Whirled News - Economic Crisis Grows

The New York Post issued an apology today for its cartoon linking a dead chimpanzee to President Barack Obama and his economic stimulus bill, saying it had no racist intentions and apologizing to any overly-sensitive Black people who may have drawn the wrong conclusions and mistakenly felt offended.

“Emotions are contagious,” the editorial said, “And as soon as one person becomes agitated, everybody around him starts baring their teeth, beating their breasts, jumping up and down and screeching.”

Meanwhile the stock market continued its decline, with the Down Jones average hitting a six-year low.

“Clearly the President is not yet getting the message that the financial community will not express confidence in any economic program that attempts to curtail our greed,” said one prominent Wall Street analyst.

Other analysts however saw cause for optimism in the continuing market downtown. “As soon as enough stocks fall below zero and slip into negative territory,” one said, “There’s another Bernie Madoff waiting to snatch them up and sell them to anyone who has any money left, and then we can begin to build another speculative bubble.”

Reports that President Obama had launched another bipartisan peacemaking initiative by meeting in his office for hours with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell proved unfounded. The rumor apparently began when someone mistakenly identified the head of a coho salmon on the President’s office wall as the Senator.

“The President continues to show absolutely no willingness to compromise,” said an aide to Senator McConnell, “As long as he insists on refusing to tie negotiation to capitulation, we have nothing to talk about. He continues to insist that the way out of this economic disaster is to try something new rather than to do more of our same strategies of tax cuts and government non-involvement. It was the Democrats’ insistence on blocking our tax cuts and their attempts to reinvigorate government that prevented our strategies from working in the first place and led to this economic disaster, and now he wants to continue on the same failed track.”