You probably don't associate the Internal Revenue Service with health, unless it's their letterhead's ability to make your heart stop. Yet, under both the House and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions healthcare reform bills, the dreaded tax department will be a major player in making sure you comply with government healthcare dictates.

You're going to be healthy — whether you like it or not. The Obama administration is pushing for a national healthcare bill this summer and Democrats in the Senate are responding, with a Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee measure that would make healthcare both a right and a responsibility.

It is 1991, and Yugoslavia, born of the ashes of WWI, is starting to break up. It is a violent affair that will be long, painful, bloody, and complex. Numerous wars in the multi-ethnic region will be fought, with Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia declaring independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia and, in turn, Serb minorities seeking independence from the last two regions. Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians (virtually all Muslim), and Albanians (largely Muslim) will battle Serbs. Croats and Bosnians will unite to battle them — then fight each other as well — then unite again; and Albanians will take up the sword against Macedonians. Muslims will burn churches, and minority populations will be purged from many of these regions. They are the first conflicts since WWII to be formerly deemed genocidal, and these wars will introduce English-speakers to a new term: ethnic cleansing.

After getting in my car the other night, this writer turned on a radio show hosted by a man renowned as a rare moderate in talk radio, although he’s most notable for only moderately deep thinking. He was talking about the Catholic Church sex scandal, and he fielded a caller proposing a unique solution: allow priests to have concubines. This prompted the host to chime in and opine that perhaps the discipline of celibacy should be revisited. After all, said he, it’s only the Catholic Church that has “these problems.” It’s the kind of shallow analysis that passes for social commentary today.

By now we’ve all heard about the air-traffic controller who allowed his kids direct airplanes at John F. Kennedy Airport last month. Yes, that’s “kids” — plural. It is now being reported that after the controller, identified as 49-year-old Glenn Duffy, let his 8 or 9-year old son take the reins, he followed suit with his daughter the next day.

She is now a healthy baby, bouncing about, playing with bubbles in the bathtub, and taking in everything this mysterious world she entered has to offer. But she almost never was.

God may not have a place in the modern American classroom, but the Devil is a different story. That is, at least in one North Carolina high school.

Spanking is like milk: It does a body good — or at least a mind. No, this isn’t the conclusion of traditionalist parenting expert Dr. James Dobson but the finding of a study conducted by psychology professor Marjorie Gunnoe at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. FoxNews.com reports on the story, writing, “According to the research, children spanked up to the age of 6 were likely as teenagers to perform better at school and were more likely to carry out volunteer work and to want to go to college than their peers who had never been physically disciplined.”

It’s ironic that Black Friday, which has a negative etymology and connotation, should have become one of the more anticipated days of the year. And it’s sad that the holiday meant to be devoted to thanking God for what we have should be followed by — and increasingly subordinated to — a day devoted to seeking what we do not.

Those who would accuse Barack Obama of pandering to — if not sympathy for — Islamists have been handed some powerful new ammunition. In a disturbing move, the Obama administration is joining Muslim nations in supporting a UN resolution restricting criticism of religion, a measure reflective of those nations’ blasphemy laws.