My father was a small town banker who grew up during the depression. He used to say that the bank shouldn't make a loan that it couldn't justify to its depositors, since it was the depositors' money the bank was lending. Traditionally, a conservatively run bank loaned around 60-70% of its deposits, and invest the rest in treasury securities and municipal bonds. Most of the big banks - and lots of smaller ones - have loaned out over 100% of their deposits the last few years, i.e., they'd loaned out ALL their deposits PLUS borrowed from other lenders and re-loaned that money! There's no way a bank can make that many "good" loans. To make that many loans in relation to their deposits, they were making some very marginal loans and it caught up with them. The FDIC and the other bank regulators should have required them to cut back on their loans long ago. If they had, this crisis may still have happened, but it wouldn't have been so severe. I don't like the idea of the government forcing CEOs out, but I don't understand why their boards of directors haven't already forced them out.

Abortion is a social/moral issue like murder and armed robbery are social/moral issues. The unborn child is being killed. Profanity on TV is a social issue.

So you think that Fox News is the creator of conservative thought? What a hoot! Conservatives pre-date Fox News by many, many years.

I suspect Obama was just setting up his next shot - higher taxes. I wish he would figure out that the best way to raise tax revenue would be to reduce tax rates, but he's too much into class warfare to admit it.

Interesting that the swine flu news pops up just after Obama does a meet and greet with Calderon. The immediate result of their meeting was more bogus information on how U.S. sporting goods stores are arming the Mexican drug lords (funny, I can't find any fully automatic weapons in any of the gun stores I frequent). When that doesn't cause any groundswell of support for anti-gun legislation, they move on to a story that may very well be designed to drum up support for socialized medicine just as the Dems' health care bill, the next item on their agenda, gets to the top of the Congressional calendar.

What nations have we used military force against to force them to open their economies to capitalism?

Point 1. There's no reason to be overly concerned with our image abroad. Other countries become our allies, or not, based on whether their interests merge with ours, not on our "image." Did our improved image under Obama do anything to get our so-called allies in Europe to do anything of any consequence in our favor on his recent trip over there? No. The "image" argument simply doesn't hold up to any serious scrutiny.

Point 2. Torture is something that purposefully causes intense physical pain and results in permanent disfigurement, disability, loss of limb/eye/vital organ, or death to a person in captivity. The advanced interrogation techniques that have been made public are more akin to a college fraternity initiation than to torture.

The reason life expectancy is higher in some countries with socialized health care, such as Canada, is that Americans suffer from so many self-inflicted diseases, not that socialized medicine provides better care. Our diet causes more diabetes, heart disease, etc. If Canadians ate like we did, the death rates would be closer. We bring many of our health problems on ourselves, and until we cease doing so, all the "free" medical care in the world isn't going to lengthen our life spans.