great depression
Here’s something you don’t see too often, these days, during the Great Big Depression: the launch of a new publication! It’s called Wonkabout, and it’s your guide to all that is fun and interesting and weird and tasty and boozey in Washington D.C., the new capital of the world. Yes We Can!
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?
To illustrate some op-ed about Ferdinand Pecora — the brave New York prosecutor of financial fraudsters who did some congressional hearing at the end of Hoover’s presidency — the New York Times dug up this ancient Blingee. There is no explanation for this bizarre old-timey example of a blinged-out spliff-smokin’ Hero of the Depression, and [...]
Continuing the thème du jour, etc. Thanks to Wonkette commenter “Freakishlystrong.” [MSNBC/AP]
Gas will soon cost less than a buck a gallon, as nobody has a dollar, and nobody has a job to drive to anyway. Even Wal-Marts are closing down. And now Knut the cute polar bear, who was photographed topless by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair just last year, is an unwanted and unloved victim [...]
CONSOLATION PRIZE: Of all the secretaries of commerce in American History, the only ones anybody has ever heard of are Herbert Hoover, Ron Brown and Norm Mineta. The first is known for making the Depression, the second for being killed in some random plane crash, the third for … doing 9/11? [U.S. Secretary of Commerce]
Peggington. We love Peggington so much, and we don’t even care who knows! In this week’s very special Thanksgiving edition of her Wall Street Journal psychodiary, “Declarations,” the Noonanism — an embarrassingly insular worldview in which no personal anecdote is void of world-historical spiritual import — has been cranked deep into the red. Here’s what [...]
Thanksgiving is the day Americans very briefly pretend to be civilized family people as they gather around a table covered in once-a-year homemade food. The day after Thanksgiving — Black Friday — is when Americans return to their real selves. At 5 a.m. today, outside a Long Island Wal-Mart, a crazed mob busted through the [...]
The government rescued insurance giant AIG from its own wretched, greedy incompetence by giving the evil company $80 billion $150 billion of your tax dollars. With this insane reward for being an epic failure, AIG was supposed to rebuild its core business — which is insurance, not gambling like a drunken fool and destroying the [...]
So, uh, the economy doesn’t seem to be doing much, uh, better. The S&P 500 is back down to 1997 levels. 1997! Everybody’s losing their jobs, if they still have jobs. Some are suggesting it will not even be a Merry Christmas, and that the real (Muslim) Jesus is sort of getting a kick out [...]
