So here we are at the tail end of the disastrous Bush era - 201 days and 14 hours left at this writing - and can start doing damage assessments. Take the economy. Our currency has lost half its value, our government debt has roughly doubled, we have lost millions of manufacturing jobs and replaced them with lower-paying jobs in the service sector, our infrastructure is crumbling, and most importantly, due to a burst asset bubble created by lax regulation in the housing industry that in turn produced a credit bubble, our economy is going to either stay stagnant or contract outright. As The New York Times points out today, this state of affairs is likely to persist until the Fall of 2009. In short, we are fucked.

You'll be hearing apologies for this from conservatives with all the frequency you heard them from Soviet-era apparatchiks, of course. One virtue of being an ideologue is that you're never wrong, no matter how crushing the weight of facts that might indicate otherwise.

So, as some parts of the country are in recession and others lurch into outright depression - Michigan, Ohio and Indiana along with most of the rust belt, for example - it's time to take a sobering look at what the medium-term future may hold for the City of New York.