Laissez le Bon Temps Rouler

Check out Burkeman. Not much happy talk ... but, for what it's worth, my gut tells me he's got it right:

It should be painfully obvious to all of us by now. No one in power has a clue of what is going on or what to do. Obama’s “stimulus” bill is seen by nearly every non government employed or DC dependent economist as a total disaster that will do more harm than good.

And pretty much everyone knows it.

Weekly unemployment numbers continue to go up and up and up and the rhetoric of CNBC financial talking heads- whores to the oligarchs who have hollowed out the American economy over the past 30 years- is finally beginning to match reality. They have stopped talking about “bottoms” or “turn arounds” but rather have assumed a sort of gallows humor inevitability of doom.

Can you feel it? This is the calm before the storm.
What we are going to witness in the coming months and years is the painful death of an American self image and identity based entirely . . . let me say that again- entirely- on illusion and fantasy.

...

This country has been living off a lie since world war two. A lie that has had us believing in our own unique greatness. America’s economy wasn’t buoyed by the fact that the rest of the world was left in a shambles after WWII. Nope- we preferred to believe idiotic bullshit about how “great” we were – how innovative- how special.
America – a nation that NEVER has to worry about foreign invasion- then set about to build up the biggest most expensive military in the history of world- with 95 percent of it being wholly unnecessary for any sort of legitimate defensive purposes.

In effect this spending has been a national socialist industrial policy for the past 50 years. 50 years of building tanks, planes, ships, missiles, sophisticated weapons systems that do nothing but sit there and cost us more money in upkeep- draining resources and brain power from productive endeavors that would actually truly grow our economy.

Pleasant dreams, fellow Americans.