Despite his consistent party-line voting record, some independents and Democrats still think of Senator McCain as the most palatable, independent-minded Republican. But this is the sort of empty compliment a friend of mine once compared to being called “the coolest Osmond.

Why is America the last best hope of Earth? What if it's Liechtenstein? Or, worse, Canada?

No one I know actually reads what I write, so thank heavens for you strangers.

Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?

Owen is the most Hitchcockian preschooler I ever met. He's three. He knows maybe ninety word and one of them is 'crypt'?

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.

I talk about going to his [George W. Bush's] Inauguration and crying when he took the oath, 'cause I was so afraid he was going to "wreck the economy and muck up the drinking water"... the failure of my pessimistic imagination at that moment boggles my mind now.