Obviously, this means we must stimulate the economy by cutting spending and contracting the economy further.

Lately, I’ve been wishing I had paid a lot more attention to my grandmother’s many long stories about her family’s struggles to get by in the 30s.

Is there some immutable law that requires every bore-ass “analysis” of a single potentially-favorable-to-ObaMao number to be caveated with a thousand quibbles?

Now that my unemployment has run out it’s tough getting by but I’m hoping the lack of a ‘death tax’ might enable the heirs of some billionaire to open a minimum wage sweat shop I could work in.

This is why Republicans will do well in November unless the recovery gets a-crackin’. It’s the economy, stupid.

The best investment now would be ammunition. Of course, several hundred pounds of beans and rice are absolute necessities, but without guns and ammo, someone will just take your beans and rice, and fricasee you and your family to serve as the meat course with said beans and rice. Ammunition, it will be worth more than gold.

The thing about the Conservative “plan” is that those are terms that don’t belong together. I’m quite serious. There are planners among them, but they disagree with each other more violently than the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea (splitters!). Each has a Utopian/Rapture endpoint, or a revenge fantasy of “sinners/liberals/Blacks” screaming in agony, but each is unique.

The politicians, on the other hand, do not plan. They react. They react, and they plot. A plot is different from a plan in the way that a lane change is different from a map. They think about the next six months and rest assured that The Voter has no memory but that Interests do.

The horrible, horrible thing is that it has sort of worked, because the Interests ask for things like political positions, and they parlay these into the Heritage Foundation or neo-cons in DoD.

Of course there’s a punchline.

This is good news for John McCain!

[re=610782]Geogre[/re]: You forgot: There are plenty of jobs out there but all those people on unemployment don’t want to do them because it’s for less money than actual unemployment benefits. For instance, if it weren’t for the fact that making enough money on the government dole is almost enough to keep me afloat, I’d gladly go out for that job at Safeway working the midnight shift that would barely make me enough money to pay the rent.

[re=610928]Hooray For Anything[/re]: Oh, yes, I used to hear that one.

My Flush-listening brother used to tell me that the McDonalds in Affluent-Suburb simply couldn’t get workers, so he wouldn’t hear anything about how the poor needed jobs. I asked him if the poor in the city knew about the jobs in the suburb, if the mass transit went to the suburb, and whether or not he wanted to eat at a restaurant with workers from downtown, or would he, as an affluent, white racist, complain? He insisted that there “are jobs.” It’s just that the poor people are “too lazy” to “go find them” in the boom towns.

That was in the 1980′s. Today, I have a feeling that we’ll just be hearing that the jobs are all gone because of the cost of taxes. “My buddy’s friend tells him that he has a company, and he wants to hire, but he can’t because of all the red tape, thanks to all the health insurance stuff.” (Coming soon.)

Like the Welfare Queen, argument by anecdote will sweep the nation on a wave of a thousand forwarded e-mails from “someone who knows.”

Look on the bright side. A lot of those jobless who died are probably Teabaggers because of their poor diets, diabetes, age, weight. So there is a silver lining.

Render the unemployed’s fat into bio-diesel and use their dried carcasses for posts in the border fence, plenty more where they came from before Jebus returns or the Chinese foreclose, whichever comes first.