A Political Lesson In Pictures

Here's our picture book lesson for the day. When you're in control of the country's legislature and executive, and you let the economy do this:
Caption: Ian Welsh puts it well: No We Aren’t In A Recession, We’re In a Depression

Image credit: Calculated Risk

Then what happens is this:
Image credit: Screenshot of this Pollster page by Cujo359

I get more tickled by the day by people who tell me how frightened they are of people like me calling for a Democratic defeat this November. At the rate these assholes are going, they'll be lucky to win even with the enthusiastic support of all progressives. They've had several chances to succeed, and they managed to screw up each one, thanks to their own greed and stupidity.

Which makes me not the least inclined to help them. They've cost me and mine plenty already.

To see each chart full size, click on it.

UPDATE: Here's a bit of text that is almost as good as a picture, courtesy of Robert Reich's column today:

Washington’s latest answer to the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression is $26 billion in aid to state and local governments. This still leaves the states and locales more than $62 billion in the hole this fiscal year. And because every state except Vermont has to balance its budget, the likely result is 600,000 to 700,000 more state and local jobs vanishing over the next 12 months (including private contractors and other businesses that depend on state and local governments) according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Say goodbye to even more of the teachers, firefighters, sanitary workers, and police officers we depend on.

The Jobs Emergency

It's hard to imagine how feckless a group of people has to be to stand around wringing their hands about imaginary bond bogeymen while things like this are going on. But that's what this crowd of Democrats are doing. They could save that much just by ending our perpetual occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet they don't. They don't need Republicans to approve that. President Obama can order them home as readily as he and President Bush ordered them there in the first place. He won't do that, though, for fear of upsetting the many defense firms that can throw their money behind the opposition, and being called soft on terrorism, not that that latter claim makes any sense at all.

UPDATE 2: Speaking of President Hopey Changey, here's how he's doing, as aggregated by Pollster:
Image credit: Screenshot of this Pollster page by Cujo359

Obama's been sacrificing Congress's approval ratings by pushing the full effect of health care "reform" out past 2014, among other things, so he won't have to pay the piper in 2012, and by following ridiculous austerity measures that only his economic advisers are stupid enough to think will work so he doesn't honk off his supporters in the financial industry. That policy will be coming home to roost soon enough, unless the GOP does a replay of its treatment of President Clinton back in 1994-5.