There's a simple way for the straight talker to prove how straight he's talking.

For the next couple of weeks, let's send Old Straight out for solitary evening strolls on randomly selected sidewalks of Baghdad, just him and his white hair and American face, being welcomed as a liberator. That should prove it.

Better yet, he could take Bush and Cheney.

After the celebration of the current vernal equinox, stolen long ago from the pagans, has run its course, after the chocolate Jesus has finished offending and titillating, what happens? He's chocolate, right? Will he be remelted before he's eaten, or will someone have the chance to chow down on anatomical correctness? Will there be pictures?

As for the color thing, can't we all agree that the real Jesus, at the end, was probably about 64" tall, weighed about as much as an average American third-grader but had as much body fat as a roll of barbed wire, and had a complexion that we pink-toes would at our most charitable have called swarthy?

The pallid Goths and Vandals, who must have followed the glaciers north and pinkened their toes as H. sapiens began their domination of the planet, had not yet returned south and diluted the eastern Mediterranean gene pool. There are any number of contemporary malnourished Arab teens who could play the part.

Since this is Friday personal anecdote night, and the topic is health care, I can share with you all that having an infarct ('96) (age 49, picked the wrong parents) and a quintuple bypass ('04) is a good way to make your small town, solo law practice exist for the sole purpose of generating cash for a particular health insurance carrier until you reach the shimmering (mirage?) oasis of Medicare.

If the doc's and the hospitals would have let me pay the insurance price, which by contract they can't, I could have financed the bypass with the premiums after the infarct.

For the past quarter-century, since the days of Saint Ronnie, we have let the greedy persuade us that private, for-profit corporations are lean, mean, resource-allocating machines, and that the enrichment of rich Republicans is just a necessary by-product. Ask not what you can do for your country; ask what you can do to make the rich richer. Anyone who believes this myth has never worked for a major national corporation, nor known anyone who did.

Back when Jack Kennedy was not yet mouldering in his grave, the American Medical Association fought that socialist Medicare proposal tooth and nail, but the ink was not yet dry on Lyndon Johnson's signature before they were hosting seminars on how to maximize their billing. In those days, small-town doc's earned no more than small-town barristers, and were equally likely to make house calls.

Since the opening of the public trough, the social contract of the medical profession, not to mention Big Pharma, has been: "Make me rich or I will let you suffer and die; nonnegotiable."

Here is my modest proposal.

We nationalize the health insurance and pharma industries, use their billions of profits and the hundred of millions of bonuses they pay their queen bees to reduce the national debt to China. We draft the health care professionals into the Army, give them a high GS rating, guaranteed benefits and clerical support, and no one looking over their shoulders. The good ones will not notice the difference. The employees who do the actual work won't care.

Modest enough?

Anyone who thinks the world changed on September 11, 2001, was not paying attention on September 10.

Would it be wrong if we started referring to ABC as the Mickey Mouse News Network?

Thanks for watching them, so that the vast and growing majority of the rest of the U.S. need not do so.

Not in any way to minimize the magnitude of the horror everyone at Virginia Tech must feel, but Charles Pierce over on Altercation has already reminded us that it's a bit hyperbolic to call this the "worst shooting in American history" when we have places like Wounded Knee in our record.

The ultimate problem with desalination is the same as with nuclear power. What to you do with the leftovers?

We've already done a good job of killing off a substantial percentage of the marine life in the oceans. Is the plan now to pickle what's left in brine? The salt that's left over when you take away the fresh water has to go somewhere.

The ultimate solution to the water problem, whether we make the decision ourselves or let God or nature's plan run its course, will be to reduce the number of humans who need to drink it.