Wonkette operative “Laura” sends this cell-phone shot from the High Desert stucco ghetto of Victorville, California. This is one of the lamest fucking places in America, the fat diabetic heart of the housing collapse, basically everyone is on the dole — military pension, social security, disability, etc. — so of course it’s hard-core wingnut land. This is the kind of place where you see new Ron Paul 2008 posters stapled up on the phone poles to replace the ones that blew away. The signs these teabaggers are waving say “HONK IF YOU LOVE COCK.”

It’s another new new unemployment record, America! The happy month of March saw 669,000 U.S. jobs vanish, bringing the jobless rate up to 8.5% — the highest since the end of Reagan’s Lil’ Depression at the end of 1982. About 5 million jobs have now been lost in this current Great Recession. And stocks are on fire — the Dow’s over 8,000 again! MORE »

The catastrophic news of the day is much like the catastrophic news of the past 18 months or so: OH JESUS, HOUSES, WHAT TO DO? Since the mid 1970s, the answer for many Chicago people has been “Move to some gruesome stucco tract house in a brand-new subdivision about an hour from downtown Phoenix.” So that’s what Barack Obama is doing today: Moving to Phoenix! MORE »

Wasn’t the Fed supposed to cut rates in half today, from 1 percent to 0.5 percent? Well, that wasn’t good enough, for this failed economy and economic system. So now it’s “near zero,” which means “zero.” Just like Japan tried for years and years, to no effect! The Federal Reserve Bank is now out of “traditional ammunition,” according to almost-president Barack Obama, and your government is now printing money at an insane pace, and then banks are taking this money and immediately buying U.S. Treasury bonds, because nothing else is safe, and that is pretty much the end of this particular feedback loop. MORE »

Sometimes the stock market is more “faith based” than a mall-church full of unemployed white trash. The Dow did a triple-digit plunge this morning, because the world is actually ending, especially the “making money” part, but it suddenly did a 200-point turnaround on month-old data suggesting a whole 4,000 heavily marked-down new homes sold in September, before the complete collapse of all American and Global stock markets. What? MORE »

Turns out we didn’t need “stealth socialist” Barack Obama to pervert capitalist America into a crumbling nationalized economy run in private by a dome-skulled kleptocracy as our nation’s battered military wastes away in the forgotten bummer of a civil war in Afghanistan. WAIT A MINUTE that is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union! And the so-called Republicans did it, because they are Fiscal Socialists! MORE »

Here are some cheery housing numbers, as the bankrupt truckers impotently beep their horns at Congress and the food is rationed and “consumer expectations” hit lows not seen since the early 1970s: More than 6 million homes will go into foreclosure before this housing collapse is finished, and the number of houses now sitting empty in America has reached a staggering 18.6 million — including 2.3 million currently on the market. MORE »

Some little hipster clarinet player from NYU is claiming the Iraq invasion and occupation was all about securing oil supplies for America. Oh and what is that sticking out of Jazzbo Al’s tattered raincoat? A worn paperback of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” which he actually first read when she was writing it, when he was screwing some gal in Rand’s “inner circle” and writing angry letters to the New York Times about how “parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.” That’s right, we’re talking about former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan! MORE »