Unemployment at 10.2% means...

You know, I'm not really sure what it means. Maybe unemployment would have been ever higher without the stimulus and recovery plans.

But I doubt it.

Does it mean I was right, and the beltway bandits... er... federal government was wrong? Or were they being optimistic in order to encourage everyone to go along with their pillaging--excuse me, recovering--of American economic might?

Maybe. But as Peggy Noonan put it, "We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists—they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on."

The economy is recovering, they say. Soon it will all be sunshine, lollipops, &c. We've "bottomed out." But the point at which the tide stops retreating is not when the starfish die. The starfish die when the tide doesn't come back in quickly enough. All of our spending was fruitless, and at best premature.

And near as I can tell, the Obama administration is just getting started. Much of the present crisis can be laid at Bush's feet, sure--war does not come cheap, and neither does airport security theater, or tax breaks, or bailing out undeserving Wall Street cutpurses. But Obama seems to think that the best way to stop the government from hemorrhaging money is to spend it more quickly.

I don't know how we're going to get out of this one. I like to say that time heals all wounds--at least the ones that aren't fatal--and I'm not so panicked to believe that America has taken a fatal blow. But the wound is starting to fester and I think the time has come to stop bleeding the patient.

President Obama, members of Congress, whatever you're going to do about healthcare, do it quickly and be done with it. Then go home and take a 2-year nap. Like medieval barbers, you're all a bunch of leech-loving quacks. Your cures are worse than the disease.

...hmmm, I wonder if there's a political cartoon for that.