Bartcop,
        I have followed your site for several years and I enjoy what you do.  I may have a more bipartisan spite
for the political status quo than you do.  I do not respect Clinton as a friend of ordinary working people, and I
think that he presided over a lot of harm that he accepted for support of the corporate middle right, and the
Democrats have had their face in the trough right next to the Republicans.  He also pushed NAFTA and WTO,
which contain some odious provisions that threaten to trump worker safety and environmental protection laws
in secret courts.  Obviously Clinton has nowhere the evil that W possesses, but he signed the welfare reform bill
that is fixing to bite a lot of people on the ass real soon with it's lifetime benefit limit.

        The mere fact of rising stock market prices is not a sign of economic health by itself.
Enron is a case in point, along with the dot-com bubble. My opinion is that the equities market is
intrinsically corrupt, and that the value of stock should be based as objectively as possible on the
actual value of a company's assets and not on a public pipe dream of it's future value based on hype.
Return on investment in equities should be a share in the actual profit a company makes.  This is
perhaps overly simplistic, but my suggestion is that if realizing an income from the stock market
requires that stocks be continually bought and sold, then that forces an income stream for brokers,
who basically do not produce anything.  Price volatility in the stock market acts as a pump that
pumps money from the pockets of naive investors into the pockets of pros and the fixers.

        To carry it further, what does a doubling of the stock market valuation mean, if PE ratios
average 50 to 100?  If Social Security were partially privatized with a Bush like plan, that would
force a flow of investment into the equities market that would not automatically produce an increase
in the value of the underlying assets.  There would be manifested a classic condition of inflation in
stock market prices.  No prizes for guessing what happens after that.

        You take just about any so-called conservative Republican, he is basically a dumber version of Ken Lay.
Bush is no better than Kenny Boy in values or honesty.  Remember another of Bush's buddies, Richard Rainwater.
He built the Columbia hospital chain into an insurance fraud machine.  He was a crook, just like Ken Lay is a crook.
These are the kind of people that W respects.  These are the folks in his skybox at the Rangers' games.  I call these
people mansion trash.  They don't end up on Jerry Springer, but they have just as much disregard for the community
in pursuing their selfish ends.

        It doesn't give me any pleasure, shit that's not true, it gives me a great deal of pleasure to anticipate that the
Bush administration is going to crash and burn in an unprecedented torrent of corruption and humiliation. It is
destined to happen because that is the kind of person Bush is, and he is representative of the character of the
people around whom he is surrounded.   And let's face it, he ain't the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.

Charles Robinson
 

Charles, a couple of points:

To a saint, the guy spitting on the sidewalk is "in the lawbreaker trough" with murderers.
Similarly, to a Nader man, Gore and Bush seem like twins and that's just wrong.
I submit the chasm between Gore and Bush is wider than the chasm between you and Gore.

Can you explain the benefits of a lifetime of welfare?
We're not talking about a young widow with six kids - she gets Social Security.
But who wants to see families on a lifetime of welfare?
Who wants to see generations of families on welfare?

Your stock market talk makes sense when applied to one company, but a diversified portfolio
couldn't be full of companies with PE ratios averaging 50 to 100. Those Enron people were hurt
because they bet too much on a crooked Republican horse.

Clinton tripled the retirement packages of perhaps 40 million families which, next to winning
World War II, is probably the greatest gift the American people have received in the last 100 years.

I found nothing to disagree with in the second half of your letter :)

Thanks for taking the time to write,

bc