Baseball has too many close plays and too many judgment calls to have wholesale instant replay that could add hours to a game. However, there is no reason why there can't be some device to show automatically whether any part of a ball went over any part of the plate, before an umpire can call it a strike. How wide the strike zone is shouldn't depend on what umpire is behind the plate.

Among the many infirmities of age is omniscience.

What I most remember about the late Irving Kristol, aside from his wisdom-- which is much rarer among intellectuals than one might expect-- was that I never saw him angry, either in person or in the media. And he lived in a time when there was much to be angry about. Those of us who are getting along in years are unlikely to see another like him, and even those who are younger will be lucky if they do.

No statement is more unnecessary than the statement that the government should "do something" about some issue. Politicians are going to "do something," whether or not something needs to be done, and regardless of whether what they do makes matters better or worse. All their incentives are to keep themselves in the public eye.

There is no point dwelling on all the foolish mistakes we have made in our lives. For one thing, it can be very time-consuming.

One of the few advantages to the country in having Congress overwhelmingly in the hands of one party is that the lack of need to compromise lets the leaders of that party reveal themselves for what they are-- in this case, people with unbounded arrogance and utter contempt for the right of ordinary people to live their lives as they see fit, much less the right to know as citizens what laws are going to be passed by their government. The question is whether voters will remember on election day in 2010.

Even if this country can survive intact and unharmed after the Obama administration-- or, heaven help us, two terms of Obama-- the gullibility that led to his being elected in the first place will still be there for some other slick demagogue to come along and get the power to put the American way of life, and even our physical safety, at risk again.