"Are all women who outsource their pregnancies exploitative capitalists who would be better off raising a needy child? Are they merely combating the tragedy of infertility by any means necessary?"

The evil of surrogacy is one issue on which the fundamentalist right and the Luddite left agree. Which is precisely why I take the opposite view. These women are technological pioneers, just like those people who make private space flights in homebrew spacecraft. This sort of high-risk adventure is certainly not for everybody, but those who push into this medical/moral unknown ground are making findings that will one day benefit us all.

The reader responses here drip with class resentment. Would you people feel the same if the "buyer" was a single black woman who mortgaged her condo to have a child this way?

I would rather have Blackwater contractors riding the ships through the pirate zone, suitably assisted by aerial spotting to find the motherships. After a few pirate crews and motherships put to sea and are simply never seen again, the attraction of the buccaneer lifestyle to the drug-fueled young men of Somalia will pall.

"There there, don't be a sulking pirate. We'll bake some brownies and have a trust and team building exercise."

To me, the coolest outcome to this crisis would be "metapiracy." Those little Somali fishing villages now sprouting sudden new wealth from pirate operations are surely going to attract opportunists. There have already been report of jihadist bands sniffing around, looking for goodies to plunder. Nuke some popcorn!

What are the Somalis going to do with a boatload of funbags? Watch your inbox for some "special" e-mails from General Theophilus Ongabonga, who "must move his cargo out of his impoverished little country right away..."

This is one thing that's not going to change in 2009, all you hopeful Democrats out there. Because Joe Biden helped write those monster laws that have allowed corporate intellectual property owners to rip up the Constitution during the Bush and Clinton years, this is one horrible mess that is just going to get worse. By the time these people get through with us, the DMCA will have an execution clause. Now that we can't use Guantanamo for terrorists anymore, Hollywood will make sure it gets filled with music downloaders.

"We need trains like mad. I live in Maine, which is littered with the bones of former rail lines. "

Before we spend on TGV trains, energy development or any other form of infrastructure, we need to pass a blanket exemption from lawsuits and delays by the flat-earth lobby. Once the agency primarily responsible for the type of development being contemplated passes judgement on the safety and viability of a project, let's actually start building it, balls-to-the-wall, no lawyers allowed.

"Asbstosis. Silicosis. Bendectin. Audi accelerators. Erin Brockovich's "cancer clusters." "Birth trauma." Silicone gel breast implants and connective tissue diseases. Thimerosol and autism. Accutane and teen suicide. "Chemical AIDS." The list of nationally-renowned junk science in the courtroom goes on and on and on.

And it'll be cold day in John Edwards' hell before an Obama Administration cracks down on that kind of scientific abuse."

It gets worse: Chu is on record as favoring nuclear, especially over coal. The Stalinistas are not going to like having an actual scientist in a post that God gave to lawyers.

Actually the title was "Mother of Storms."

...it would agree to exchange some of its wages for equity in the Big Three. This would make union labor competitive with labor in "South Japan", while at the same motivating the workers to make their companies more competitive.

...proclaiming that the war is over, it was all Bush's fault, and we're returning Iraq to jihadist control a week from Tuesday. Yesterday's Mr. al-Florsheim would have praised him to the skies. But it would be raining footwear from a much larger cohort of Iraqis, those who are now starting businesses and getting their families fed with a higher degree of safety than under Saddam or whatever death-crazed militia yesterday's hothead may have represented. After all, the person who tackled the shoe-thrower was not an SS man, but one of the other Iraqi reporters.

As for "the low-level, ultimately irrelevant crimes of Rod Blagojevich." Yeah, right: blatantly putting up a president-elect's Senate seat for auction is a low-level crime. Like Charles Manson was a stop sign runner.

"How the World Works has had a hard time getting too excited about it..."

Because Bernie Madoff was a major funder of Soros-like candidates and causes. At next spring's Oscars, expect some rants about the loss of that trifling $50 billion from the left's list of favorite causes. Hollywood's lords and ladies are going to have to drop their bling into the big tin samovar when it gets rattled in their faces.

A more enlightened and liberal (in today's sense) solution might be to create an independent Republic of Salonia out of these places. While the Salonians busy themselves taxing each other and fleecing European tourists, America could concentrate on getting an economy going again.