Letters to the Editor

OPINION:

Holistic moms

While we greatly appreciate Gabriella Boston’s coverage of the Holistic Moms Network and some of our members’ unusual Mother’s Day celebrations (“Holistic moms shun commercialism,” Page 1, Saturday), we would like to clarify that the Holistic Moms Network is not a “New Age group.”

Our membership is diverse on many levels and includes bankers, lawyers, doctors, actors, artists, holistic practitioners, teachers, and stay-at-home mothers, many of whom would not plant their child’s placenta under a tree.

We honor and respect those in our membership who choose to do that because we value and encourage diversity, and we respect individuals’ personal choices — in every area of life. Indeed that is one of the principal tenets of the Holistic Moms. So, while some of us may have participated in quasi-“pagan tradition” on Mother’s Day, many of us simply chose to spend time with our families, and even got a card or two!

EMILY FANO

Media coordinator

Holistic Moms Network

Caldwell, N.J.

No NRA endorsement

A correction to your editorial titled “Bayou blues” (Saturday). The National Rifle Association did not endorse a candidate in the recent special election in Louisiana’s Sixth Congressional District. While we endorsed Don Cazayoux and Woody Jenkins for their respective party nominations, no candidate was endorsed by the NRA for the special general election held on May 3.

CHUCK CUNNINGHAM

Director of federal affairs

National Rifle Association

Local school boards are the problem

Dan Lips commends Ronald Reagan’s call for states and localities to improve the poor academic performance of elementary and high-school students as first reported by the study “A Nation At Risk.”

In “Still a ’nation at risk,’ ” (Commentary, Saturday) Mr. Lips hails Mr. Reagan’s decision to not involve the federal government in the process of educating our nation’s youth but rather to emphasize the antediluvian notion that educational systems are best directed by states and local school boards.

While I do believe that Washington should not dictate each and every aspect of our schools’ operations, I also firmly believe that it is the responsibility of the national government to impose a national academic curriculum to be followed by all elementary and secondary school systems.

Allowing local school boards to decide which courses are to be taught to students within their individual areas of responsibility makes for widely disparate educational quality.

A well-educated school board in an affluent New England town may well make the best decisions for its students. This may very well not be the case in a poorly educated, impoverished town in Mississippi or Louisiana where local folks with less appreciation for current global realities hold power. Mr. Lips fails to realize that in most educational situations it is the local school boards that constitute the problem.

LOU CANDELL

Williamsburg, Va.

McCain and the Hispanic vote

In “McCain’s quest for the Hispanic vote,” (Editorial, Thursday) you wrote: “In order to remain competitive in the general election, John McCain will have to perform a Herculean task: Court the Hispanic vote without alienating the base of the Republican Party.”

This is not a Herculean task at all. The main thing McCain has to do is to promise to free former Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean. Hispanics are deeply saddened and angry that two of their brothers who appeared to have been protecting their country are behind bars for their pains and that, worse, their salaries and pensions have been cut off, leaving their wives penniless.

Even Hispanics who like easy immigration want to see their brothers treated fairly and decently. Mr. McCain could court Hispanics while holding on to his conservative base by promising to free and reinstate these two guys.

DON HANK

Wrightsville, Pa.

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Mr. McCain — who echoes the Bush cadre’s twin goals of endless war in the Middle East via permanent U.S. occupation, and a de facto union with Central and South America using North American Free Trade Agreement, Central American Free Trade Agreement and the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America — is no maverick. His aims dovetail intimately with those of one-world elitists pushing to equalize assets among global populations.

They feed Americans cheaper, suspect food from China,they back purportedly smarter legal workers from India, and supposedly harder-working illegal Mexicans, while foreign countries take over U.S. infrastructure at taxpaying citizen expense as the federal deficit topped $9,364 trillion May 8, against our deeply devaluated dollar.

He’s also solidly in sync with minority Hispanic factions through his Outreach Director Juan Hernandez, a former Vicente Fox employee and avowed Mexico-first dual citizen.

Mr. McCain would love to forget the American majority that overwhelmingly opposes perpetuating war and at-will disregards for our highest national and international laws.

The American majority wants less immigration; legal paths to citizenship already exist; and constitutionalist Ron Paul adheres to the law.

Imagine that.

M.L. PINKARD

Lafayette, Calif.

Defining a recession

I was disappointed in reading your editorial on “the definition of a recession” (Friday), as if it’s a definition solely used by conservative journalists and Fox News. This definition is the very same definition taught in universities nationwide.

So, for the sake of your argument, let’s use the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) definition instead, and see whether we had a recession from March 2001 to November 2001. If you had done a little research on NBER’s Web site, you would have found this written quote from one of their press releases dated July 17, 2003:

“The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research met yesterday. At its meeting, the committee determined that a trough in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in November 2001. The trough marks the end of the recession that began in March 2001 and the beginning of an expansion. The recession lasted 8 months.”

Another report from November 2001 determined that the gross domestic product peaked (defined as an end to expansion) in March 2001 and a recession began at that point in time, until the November 2001 trough. And then another expansion began.

I don’t know who the authority is, besides The Times, in anointing the National Bureau of Economic Research as the “official arbiter” of when recessions begin and end. Their determinations are generally accepted (by whom?) as a broad consensus of committee member economists, by analyzing established data from a span of time in the past.

The committee does not forecast or comment on current economic activity. They don’t make real-time announcements of whether we’re in a recession.

It’s hard to believe that a nonprofit and independent organization of economists, in their definition of a recession, would choose to employ two vague and subjective adjective clauses such as “significant decline in activity” and “lasting more than a few months.”

Reducing a precise, empirically measurable definition of recession to one that is vaguely left to an immeasurable, muddled collage of individually subjective opinions defeats the purpose of using such a conceptual term.

Nevertheless, I would suggest that the reason they do have such a vague definition is to generously allow inclusion of a complex array of data to reach a consensus on the economy’s status in the past tense.

And if one reads their definition further, as you’ve deliberately chosen to exclude, that won’t happen until there’s empirical data showing that the economy has reached a trough. Has our economy bottomed out? We don’t know that yet, and we won’t be hearing from them for a “few months,” if not more.

You admitted that the “official” NBER has not yet decided whether we are in a recession, but you have taken the liberty to conclude it is a recession by using the NBER’s vague definition as a crutch. And that definition, as we saw above, just may come back to bite you.

RICHARD CASTELLI

Falls Church