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great depression

As we’ve noted previously, our 10th-grade Christianist textbook, World History and Cultures In Christian Perspective, is a weird patchwork of preaching and history as filtered through late-Reagan-era rightwing politics. This is especially noticeable in the chapter “20th Century Liberalism: Retreat from Responsibility and Authority” which we wrap up this week. The God Stuff in this [...]

(Pittsburgh) A few days ago I was in Rome, now I’m in Pittsburgh. My serotonin level is in freefall. No, Pittsburgh’s nice, really! The frutti di mare is good here. It’s the jet lag and the hemorrhoidal bonfire in my ass that make me want to die. And my VISA bill. I asked an emaciated [...]

Unloved corporate failure Meg Whitman was last seen insisting that she should be governor of California because goddammit, she paid $141 million to be governor of California. And now the former eBay executive has re-appeared on the public stage, with news that she will be hired to run the ruined tech company Hewlett Packard. The [...]

Here is a fourth-hand political gossip rumor: Barack Obama has got the depression, bad. Why? According to Gawker’s John Cook, the New York Times “is preparing a story arguing that Obama no longer finds joy in the political back-and-forth, has seemed increasingly listless to associates, and is generally exhibiting the litany of signs that late-night [...]

The stock markets just closed in New York, hooray! (“Hooray,” because now the stock markets can’t fall any further today. But tune in tomorrow!) If you don’t care because you’re already poor — hello, 90% of America! — or you have retirement and/or investment accounts and have just been too terrified to look at Marketwatch.com, [...]

While the Republicans try to force a default of the American Nation with such tactics as “scholarship grants are for communists,” the Democrats are engaged in an exciting game of catch-up. “Oh,” Obama might say, looking thoughtfully at his hands, “Pell Grants are communist? Well then, I offer a compromise of shutting down Medicare and [...]

Times are tough and getting significantly tougher, so it’s a challenge for the Obama campaign to come up with some fundraising stunts that will attract any attention in these desperate, weird times. He could put his dong on Twitter, we suppose, but that’s not exactly the right kind of attention. What the Barack Obama campaign [...]

Good news for the U.S. job market: The unemployment rate miraculously dropped from 9.8% to 9.4% in December, the biggest one-month drop in the official jobless rate since 1998! Coincidentally, this plunge in the number of Americans desperately seeking work coincides with more Americans dropping out of the labor force entirely, because there aren’t even [...]

Hey a colored guy snuck into somebody’s yard, in Iowa or wherever. What is up with that. Oh this is Barack Obama, boring president who does not give everyone jobs somehow. This is his “new schtick,” which is frankly kind of awful. Why can’t he be more like America’s only hero, Sarah Palin? If she [...]

Not to spread the funny news too thick today, but have you glanced at the business headlines? The stock markets have not reacted too well to the awful lack-of-employment numbers, with the Dow Jones Index plunging 325 points — that’s three-and-a-quarter percent and well under 10,000 and all the other markets looking similarly terrible. And [...]

After dropping like a stone for the past three or four years, existing home prices in the United States went up a little teeny tiny bit in the second quarter of 2009. HOORAY WE CAN REFINANCE OUR WAY TO HAPPINESS AGAIN! So, the sales price of American houses went up by 2.9% between April Fools [...]

Have you ever had a holiday vacation on Martha’s Vineyard? So boring! Once you get over the “Ah and there’s where Ted Kennedy crashed his car and drowned that lady” historical thing — sorry, Denby! — you realize it’s just a place full of crappy tourist shops and terrible humid boiling weather and a bunch [...]

Some math wizards down in Texas have come to an incredible conclusion: What with 6.5 million lost jobs since this Hellcession began, there’s less rush-hour traffic. HEY THAT ALMOST MAKES A CRAZY KIND OF SENSE. But the news isn’t all good.

It’s official for Sad America: As the economy shrunk another 6.1% in the first quarter of 2009, the total GDP loss for this recession (so far!) is 3.3%, making this the worst recession since the legendary “Elvis Downtown” of 1957-58. And there’s only one economic collapse larger than our current horror: the Great Depression of [...]

The First Hundred Days! Oh how we’ve talked about them, and even lived through them, although that’s never as good as talking about them. And now? We must assess. According to cable news and The Politico, which owns cable news, this has been a very tough, very disappointing, very humiliating 100 days for Mr. Socialist [...]


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