America the Beautiful:

Gamble on Freedom, August 05, 2005
Roger Abramson's cover story in this week's Nashville Scene is a masterpiece and I agree with every word of it. Too much of our tax dollars and government focus is wasted policing victimless crimes, and it needs to stop. Read the whole thing. And if you're a liberal, make especially sure you drink in the final three paragraphs....

Inside the Heart of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, August 03, 2005
Rob Huddleston exposes a bit of the dark smoky insides of the secretive and oh-so-dangerous Federalist Society....

14er, July 25, 2005
Randy Elrod celebrates completing his first climb of a "Fourteener," one of the 54 mountains in Colorado whose peaks are at least 14,000 feet high. Nice pictures, too. I really wish I lived in Colorado....

A Supreme Pick, July 02, 2005
Blake Wylie says the president should nominate a "strict Constitutionalist" to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court. He's right. Wylie's pick: Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals Justice Alex Kozinski....

You Be The Judge, June 08, 2005
Random Numbers has some thoughts about judicial tyranny....

The Pepsi Rhetorician, May 19, 2005
Donald Sensing considers Pepsico CFO Indra Nooyi's speech to the MBA grads at Columbia and explains just how offensive and lousy it really was. Read the whole thing....

Boycott Pepsi, May 17, 2005
AFter reading about the America-insulting remarks of Pepsico CFO Indra Nooyi at recognition ceremonies for new MBA graduates of the Columbia Business School, I am inclined to boycott Pepsi products. That should fairly easy to do because I generally prefer Coke and Dr. Pepper to Pepsi - except that on the campus where I work, the local Pepsi distributor has exclusive rights. And I have just recently become addicted to AquaFina "Flavor Splash" naturally flavored...

Tsunami Update: "Stingy" Americans Give More Than $1 Billion, April 21, 2005
Chuck Simmins reports that private donations from Americans to tsunami relief efforts have now topped one billion dollars. Simmins began compiling The Stingy List after various people - such as Former president Jimmy Carter, a U.N. bureaucrat and all the usual suspects of the loathe-America Left - called America stingy in its response to the tsunami disaster of last December. It's a story you'll find first in the blogosphere, and only later in the mainstream...

Grand is Too Small A Word, March 23, 2005
Here's a phenomenal collection of photographs of Grand Teton National Park, one of the most beautiful places on earth. Man I wish I could barn-blog this. Or this....

Mud-Level Diplomacy, March 22, 2005
Thunder 6 tells a moving story of "mud-level diplomacy" in Iraq:If you took a cursory glance at our reconstruction efforts in Iraq you would probably be blinded by the vast sums being invested in the hobbled infrastructure. It is a necessary step, the global version of the "you break it, you buy it" philosophy. But the future of Iraq doesn’t rest on these repairs alone. In fact if you were to focus on the "big...

Book Review, February 08, 2005
It may sound odd, but a book I'm currently reading about the nitty gritty details of personal financial planning is turning out to be a very moving book about the greatness of America and the still-attainable reality of the American Dream. David Bach's Start Late, Finish Rich is the very solid follow-up to his mega-bestseller The Automatic Millionaire. Subtitled, <>i>A No-Fail Plan for Achieving Financial Freedom at Any Age, the book doesn't break new ground...

Tsunami: Stingy List Update, February 07, 2005
Chuck Simmins, keeper of The Stingy List, reports that non-government giving for tsunami disaster relief (giving by American private citizens, corporations and non-governmental organizations) has topped $900 million....

Tsunami: Stingy List Update, January 27, 2005
Blogger Chuck Simmins, keeper of The Stingy List, reports that donations for tsunami disaster relief by American individuals and corporations have topped $786 million in cash and in-kind contributions. UPDATE: Here's a copy of The Stingy List with hyperlinks added to the nearly 700 different news stories and web postings Simmins has collected to compile the list....

