By the Comics Curmudgeon
I will not lie to you: Sometimes political cartoons can be confusing! Especially for you, the unwashed masses, who never got any proper art education in school because your elected officials decided that Americans needed to know more about “science” and “math” and a bunch of poindextery stuff like that. Fortunately, your Wonkette provides to you, free of charge, explanations of some of the more obscure cartoons, straight from the typing fingers of the world’s only professional cartoon explainer. Join us after the jump, and prepare to be AMAZED AND ENLIGHTENED! MORE »

Sorry but this might be a “LOCALS ONLY” post and the rest of you are just going to have to deal with that, okay? Okay. PSST, HUMANS IN WASHINGTON: our local professional sports team, the Redskins, who play in Maryland, is the worst organization on Earth! MORE »

Poor Rhode Island is a wee state with a huge unemployment problem, horrible taxes, and an abysmally high cost of living. Fortunately, it’s also got a governor with a can-do attitude who sees one very obvious way to dig the state out of its current budget mess: just get state workers to take two and a half weeks off, unpaid, over the next year or so. MORE »

IT’S LIKE A RECOVERY, BUT WITH NO EQUITY, SAVINGS, CONSUMER SPENDING, JOBS, RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS, INNOVATION, STRONG CURRENCY, AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE, BASIC SHELTER, OR LONG-TERM PROSPECTS FOR A COMPETITIVE MODERN ECONOMY: “The housing market continues to threaten signs of an economic recovery, with new data released on Thursday showing an all-time high of Americans falling behind on loan payments and the rate of home foreclosures unlikely to peak until late in 2010.” But the stock markets are up! Everyone in America owns bundles of good stocks, right? Right?? [The Hill]

Sad news! While sales of peasant dwellings have begun to creep upward due to the first-time home buyer tax credit, low mortgage rates, expanded FHA loans, and of course FIRE SALE PRICING on foreclosed homes, homes costing more than $750,000 have been difficult to move in this market. Wealthy home owners (or “the middle class,” as they’re known in pricey markets like New York, DC, and the Bay Area) are finding it difficult to sell their million-dollar shacks. However, at least some of them are able to rent out their sad dwellings for, oh, $7500 a month, so don’t feel too bad about this problem yet. MORE »

Feeling a little fancy today? You should be! If you’re Canadian, we mean …. Because the Bank of Canada has announced the Horrible Recession is over, done, finished, kaput, était finie. But only in Canada, and only for Canadians. Dang. [Canada.com/Globe and Mail]

All of your aspirational yuppie mall brands like Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma and Coach (which used to be legitimately fancy, years ago, before they decided to start selling loudly branded handbags to Bethesdan tweens) are having to lower prices permanently because nobody has money anymore and they don’t want to get people used to insane 75% off sales all the time. MORE »

NO JOBS LEFT TO LOSE: New jobless claims fell this week, hooray, due to the number of jobs in the US forming an asymptote with zero. Continuing jobless claims, meanwhile, are just staggering and awful, a wretched 5.47 million and counting. Start growing your Victory Gardens now, because otherwise you might not have food next winter. [MSNBC]

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Once every a generation or so, it’s important that our comfortable lives are shaken up, so that we can take stock and figure out what’s really important. Sure, economic disruptions are painful, but they can also herald a return to self-reliance and old-fashioned, time-tested values. Unfortunately, our current economic crisis passed that point weeks ago, so now you’re sort of just rubbing it in, Cold Dead Hand of Adam Smith. We promise to stop with the credit cards and the adjustable rate mortgages, OK? Just give us our fucking 401Ks back. Sadly, it appears that our political leaders will be forced to take truly drastic steps to stop our planet from being transformed into a vast hobo jungle. MORE »

Just the other day we were wondering, “What areas of the job market flourish in depressions?” and the answers were, “Repossessions, Netflix, economic analysis, and state unemployment offices, of course,” but it turned out that unemployment offices are all closing. Still, it seemed plausible that economists might have a pretty good lock on a job for a while, as there is no shortage of economic information these days, and who is going to mull that shit over for the masses, bloggers? But no, economists can’t get jobs any more, either, because all of the universities that hire them are going broke. [Wall Street Journal]

Congratulations to the 35,000 doomed people who filed new unemployment claims last week — thanks to you unlucky folks, January job losses hit 626,000, the highest unemployment numbers since the Ronald Reagan Recession/Depression of 1982. That was a fun catastrophe. Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about Reagan’s Depression? MORE »