The American Spectator

TRY ALL YOU WANT
Re: Robert Stacy McCain’s It Won’t Work:

Here’s the problem: the only people who will get that message are readers of this and other conservative blogs, or listeners to conservative talk radio (as long as it lasts). You sure as heck aren’t going to be seeing or hearing it in any of the MSM outlets.
— Keith Kunzler

Robert Stacy McCain is correct when he says the Democrats cannot fix the economy. Obama’s new public works proposal is comprised almost entirely of digging new trenches for fiber optic lines and laying down more concrete and mortar for roads and schools and such. Where is the vision for the sciences and technology besides the —yawn — proposed upgrades to digital health care databases, which just another tool for big-brother government control. He’s trying 80-year-old solutions that will not work and not in the slightest way advance America in the technology sector. We will be lucky to sell enough new cars to travel on the new roads and fixed bridges.
— Steve Cade
Portland, Oregon

LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR
Re: David N. Bass’s Abstinence Phobia:

It should surprise no one that Democrats will end the funding of abstinence teaching in schools. If successful, the practice of abstinence will reduce the Democrats’ core constituency: welfare recipients. As long as children drop out of school to raise babies they are not capable of turning into employable adults — the Democrats will have their major voting constituency intact.

Remember they have only three major constituencies. For money it is the unions and Communist Chinese; for publicity it is the hollow headed Hollywood crowd; and for votes welfare folks (and some poor misguided radical leftists). 

Democrat constituencies are like your third grade class. Two people would be nominated to run for class President. One might try to discuss something serious such as more nutritional cafeteria food or longer recess for physical activity. The other would promise ice cream and candy for lunch. Care to guess who wins?
— Jay Molyneaux

North CarolinaThe money spent on sex education is a secondary effect; the root problem lies in the expectations that someone besides the families of children are the ones tasked to teach family values. When the school was a local institution (paid for by local taxes) and families had close contact with each other, the school may have been yet another venue to instill family values; the local religious house being the secondary and the family being primary. It is exactly because these values were shared community values that the school could disseminate a clear moral vision. This shared vision has disappeared. School reflect their communities and both are too diverse to agree upon common values such as abstinence.

What is the government’s compelling interest to promote sexuality or abstinence? What Conservative or Libertarian can find constitutional grounds for the Department of Education? Spending money on abstinence/sexual education is not a financial issue but a matter of principle, both Constitutional and moral.

The government, via the school system, is not the appropriate provider of morals, sexual or otherwise. The home is the appropriate place for teaching manners, etiquette and other matters of social behaviors. Schools can certainly reinforce these practices, but parents cannot reasonably abrogate their responsibilities and expect the schools to pick up the (broken) pieces.

Any two animals in heat of can produce progeny, but only true adults can properly raise children.
— Ira M. Kessel
Rochester, New York

REGULATED TO DEATH
Re: Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein’s Mark to Market Means Mayhem:

Wesbury and Stein make the same point that I have for some time: mark to market (MtM) accounting rules have exacerbated a normal credit cycle into the monumental mess we now have. MtM, in conjunction with Sarbanes-Oxley, have compelled banks to value assets at the low-ball offers that they received, forcing them to devastate their capital accounts.

FASB and the SEC have dug their heels in to maintain MtM rules in the face of the severe damage they are doing. They justify this position by saying that it allows the market to know the “true” value of the assets held. If that is the reason for doing so, then compel institutions to put in the footnotes to their financial statements the MtM valuations and explain why they differ, if they do, from the values on the balance sheet. Investors will have as much information but the credit and capital markets won’t be held hostage.

I put true in quotes above. It is not at all clear that MtM is giving accurate assessments of value. Based on the writedowns of subprime debt the MtM analysis is implying that all $1 trillion of subprime debt will default AND that the underlying assets are totally worthless. Does any sentient adult seriously believe this?