OT: Political dead horse

Unfortunately, your trade deficit is huge. The rest of us can't afford to keep on supporting you. Tin-pot African nations with tiny economies are much more affordable.

Keynes advocated budget deficits in periods of recession - and you've been out of recession for some time - and the idea was to give the money to people who would spend it. Dubbya is giving most of it to the rich, who are squirrelling it away, so they have lots of cash in the sock to buy the poor suckers who will have mistimed their expansion when the next depression arrives.

Since Keynes' key insight was that the rich had that option, your budget deficit is about as non-Keynsian as they come.

I do, but only in the right place at the right time. You've been listening to too many Republican knee-jerk ideologues - the world isn't as simple as they like to think.

------------ Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Dream on.

The grocery store may not get anything from you directly, but the guy who pays your salary think that he does, and - if you traced through all the links - you'd find that some of your efforts did get through to the grocery store.

International trade figures try to include everything. They probably are a bit weak on recreational drug, so you are - infact - probably running a even bigger tap with Columbia than the one that shows up on official web-sites.

That is the interesting question.Under Reagan you were paying your tab by selling off the farm, but you've now sold all of the farm that anybody wants to buy, and you really are borrowing. The question of how long the international bankers will keep on lending you the money is really very interesting. When the Feds lowered the boom in 1929, the results were pretty catastrophic.

---------------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I think for myself, in electronics and in most other things.

John

Sorry. I meant to imply that you were reacting to me as if I was a Republican party political ideologue. My approvals are always nuanced.

------------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

"You've been listening to too many Republican knee-jerk ideologues -"

isn't nuanced.

John

Of course it isn't, and neither are their rote-learned political judgements.

To paraphrase "Animal Farm"

"Monetarism good, Keynesian economics bad"

Pity that the former lacks any semblance of predictive power in the real economy.

------------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

In don't think you could be nice if you wanted to, which you don't.

John

Half correct. I am trying to be nice, and clearly not succeeding. I've been reading Molly Ivins, who does seem to be able to combine a thoroughly pleasant persona with some fairly pointed observations about the current U.S. administration. "Nothin'but good times ahead" , "Shrub" and "Bushwacked"have just arrived, courtesy of two of our American friends, and I've been enjoying them immensely. Emulation is probably as far beyond my skills as laying out ECLinPS is beyond Molly Ivins', but I must be able to learn something...

----------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Ivins is coarse, mean-spirited, and mostly wrong. She is massively eclipsed by Will, Krauthammer, and even Ann Coulter, all of whom can write.

Why are leftist writers always so angry? No, it's not because of what they deplore, it's because that's the way they are. Personality precedes politics.

The only leftist writer I like is Camille Paglia, who is an absolute, brilliant hoot. She's also the only leftist writer I know of who seems capable of being happy.

John

Puritanism went out of Fashion and the people who would have gone there became the cadres of the left wing.

None of this has been obvious in the pieces I've been reading. Her version of the way that Dubya got to be a pilot in the Texas National Guard is probably not the one that has been blessed by the Republican Party committee for the propagation of the faith, but most independent investiagators have found it plausible.

A particularly sweeping exercise in ad hominem argument. It's not a feature I've noticed as a common characteristic of my favourite political authors - few people describe John Kenneth Galbraith as angry. I don't see him as particularly leftist, but I imagine that you do

I'll look out for her work - not that I'm likely to run into it in Nijmegen's major bookshop. While it does carry a lot of books in English it is still serving a mainly Dutch-speaking cliente in a relatively small (150,000) university town.

I'll be back in Melbourne in Australia in January, and may do better there - the bookshops serve a much larger English-speaking community (though it does happen to include the largest Maltese-speaking community in the world, and the third largest Greek-speaking community, smaller only than Athens and Thessaloniki).

---------------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

That's because like Ivans, you're coarse, mean-spirited, and mostly wrong. No surprise here.

"Her Version?" "Plausable?" How about *factual*? My bet is that you still believe Dan and Mary Mapes ("It doesn't matter if the documents were forged, they're factual") too.

You don't see Ivans as a sourpuss so I doubt that you'd see it anywhere on the left. You're blind.

While I don't agree much with her, I enjoy reading her work. It's a long way from MI and Al Franken.

Why don't you do a web search for her work? Sheesh, the excuses.

Somebody wrote a book a year or two ago, the premise being that personality type determines ones politics. It sounded interesting, and I wrote the info down, but, alas, it got entrained in one of my massive piles of paper and is lost. Anybody know?

John

We are all born Little Red Commies. We all die True Blue Tories.

During a lifetime the rate of change is variable and erratic.

Maybe that they can't convince anyone that they are correct? And they can't get into lucrative radio markets... they aren't funny.

Don't know of Camille, except what I just looked up. What news media carries her? Is she on Air America ?:-)

...Jim Thompson

She used to do a regular column, then disappeared. I think she's back on Salon now.

Her book "Sexual Personnae" is academic and boring, but "Tramps and Vamps" and "Sex, Art and American Culture" were fun.

"That same year, she also became enamored with the evil queen in Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a character she later described as elegant and imperious."

John

I don't believe it. It is apparent that some people never grow up.

Be your age. So Karl Rove managed to plant what was probably a retyped copy of a real document on a couple of luckless reporters - brilliant manipulation of the media, but it doesn't make Dubbya career as a pilot in the Texas National Guard anything less of a rich kid's way of avoiding service in Vietnam

I'm not blind, but you clearly suffer from the political equivalent of left field neglect

and miss a lot that is obvious to those with something closer to 20:20 vision, which is that Dubbya's administration has been a disaster for everybody who isn't seriously rich (and the only person who might believe that seriously rich doesn't start with the next guy up the pecking order would be Bill Gates).

It isn't an excuse, just an explanation. If you can see Molly Ivins as a sourpuss, no doubt you can see me making excuses for my reading habits - as if your opinion on the subject was of any consequence

I don't read text on the web for pleasure - if I want to digest a lot of text I print it out or buy the book. John Larkin hasn't advanced any argument to suggest that I have an ugent need to read her work, so I'll wait until I can have a look at one of her books in a bookshop, find out if I can tolerate her wrting style and then and only then shell out the money to buy the book.

-------------------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Don't bother to read Camille. She's brilliant, funny, irreverent, exhuberant, sexual, and sort of all over the place, and she doesn't much blame anybody for anything. Definitely not your thing.

John