I just checked my balance, and for the first time this year, my 401K is actually in the black for the year, by (drumroll) 0.2%! Yippee! I'm making money again! I might actually be able to retire one day! Or at least buy myself one hell of a nice sports car to drive to my "retirement" job at Wendy's.
Seriously, though, for the past couple of months, we've had to endure the likes of Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and others (usually second-hand, because I'd rather pull my own fingernails out with a pair of pliers than actually watch that garbage) talk about how much Wall Street hates our shiny new President. He or Treasury Secretary Geithner or somebody at the Fed would naively get on television and tell it like it is, and the guys on the trading floor would go all ZOMG!!! This is it, Elizabeth!!! The BIG ONE!!! And the aforementioned Fox News idiots would report on it with a smug expression of their faces.
So now that my 401K, which is by no measure the greatest 401K plan ever devised, is actually in the black for the year - the whole year, not just the part that started at noon on January 20th - one might think we could get people to just STFU about how President Obama is destroying Wall Street in order to save it because, if you kept your head like he did, and didn't do anything stupid, like bail out of the market at fifty cents on the dollar, you're probably making (some) money again, just like me. As a matter of fact, I might just buy some more stocks right after posting this little ditty.
Finally, for those of us who believe that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is some kind of barometer for the economy as a whole, this is an encouraging sign. We still have a lot of problems, and there's still a lot of suck in the economy yet, and we might still have declining GDP even after the dismal report for the first quarter (which should not have come as a surprise to anyone), but there is a suggestion of a glint of light at the end of this dark tunnel, although you'd have to turn off your flashlight to see it.
This is, of course, no thanks to the Republicans, who seem to think their jobs now are to say "no" to whatever it is they're voting on, no matter what it is. No matter; they're going to get their asses kicked again next year for hoping the economy fails, and then see how utterly impotent they will become. The fact that we have Arlen Specter sitting next to Joe Lieberman in the Senate cafeteria is testimony to that. We might all go "meh" at the thought of Sen. Specter (D...er...R...uh...D - PA) getting himself re-elected as a Democrat, but if he helps us out on even one cloture vote, I'm kinda, sorta willing to live with that, in a half-hearted, milquetoast, unenthusiastic sort of way.
So buck up, Kossacks, and stop asking the driver, "are we there yet?" We'll get there when we get there, but we'll get there, in spite of the wingnuts.