Keith Burgess-Jackson

Here is Thomas Sowell’s latest column. Here is John Podhoretz’s latest column.

Here is Pope Benedict XVI’s Easter address, in which he mentioned Iraq. Here is Richard John Neuhaus’s commentary.

I learned while visiting Michelle Malkin’s site that Fred Thompson is blogging. See here for his post about Iran.

Mark Spahn sent a link to this interesting blog post. Read it carefully; there will be a test in the morning.

There is a takeover attempt taking place. No, I’m not talking about corporate America. I’m talking about the attempt by fanatical leftists to take over the Democrat Party. Here is the latest incident. You might think that leftists would form a party of their own, rather than try to take over an existing party. But it would take time to build such a party, and leftists are nothing if not impatient. They want change now! They think it’ll be easier, and quicker, to take over an existing party than to build a new one. We’ll see whether it works. I’m sure that it won’t. The only way a major party can win a national election is by forming coalitions. Ronald Reagan, for instance, joined libertarians with conservatives. Had he tried to cleanse the Republican Party of the so-called Religious Right, he would not have been elected. Parties aren’t meant to be pure. They can’t win if they’re pure. The extreme Left is going to learn this lesson the hard way. By driving the Democrat Party to the left, and by expelling the likes of Joe Lieberman, they ensure failure. If you want to know the truth, I think leftists want to lose the presidency. At a minimum, they’re ambivalent about wielding power. They’d rather snipe than govern. They’ve grown rather fond of hatred and anti-Americanism during the past six years. Why give up a good thing, especially when it makes you feel good and raises a lot of money?

[M]oral language is a human institution. It is the business of the moral philosopher to say, not what the logical behaviour of moral terms would be like, if they were devised by and for the use of angels, but what it actually is like.

(R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963], 73 [italics in original; footnote omitted])

You can’t stare into the sun
You can’t pretend to have fun
Shake your head
You can’t read a robot’s mind
Can’t expect vultures to be kind
Shake your head
Can’t tune a radio to heaven
You can’t live seven lives
Shake your head
You can’t win money at the horses
You can’t fight the armed forces
Shake your head

Shake your head (let’s go to bed)

You can’t sing underwater
You can’t have the boss’s daughter
Shake your head
You can’t make missiles out of mud
You can’t purify bad blood
Shake your head
You can’t sue Buddha for libel
You can’t rewrite the Bible
Shake your head
You can’t hit homers like Babe Ruth
Can’t put your finger on the truth
Shake your head

Shake your head (let’s go to bed)

You can’t feed the hungry
Can’t talk Shakespeare to a monkey
Shake your head
You can’t bounce a square ball
You can’t fight city hall
Shake your head
You can’t argue with death
Can’t break a burly sailor’s neck
Shake your head
You can’t drink lava from plastic glasses
You can’t influence the masses
Shake your head
You can’t become invisible
Can’t bullshit the devil
Shake your head
You can’t ban the bomb
And there’s no way to stay calm
Shake your head

Shake your head (let’s go to bed)

Here.

To the Editor:

The primary reason people do not rush to an emergency room at the first sign of chest pains may be the cost of an emergency room visit.

Most people cannot pay well over $1,000 for an emergency room visit and the required tests, and so will not go to the emergency room until they are sure that it is a life-threatening situation. By that time, as the article shows, the damage is done.

You also point out that the reason hospitals fail to transfer cardiac patients is a financial incentive to keep them. It is time that we eliminated the perverse incentives for poor health care and provided universal access to health care.

Michael Scheinberg
Austin, Tex., April 8, 2007

Note from KBJ: For some people, the answer to every question is, “Universal access to health care.” Why is your health care my concern? Why is my health care your concern?

Here.