Download A Piece of History, January 21, 2005
Audible.com is offering a free audio download of President George W. Bush's second inaugural. Click here. You can download it and burn it to a CD....

Tsunami Relief: "A Very American Thing To Do", January 12, 2005
Chuck Simmins, keeper of the increasingly awesome The Stingy List, reports that donations for tsunami disaster relief by American individials and businesses has topped $615 million. And that's in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and hand's on assistance by the military being donated by Uncle Sam. Simmins, by the way, took some heat from Lefty bloggers for noticing out loud that the very long list of private sector donations was...

Tsunami: Hooray for Hollywood?, January 11, 2005
Chuck Simmins, keeper of The Stingy List, reports that the total donations by American individuals and business has topped $515 million.One addition to the Hollywood tsunami donation list, Hillary Duff. So I know have four names, out of all of Hollywood, who have made donations to tsunami relief. But I am assured by Gabriel, and the folks at Crooked Timber, that there are loads of private donations being made. I know, those Hollywood folks are...

Tsunami: Stingy? We Sent Them A Lincoln, January 10, 2005
Via Chuck Simmins, keeper of The Stingy List, comes MurdocOnline's rather nice photo illustration of the little contribution the United States taxpayers are making for tsunami disaster relief. Click to enlarge....

Is "Americanism" Just Modern-Day Puritanism?, January 09, 2005
Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost, has started a blog symposium focusing on an article in the latest edition of Commentary that asserts that Americanism is the successor of Puritanism. Carter is offereing prizes for the top three submissions. The article, Americanism - and Its Enemies, is by David Gelernter. Commentary is a very good magazine that deserves wider exposure via the blogosphere. Two bits of advice for the people at Commentary: 1. Make your...

Tsunami Relief: Where is the Left?, January 09, 2005
Chuck Simmins, keeper of The Stingy List, says donations by American companies and individuals for tsunami disaster relief has topped $456 million/ [Update: It's now $503 million.] And, says Simmins, very little of that appears to have come from Hollywood or the Left. Simmins, in an email, said: "I've grown increasingly curious at the lack of information about certain names and industries and locales on my list. It seems Hollywouldn't. If George Soros can spend...

The Stingy List Update, January 07, 2005
Chuck Simmins, compiler of The Stingy List, says Americans have now donated more than $401.7 million to the tsunami disaster relief effort - not including the massive outpouring of money and military resources by the U.S. government. I heard an estimate somewhere that the U.S. military relief operations in the disaster zone are costing $6 million a day - not including the cost of the actual relief supplies being delivered....

To Dream A Less-Impossible Dream, December 05, 2004
A childhood dream rekindled. Ed McMahon shows up at my door with a big check and I'm buyin' one of these babies....

First Snow, November 29, 2004
Winter has arrived in East Tennessee - at least judging from a very nice panorama shot posted today at South Knox Bubba's blog. I'd give you the link, but he's still redirecting any traffic from HobbsOnline to the FreeRepublic site. So you'll just have to trust me - it's a nice picture of some snow on the tops of those tall hills east of Knoxville that they called "mountains." Those aren't mountains. These are mountains....

Stuck Overnight at LAX, August 25, 2004
Nashville blogger Blake Wylie is traveling on the Left Coast and blogging the adventure. Blake, by the way, is a fantastic photographer....

Nawlins, July 12, 2004
I took Mrs. HobbsOnline to the French Quarter in New Orleans for the weekend. Here's a brief trip report on 12 Things I Learned in New Orleans: 1. New Orleans is grimy and dirty. And smelly. 2. I like the French Quarter, she doesn't. But she enjoyed shopping. 3. Creole cuisine is great, cajun isn't. ......

Fighting Back , June 22, 2004
There is hope for the future. Read the whole thing, and revel in it. Dean Esmay is right. This is one brave kid....

