Sunday, June 12, 2011

HnC Vault: Monthly Statement

Originally published March 23, 2009


This character gets my vote for "least likely to ever have her own newspaper strip."

Update June 12, 2011

The reason today's cartoon has returned is that bleak news from Wall Street has also returned - with a vengeance. The Dow lost money for the sixth consecutive week, making it the worst run since the bad ol' days of 2002.

The reason for the dropping stock prices is all too clear: there is a growing feeling among investors (and, in fact, all sentient beings) that America's economic recovery isn't slowing - it's nonexistent.

Even more troubling to investors is the realization that Barack Obama and his Democrat cohorts aren't going to get serious about reducing debt...meaning it makes more sense to pull your dollars out of the doomed stock market and buy something (anything!) with them before those dollars become useless scrap paper.

Maybe our little fly deserves her own cartoon strip after all.
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17 comments:

drjim said...

I've been investing a chunk of my money in precious metals, lead, brass, and copper!

Dave said...

Yep Obama's economic policies are working great.....aren't they?

Suzy said...

That little fly could be useful if he would hang out in the White House and then leak some stuff to the media before Obama can stop it.... Sarah Palin didn't even attempt to stop the email snooping...its time to do some snooping where it matters. Maybe the little fly on the wall can find out how to save the economy....

Earl said...

Or the little fly could lay eggs in Obama's ears at night. We could name her Maggie. She used to be a maggot, too.

Pete(Detroit) said...

djim - right on. and reloading supplies.

Angry Hoosier Dad said...

Suzy:
I thought the emails were state property. Besides, SP probably doesn't have anything truly damaging (Lord knows the LSM will fabricate what they can't find) to see there.

Anonymous said...

Death Web

Funny you put this up, had a thought along these lines based off your debt post the other day.


Thats no safety net, thats a giant spider web!

Suzy said...

Angry Hoosier...how much of Obama's private life is also state property, yet nobody has seen it?

John the Econ said...

Obama's stated mission was to "fundamentally change America". To anyone who was listening, that clearly towards being like a European socialist democracy. Well, he's done it. 10% unemployment and 2% growth is the norm for most European socialist democracies. I really don't know why anyone who voted for him can be upset.

Angry Hoosier Dad said...

Suzy:
Fear is the key in both cases. Fear of Palin becoming a conservative President, succeeding wildly and showing the libs for the destructive scum they are and fear of Obama's vindictiveness and use of his power to destroy his enemies, real and imagined.

Stilton Jarlsberg said...

@John the Econ- The Libs who voted for Obama have made it very clear why they're upset: he hasn't changed things enough for them. Yet.

Andrew said...

@John, his Obamabot voters thought he would deliver some magical unicorn Euro socialism (which always sounds great to libs who haven't actually lived in Europe under those systems). They expected lots of high quality free services --university, medical care, unemployment benefits, subsidized housing for all--which they have always heard as being universal in Europe in some vague, nebulous way, without details or specifics. A strong, always benevolent, always caring government which will provide all their needs. A return to Mommy and Daddy.

What we're getting instead is Mexico. Permanent haves and have nots, vast permanent structural unemployment, a government that fiercely reserves all powers to itself even as its incompetency ensures a failed state, and a semiliterate peon population in permanent want and dependency amid rolling shortages, entrenched corruption and gang-wars.
Another 18 months of Obama and we may be looking back on 10% 'official' unemployment and 2% growth projections as the lost-forever Good Old Days.

Chuck said...

Yes, my retirement investments are rapidly turning into fly food. Question: at what point is it NOT Bush's fault. At what point does the "One" take ownership? At what point to the people hold him accountable?

Today's Rasmussen pole (of likely voters) has 23% strongly approving and 47% overall approving of Obama's job performance. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!? I just don't get it. Who is better off now than they were 3 years ago? Who is in a better place now, as a result of anything coming out of Washington, than they were 3 years ago.

Question: Am I correct in concluding that only whites are capable of being racist?

