Deferring to people's own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English ... This may seem like carping, but it's not ... there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him.

I, too, was disappointed to see that Arlen Specter took a very public step to announce his allegiance to the Democratic party.

But one response would be that Democrats are tripling the debt, which means that generations of Americans not yet born will be taxed to pay for spending today. That is a kind of taxation without representation.

I'm off to deal with edits to my magazine piece, and then I'm taking a nap or launching cocktail hour, whichever comes first.

for every one pirate assault, a lethal air assault should immediately follow

and thanks especially for identifying yourself as a Ph.D. I might not have known how seriously to take your comments otherwise.

All in all I agree with some points, disagree with others. But it's been a long week and cocktail hour is fast approaching

I don't have any grand point to make, but it's interesting to think about for all sorts of reasons. Or at least I think it is.

By the way, his deplorably ageist remarks about some of the more elderly breasts on display ought to concentrate his mind on the demographic direction of Europe.

How do you top trying to make injured veterans pay for treating their own war wounds? Maybe by making fun of disabled athletes.

Basically, "mainstream" journalists ... chat all day on a list-serv with liberal activists and journalists.

But my bigger idea is to go all Randian and literally go on strike (and I've never really been much of a Rand fan, by the way—Whittaker Chambers had her down right). I'm going to start converting income opportunities into more leisure by deliberately reducing my income.

I certainly haven't read everything (let alone the terrifying thousand-plus pages [of the stimulus bill] themselves).

The British Empire's principal association with slavery is that it abolished it. [ ... ] When a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia.

The way things are going in Britain it would make more sense to drop the word "Balls".