Menchen Quote

and some shop-talk

Priceless, it is. I'm sure you know someone who fits Menchen's description:

The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts. He ascribes all his failure to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damfoolishness, to the machinations of werewolves assembled in Wall Street, or some other such den of infamy. If these villains could be put down, he holds, he would at once become rich, powerful and eminent. Nine politicians out of every ten, of whatever party, live and have their being by promising to perform this putting down. In brief, they are knaves who maintain themselves by preying on the idiotic vanities and pathetic hopes of half-wits.

– H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, June 15, 1936

Written almost 72 years ago, yet still holds true today. Just substitute "Big Oil" or "predatory lenders" for the "Wall Street werewolves" and you're good to go.

Previously posted elsewhere. I still wish I knew where I found it.....

In other (shop-talk) news, I'm adopting the practice of updating posts with a reciprocal link to whomever links to a SupplySidePolitics 2.0 post. Q and O started doing this recently (albeit sporadically), and I think I can speak for all us "unsuccessful bloggers" out there: we really appreciate the mention. When one's weekly traffic is measured in (small) multiples of tens, seeing an extra couple of dozen hits does the bloggin' heart some good.

So, if you link to a SupplySidePolitics 2.0 post, leave a mention in the Comments or shoot a quick e-mail to me at heywoodblogger at yahoo dot com (you know the drill) and I'll update my post accordingly.

In all my free time, I plan on making this policy retroactive, and putting up reciprocal links to all the previously linked posts from the past (almost) four years. Insert your own "when flaming pigs fly" joke here.

that, I think, is all. More soon,