If you don't like Obama (for ANY reason) are you automatically a racist? If you like him only because he is the first Halfrican American President ... not racist at all?

Okay, I realize I'm mostly preaching to the choir here.

But really ... is there any hope for positive change?

Stilton Jarlsberg said...

@Andrew- Good summary...albeit totally depressing.

@Chuck- When WILL people assign blame for the "Obamaconomy"? Yes, things were bad when Obama took office - but they're worse now. Not a little worse, a lot worse.

Regarding racism, there are many alleged experts who say that only whites can be racists, because racism isn't a matter of hate, discrimination, bigotry, intolerance, or even violence... but only what whites do or feel.

Meanwhile, it's not considered racism if people love Obama solely because he's black. It's considered enlightenment.

Finally, you ask if there's any hope for positive change. Some days I wonder. And some days I think that America 2.0 may be a great place...but the depths we'll sink to before we can get there will be unthinkable.

Andrew said...

@Chuck, I haven't believed a poll in 20 years...I mean, who you gonna believe, a NYT/WaPo poll or your own lyin' eyes of the world around you?
But 50% pay no taxes, 15% are on food stamps, an unknown vast percentage are governmental employees, active or retired (for whom things overall are status-quo FINE thus far). Those folks are just fine with things as long as their gummint checks arrive on time (I'm not including Soc. Sec. retirees here, because those folks EARNED those checks over their working lives...despite Obama's campaign to rebrand them as 'entitlements' to blur the fact that welfare families are killing us).

Which leaves a big percentage who just don't have a clue, products of gummint public schools who believe the lefty myth that we can continue unlimited spending forever if only we would FINALLY tax "the evil Rich" sufficiently.
It's a comforting and comfortable myth, one that is reinforced for them by the MSM every day. When the system crashes--and it looks like we are squandering our last long shot chances at preventing a total crash--it won't matter much what myths they believed.
@Stilton, I want to believe in an America 2.0. I really do. But I can't see any plausible way for anything resembling the America we cherish to survive the impending crash. A society so broken it cannot avoid catastrophic collapse is far too broken to magically reconstitute itself into something better and finer once catastrophe has reduced it to utter, bankrupt failure. History teaches that Rome, Athens, the Weimar Republic, and the Confederacy never rise again.

Stilton Jarlsberg said...

@Andrew- Barack F. Obama just loves to put on his frowny face after tragedies and say "Tucson will come back better and stronger," or "Fukushima will come back better and stronger," or Tuscaloosa or Christchurch or whatever region is written on his teleprompter.

But when I voice my hopes/fears about America 2.0, I'm not saying anything like that. I think the best case scenario is that whatever society emerges from the ashes of our fallen Republic may be a bit smarter and a bit more resolute... but will be smaller, poorer, and will never remotely approach the heights from which we've been thrown.

Andrew said...

@Stilton, your last sentence is the most likely, and the saddest, summation of all. The tragedy is that this was all so very preventable, so completely avoidable.
Looming over us even more than the crippling debt and the crippling socialist/statist mindset are the 100,000,000 or so souls walking around with no clue and no survival skills other than the daily waddle from their gummint supplied housing to the supermarket where they swipe their gummint food stamps card at the hot-deli counter and waddle back to Oprah and Idol and People's Court. Those folks are unpromising and unteachable and sadly they did not have to grow up that way. But they're here in quantity and burdening the lifeboat, wolfing down the dwindling rations--dumb as bricks, eager for 'outrage' but never touching an oar. In our earlier national crises such people were few and far between; now they're almost a tipping-point majority. And thus great nations fall, in our case, just a generation or two from our pinnacle.
We've condensed 350 years of the Decline of Rome into a fast 30 or 40 years.
Now it feels like a race between a financial default meltdown and the prospect of Islamic suitcase nukes going off in several midtowns. I want to be wrong here, but neither seems to offer much of an Act II for Franklin's "a Republic, if you can keep it."