Maybe A Flushing Sound

Masochists &/or political fetishists (Guess we're one or the other.) will remember H. Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound" of "American" jobs going to (at that time) Mexico. There's no sound these days, because today's jobs aren't "going" anywhere, they're just disappearing w/ the snap of an illusionist's finger. (They were mostly illusionary jobs anyway, so ...)

With tens of thousands of layoffs announced this week by well-known employers such as Pfizer Inc., Caterpillar Inc. and Home Depot Inc., the unemployment picture is bound to get worse in every region of the country, economists say. "We won't see a light at the end of the tunnel until 2010," said Anthony Sabino, a professor of law and business at St. John's University. The number of newly laid off Americans filing claims for state unemployment benefits has soared to 589,000, while people continuing to draw claims climbed to 4.6 million, the government said last week. There's been such a crush that resources in New York, California and other states have run dry, forcing them to tap the federal government for money to keep paying unemployment benefits.

The light at the end of Prof. Sabino's tunnel will, of course, be a locomotive of Islamic terror, or the choo-choo of ultimate economic disaster (in the form of inflation, deflation, or perhaps both) or perhaps the flames of global climate change.