Here’s a little news release on Channel 4 about $700,000 in federal stimulus money distributed in Arkansas to help 2,700 public school students.

Why do these 2,700 need help?

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They’re homeless. Merit pay and charter schools provide little comfort to such children.

This reminds me again of the sad story of a former Arkansas newspaper reporter who died homeless in Birmingham in 2006. The news, told by a preacher who’d tried to minister to him, belatedly reached me last week. The comments on that blog post are interesting — particularly from the faithful conservative commenter who decried playing to people’s sympathy in achieving political objectives. Sympathy? We’ll have no sympathy in the United States of Darwinism.

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I also thought I’d pass along a comment posted to the Arkansas Times Facebook fan page about the same story and my suggestion that the U.S. can do more:

We already help our sick. No one is denied health care, as demonstrated by the illegals with sore throats in the emergency rooms. You want to see people who can’t get health care? Then give this over to our government… No we can’t.

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