have — namely, a good night of sleep under his belt.  I’m a fairly chronic insomniac, and he is not.  Last night was an [...]

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Tweet On the heels of Bookworm’s excellent, hard-hitting essay on narcissism comes a nice coda on man-made global warming that is emblematic of Bookworm’s theme. Because of major discoveries involving the interaction of atmospheric aerosols and cosmic radiation, “climate models will have to be revised,” stated a communication from CERN that promises to completely overhaul [...]

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Tweet I read someone today who said that Jesus must have been a socialist, because he didn’t seek profit, which is the hallmark of capitalism.  Instead, gave away his time, energy and skills to those who could not pay.  Since he didn’t have a profit motive, he must have been a capitalist.  QED.  It was [...]

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Tweet Is our democracy germinating the seeds of its own destruction? Alexis de Toqueville warned, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” That day has come. It is not yet gone. Democracy  in ancient Athens lasted about 250 years. We in the [...]

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Tweet As we settle into the Obama Depression era, one thing that I and others have noticed is that many of the very youth that voted enthusiastically for Obama are the ones already feeling the consequence of his policies: they are unemployed. As one of my college-age kids put it, “our generation is so over [...]

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Tweet “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” – President Barack Hussein Obama I posted this as a comment to Book’s previous post, but have now posted it independently as a challenge to all of us Bookworm salon aficionados. Here’s the premise: virtually all the political violence that has happened in [...]

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Tweet Forgive my long opening discourse. I need to set the stage. Most Americans don’t know much about Belgium and Flanders. It’s a shame. For a quick summary, Flanders is the region that stretches from Belgium’s northern border with the Netherlands, west to the  English Channel and into northern France (including Dunkirk). It is home [...]

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Tweet Bookworm recently asked, “is Europe trying to save itself?” To that question, I can only offer anecdotal evidence from family and business visits made to France and Belgium this summer, shortly after the Greece-precipitated financial crisis. Europe (witness the EU) is an uber-bureacracy. For centuries, Europe’s forms of governance have devolved into top-down, centralized [...]

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Tweet With increasing frequency, we hear reports about the Left’s growing disaffection with Obama.  The media, for example, is hostile to the fact that Obama doesn’t even bother to hide his disdain for them.  This is not just media pique resulting from unreasonably high expectations.  Obama is quite explicit about his unwillingness to have anything [...]

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Tweet One of the frustrating things about conversing with liberals is that, even as they’ll concede that socialism in Russia and China and Cuba and North Korea is not, or was not, a good thing, they’ve always got Europe to fall back upon. European socialism works, I am told.  Europeans have assured housing, assured medical [...]

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Tweet I warned people close to me (mother, sister, etc.) that Obama was a socialist and they laughed at me and (quite lovingly, because they’re my mom and my sister) called me “extreme.”  I wonder if they would have laughed at Al Sharpton too, now that he’s finally let the cat out of the bag: [...]

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Tweet Jesus Christ spoke the words that are the caption of this post.  As I understand it, he was speaking about the transience of his time on this earth, as opposed to some of the more permanent features of life on earth, such as poverty. Even Christ, though, couldn’t have anticipated the fact that Barack [...]

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Tweet I caught a few minutes of last night’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart, during which Stewart amused himself by taking potshots at a very big target:  CPAC.  I haven’t paid much attention to CPAC, so I can’t and therefore won’t comment on whether his shots were righteous or dishonest.  If you’d like to know [...]

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Tweet The American intelligentsia has a love affair with Communism that will not die.  The dead Soviets, the dead Hungarians, Czechs, Albanians, Poles, Bulgarians, etc., the dead Chinese, the dead Koreans, the dead Africans, the dead Cambodians, the dead Vietnamese, the dead Cubans, and the dead Latin Americans are all irrelevant.  Those are just mistakes [...]

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Tweet The holidays continue to make demands on me that take me away from my beloved computer and my blog.  I’ve managed to track enough news, though, to know that Reid managed to get his vote.  My question for you, and one I can’t answer myself, is this: Will the health care bill, even if [...]

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Tweet It’s scary, but Mark Steyn is right: I’ve been saying for a year now, in NR and NRO, that the object for savvy Dems is to get this thing passed in whatever form because, once you do, there’s no going back. Kim Strassel in yesterday’s Journal gets it: So why the stubborn insistence on [...]

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Tweet American Thinker is a site I check regularly, at least twice a day.  It’s not just that the editors are kind enough to publish my work occasionally.  It’s because the articles that appear there routinely range from really good to out-of-the-park stupendous. Today, there are two that fall in the latter category.  These are [...]

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Tweet I don’t normally follow film critics to get my political information, so I missed what Roger Ebert wrote back in August to explain why Obama Care is a good thing.  Had I read it then, I would have learned that of course it’s socialized medicine — and that’s a good thing.  In a lengthy [...]

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