A Report from Iraq, June 21, 2004
Here's the latest from Spirit of America, as SoA's Jim Hake files a report from Iraq including visits to Baghdad, Ramadi and Fallujah. Read. The. Whole. Thing. You won't find it in your daily paper....

Toro! Toro! Toro!, June 17, 2004
At the age of 40, I bought my first mower yesterday. I've lived in apartments or rental homes where the landlord cut the grass for most of my adult life, and for the last three years have used an old SearsCraftsman mower that's been around for at least a dozen years and was given me a few years ago by my father-in-law. It's on its deathbed. Bagger busted, handle and controls falling apart, hard to...

"God" To Remain in Pledge, June 15, 2004
So sez the Supreme Court. But the devil is in the details....

The Thanks of a Grateful Nation, June 12, 2004

Goodbye, June 11, 2004
We lost Ronald Reagan only days ago... ...but we have missed him for a long time. We know, as he always said, that America's best days are ahead of us.But with Ronald Reagan's passing, some very fine days are behind us.And that is worth our tears. Americans saw death approach Ronald Reagan twice in a moment of violence and then in the years of departing light.He met both with courage and grace. In these trials,...

Have We Forgotten?, June 11, 2004
Todd Anderson says we've forgotten what government is for. Maybe this week as the nation reflects on Ronald Reagan, we'll remember....

The Passing Of A Great Man, June 10, 2004
Ronald Reagan's casket is carried by caisson down Constitution Avenue to the United States Capitol. The greatest president of the 20th century deserved - and got - huge crowds for the processional to his state funeral. And Vice President Dick Cheney's eulogy was perfect. For decades, America had waged a Cold War, and few believed it could possibly end in our own lifetimes. The President was one of those few. And it was the...

Reagan, The Liberator, June 07, 2004
Pejman Yousefzadeh's essay on Reagan, The Liberator, is not to be missed. It wasn't just "Soviet Communism" that fell, or the Berlin wall that came down because of Reagan. Pejman reminds us that Reagan's policies and rhetoric eventually lead to the end of "the brutal and bloodstained Ceausescu regime" in Romania, and the spread of liberating revolution across Eastern Europe. I won't excerpt it - it's too good to be sliced and diced and served...

Reagan, Proto-Blogger?, June 07, 2004
Rex Hammock has some touching thoughts about the late, great Ronald Reagan. Rex also thinks Reagan would have been a blogger had blogging existed 20 years ago. Excerpt......

Reagan Roundup, June 07, 2004
I was planning to put together an extensive round-up of Ronald Reagan tributes and commentaries from around the blogosphere. But I don't have to do it. AlphaPatriot did it. Happy reading....

A Job Well Done, June 07, 2004
Mark Steyn has a brilliant column on the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Hugh Hewitt has good stuff re Reagan too. My mind is swirling with thoughts about Reagan, about how he was the first presidential vote I ever cast (in 1984, and I can still remember the day perfectly), about how I wanted him to win the nomination in 1976, and was sad I wasn't old enough to vote for him in 1980. About how...

God Bless Ronald Reagan, June 05, 2004
Ronald Wilson Reagan, 1911-2004. He saved America....

Indian Wars, June 01, 2004
The Rocky Mountain News has a very interesting and moving story about Native Americans serving in the U.S. armed forces, both now and in past wars. According to the RMN, the nation's 2.5 million Indian people - the smallest ethnic group - are currently the most over-represented group in the armed forces, according to U.S. Census and Pentagon statistics.Weed looked at all the flags flying at half-staff. His eyes watered. He blamed the wind. "That...

How Do You Explain America, March 10, 2003
A few weeks ago, our five-year-old daughter let it be known that her new favorite song is the Dixie Chicks' recording of "Traveling Soldier," which tells the story of a U.S. solider doing his duty in Vietnam, and the girl he left behind. Our daughter, it turns out, didn't know what a "soldier" was. My wife took her to the National Guard Armory to meet some soldiers, and now she is fascinated by them, fascinated...