Category: Bits and Pieces

Not much time to blog today, so I give the Bookwormroom readers a challenge.  As a child of the 60’s I remember (barely) when Americans were optimistic.  Most Americans of the 1950s believed the “march of progress” was a very real thing.  The world was constantly improving and America was

Over the years there has been much discussion over the lessons we learned from our craven withdrawal and defeat in Vietnam.  The lessons I learned were pretty simple:  (1) Don’t go into a war unless you intend to win it.  “Limited war” is an oxymoron.  (2) Don’t go into a

Perhaps because I’m on vacation, perhaps because we’re in the dog days of August, but I’m having some mental problems grappling with the distinction between appropriate times to judge acts and appropriate times to judge intentions. I think I might have discovered a bright line between the two, but I’m

Is it my imagination, or is this rabbi (on the bobblehead doll the Giants are giving away on Jewish Heritage Night) secretly a cowboy.  Okay, the link’s working now.

This time they are in San Francisco, and their target is a proposed Starbucks.  Perhaps not surprisingly, they’re led by a local cafe owner who (ya think?) might have just a wee bit of a conflict of interest.   Hey, folks, if you don’t like a Starbucks in your neighborhood, then

Our trade deficit is out of control.  Our national debt is out of control.  The dollar is dropping against most currencies.  Oil is at an all-time high.  The housing market is weak.  The mortgage market is in disarray.  And, until two weeks ago, the stock market was hitting record highs.

While we were having an interesting discussion about Michael Vick and dogfighting a few weeks ago, I was watching the Tour de France.  At the time, everyone in the media, and most of the folks in the discussion here were bemoaning how terrible dogfighting was and couldn’t understand how people could

     DQ here.  I was reading an article on the buy-out of Chrysler the other day when one line caught my eye.  The group taking the company private is paying $1.4 billion and agreeing to invest $6.1 billion in the company.  Sounds like a bargain for a company the size

It was bad, but we can be grateful that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been: The estimate of the number of people still missing after the collapse of a highway bridge over the Mississippi River fell sharply today to eight, as divers prepared to resume their search

With respect to the Minneapolis bridge collapse, it was too much to hope, as I did in my last post, that fatalities would remain in the single digits.  Right now, with known injured people and bodies recovered, the search begins for the people still missing — possibly as many as

The last word I heard on the bridge collapse in Minneapolis is that about 50 people are injured, with 3 confirmed deaths. (H/t Drudge.) The reason behind the bridge’s collapse is currently a mystery, so I won’t comment or speculate. I’ll only say that I hope that the above numbers,

I’m back and have a few more (and last) random comments. I love my computer.  I realized when I was struggling with a rinky-dink tablet computer that part of why I’m able to blog as I do is that I’ve got things set up so perfectly for my needs and

I’m packing up stuff now, ready for a full day’s travel (home) tomorrow, so this  will be my last post for 24-32 hours.  I have a question for you, though.  Do bloggers like me matter? I think that the big bloggers, whether Right (Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, Power Line,

I’m very glad Bookworm is back and will leave the blogging to her, but I did want to throw out one more topic that came up in a prior comment stream.  The question was what our society can/should do to instill a sense of personal responsibility.  Mike Devx was kind

I’m finding it hard, this vacation, to do any sustained blogging. And to those of you wondering, I like blogging sufficiently that it’s a pleasure, not a chore I willingly leave behind when I turn off my familiar office computer. So, here come a few other random observations, which are