Bookworm Room

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 even [...]

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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 scientific [...]

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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 a [...]

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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 United [...]

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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 Obama, [...]

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“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 America [...]

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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 to [...]

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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 governments [...]

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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 to [...]

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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 care, [...]

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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: Al [...]

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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 Obama [...]

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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 more [...]

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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 from [...]

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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 it [...]

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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 passing [...]

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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 the [...]

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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 post [...]

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Is Obama telling a true story or not?  I don’t know and with Obama’s credibility gap, it’s impossible to tell.  It doesn’t matter, though.  What does matter is that, by relaying this anecdote, Obama is keeping alive the Obama/Hitler analogy: President Obama at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner last night, discussing false claims made [...]

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Whenever I read the news, I’m being told that those who disagree with Obama do so based on his color.  Ordinary Americans simply can’t handle a black man in a power position and reflexively disagree with him and wish him ill.  It’s not even personal, we’re told.  It’s just that we’re bone-deep racists. When Joe [...]

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One of the most frightening things about a nanny state is the way in which it saps each citizen’s ability to care for him or herself.  While others may have been hurling imprecations at President Bush in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I reserved my bile for a nanny state that left thousands of people [...]

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At first, only people in L.A. saw it.  Now we’ve all seen it: Predictably, liberals are already crying “racism.” As for me, maybe I’m just out of touch with pop culture, but the Joker character never ranked up there in my mind with Uncle Tom or Sambo or any other stereotypical character created by racist [...]

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Obama wants more and more of our money, so that they government can exercise more and more control over every aspect of our lives.  John Hindraker has the bottom-line about that worldview: The real lesson of the Sanford fiasco is, given the frequency with which politicians display appalling judgment, weak character, and a pathological lack [...]

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Since you guys have been a little slow in offering your much desired as guest bloggers, I’m going to take advantage of some of the gems you leave in the comments section.  Today’s gem is from Charles Martel, which he wrote as a response to my “Good deal all around” post: I think socialism may [...]

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Got this in an email from Richard Baehr: An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor [...]

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