Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, on November 5 went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in Texas. The ensuing gunfire left 13 dead and 30 injured. Hasan himself was shot four times by law enforcement personnel. He survived and is currently under military guard in a hospital.

AARP, the 40-million-member senior-citizen lobbying group, and the American Medical Association, representing 250,000 physicians, on November 5 threw their support behind the healthcare reform bill being proposed by House Democrats.

Two things that people should never see being made, Otto Von Bismarck once quipped, were sausages and laws. The Founding Fathers intended to make it hard to pass laws. The enumerated powers of Congress to make laws were limited to a very few areas of national concern, like postal roads, patents and copyrights, and weights and measurements. As narrowly as the Constitution restricted federal legislative power, the Bill of Rights — whose adoption was an essential precondition for many states in adopting the Constitution — include two clear and emphatic amendments which should make the whole concept of federal health care a joke.