Quick Thanks to Rick and Michael

Hello All,

Many thanks to Rick and Michael for their thoughts on the Pakistan post.  I'll respond to these helpful thoughts in full a bit later today.  For the moment, let me do three quick things: 

First, to reassure Rick and all other MOJ readers that I do not wish to analogize social conservatives to acid-throwers and so forth.  My concern, rather, is with paranoid radicals: the folk who continue to propagate birth certificate, Obama-is-a-vampire, his-wife-is-a-shemale, etc. etc. nonsense with abandon; who seek simply to stop their opponents even from speaking, rather than to refute them; and who seriously  threaten, I think, to oust sane Burkean conservatives (whom they lumb together with more "liberal" Republicans as "RINO"s) from a once venerable political party.  But more on this soon.

Second, to crow about having posted my remarks two days before Krugman's column!

And third, to commend to you, with expressions of humility, this recent piece on the health care reform debate -- http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1484768 -- which is soon to come out in the economic policy journal Challenge.

Thanks again and more soon,

Bob