Wow. I tried the live-chat window. The comments come by so fast I could begin to read them. I must be getting old.

Oh! I do hope you are right. How many electoral votes?

Here is my thought process: Our founding documents tell us we have a God-given right to life along with liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that the state can only take away those rights after due process. The question is, at what point does the unborn child acquire those rights? Modern science tells us that at the moment of conception the unborn child has a unique DNA code, separate and distinct from either of it's parents. In other words a unique person.

It's all about incentives. High marginal tax rates are an incentive not to take risks to earn additional money. They are an incentive to invest your money in ways that earn tax free interest such as municipal bonds. Lending your money to your state government (buying muni bonds) does not create economic growth the way that lending it to a private sector corporation (buying corporate bonds or stocks) does.

Maybe a well timed, embarrassing leak from said intellengence community?

Depends on how you look at it. If the 200 interviews to time away from debate prep then they were a disadvantage.

Great question! Seems like this factoid would be a good weapon for Mitt. Wonder why he doesn't use it?

I wasn't talking about divorce. Hence the term "unwed fathers". I'm talking about men who shack up with a woman and then disappear when the baby arrives. My comments have not been an attempt to assign blame rather they are an attempt to suggest the most efficient incentive to counteract the problem of fatherless children.

 It's the men who are abandoning the children to be supported by the tax payer. I say mandatory sterilization for unwed fathers. Putting them in jail doesn't do much if anything to reduce the cost to the state. The threat of becoming a eunuch would provide a powerful incentive for men to be responsible.

I disagree. There was a time when there were enough people in the country who had internalized the Judeo-Christian value system to apply social pressure (the shame factor) against those who broke the rules. This wasn't 100% effective but it was effective enough. Divorce was considered a shameful thing let alone pregnancy out of wedlock. The secularists have spent fifty years or more working overtime to drive the Judeo-Christian value system out of the public square. The shame factor that kept people in line went with it.

As for your original question, it’s not whether or not the makers can support the takers; it’s whether or not they will support them. I believe sooner or later Atlas will shrug. I don’t know what that will look like but I suspect it won’t be pretty.

I'm all for a free market in banking as long as there is no fraud. One bank pays for FDIC insurance and proudly advertizes that fact. It pays a quarter of a percent per year on deposits. Another bank has no insurance. A fact that it openly discloses. It pays five percent per year. What's wrong with giving the consumer the choice? We allow consumers to choose between triple A rated bonds and those with lower ratings. Why should banks be different?

I think the comparison to WWII is a good one. Here's why: When the Japanese surrendered we forced their emperor to publicly declare that he was not divine. In other words we made them change their religion. Our leaders recognized the religious nature of the conflict and had the moral certainty to act on it. As for the Germans, not many people realize that National Socialism was essentially a pagan religion. Christian churches in Germany were forced to take down their crosses and put up the swastika instead. Germany was forced to repudiate this religion after the war. If the western way of life is to survive we are going to have to recognize the nature of this conflict and have the moral certainty to act upon that knowledge. I hate to say it but after being besieged by the secularists for 70 years, I seriously doubt that we are up to it.

 There are plenty of things that are said and done in this world that greatly offend me but I don't run out and beat people to death and burn down buildings because I'm offended.

Wake up people! The problem here is not some idiot making a stupid movie. The problem is Islam. Muslims are going to continue to be offended until there are no non-Muslims left because their holy books tell them their duty is to make the whole world surrender to Allah.

I keep hearing that Muslims hate us because of our foreign policy or because of our freedom. Nonsense! Muslims hate us because we are not Muslims. The movie is just an excuse.

The sooner we, as a nation, come to grips with this truth, the sooner we can craft a foreign policy to effectively deal with it. Not to mention an immigration policy that acknowledges that mass immigration from Muslim countries is cultural suicide.

I'm a project manager. I have zero control over the quality of the products my company manufactures and I have to install. I have almost no control over which technicians get hired to program and check out the systems I am responsible for. I only occasionally have control over what subcontractors are hired to do the installation. I have absolutely no control over which customers we do business with.

Care to guess what would happen if I told my boss that because of these factors, he shouldn't hold me accountable for the outcomes of the projects I manage?

As typical liberals the teachers don't like your idea but have none of their own. In this case they don't want to be evaluated on student performance but I have yet to hear how they would want to be evaluated. Until they come up with an alternative, I can only assume that they want no accountability at all.

To be fair, in one way they are right. The number one correlation to student performance is not class size or dollars spent per student or computers in the classroom or quality of facilities or even teacher qualification. The number one correlation to student performance is parental involvement.

That's why vouchers are, in my opinion, such a good idea. You hand a parent a voucher worth several thousand dollars and tell them it's up to them what they do with it and you have automatically increased parental involvement significantly.

Not being an expert on monetary policy, here's my understanding of the Fed's action: The Fed is creating money out of thin air and giving it to the banks in hopes that they will lend it to businesses so that those businesses will expand and hire more workers. This would seem to me to be a trade-off between the inflationary effect of creating worthless money and the stimulating effect of helping expand the private sector. Having made that move the Fed then sabotages its own tactic by paying the banks interest on the money thus incentivizing the banks not to lend. It seems to me that the only winners in this current scenario are the banks.

I hate to say it but this lends support to those conspiracy theorists who say the Fed was created by bankers for the benefit of bankers.