Remember all that talk about how the unemployment rate fell by .1 percent last month and this proved, definitively, that happy days were here again? Remember all the sailors kissing ladies in the streets, and the wonderful ticker-tape parades? Well, everything has gone back to being terrible, according to New Statistics. MORE »

In these difficult times, when it seems everything is declining — corporate profits, individual incomes, assorted varieties and levels of a thing we used to call “hope” — one thing grows ever larger and more robust: our unemployment rate. Let’s hear it for the magical number 9.5, for that is the percentage of Americans who currently don’t have jobs. MORE »

If you want to weather the recession in style, there’s no better bet than serving our nation’s ever-diminishing population of wingnuts. As more Americans climb aboard B-Rock NObama’s Socialism ‘n’ Poetry Jams Express, frustrated conservatives have flocked to a few of the nation’s last reputable wingnut media outlets for soothing words about how right they still are about everything even if “the news” says they’re wrong. MORE »

Hey we solved a mystery, maybe! In her infamous Twitter Rant, Meghan McCain cites “a particularly nasty comment from a person I won’t say how but I indirectly work with questioning if I have ever worked.” Blah blah blah WHAT? (Just read it a few times and it will vaguely resemble English.) So who is this secret meany? He would have written something for the Daily Beast (freelancing = “indirectly working with”)… why it must be prominent young communist MATT YGLESIAS, YES? MORE »

You’ve done it, America! You have already shed so many jobs that you are running out of remaining jobs to lose. That means new unemployment filings for last week were not quite as awful as unemployment filings for the previous week, and were the lowest since late January! We have turned a corner, etc! MORE »

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown suggested that a group of unemployed people who represent society’s most rapacious, morally flexible personalities sculpt the vulnerable minds of innocents. We speak, of course, of out-of-work bankers getting jobs teaching school children. Crazy Europeans! What will they think of next, milk in boxes? MORE »

We have received another sexy stimulus party report, this time from elitist operative “Eric.” He tells us that he drank imported beer, because he doesn’t like Bud Light (take that, Cindy McCain), that his girlfriend is kind of a pain in the ass, and that he has a job for now. In other words, we have no idea whether he went to a stimulus party or not; we get a lot of e-mails from drunk lunatics for no reason after all. MORE »

Oh goodness we spent all day yesterday saluting Bill Kristol, who had to leave the New York Times because he was TOO PERFECT TO GO ON, without noticing a gem of a column by his fellow token conservative David Brooks. He wrote about the profound reverence with which we should approach our professions because they are sacred “institutions.” David Brooks comes from a magical time when people could have a single profession or employer for their entire working life, and might feel like their personal sense of self-worth was related to how well they did their jobs. (This was long before the invention of men’s room attendants, debt collectors, and fryolater de-greasers.) MORE »

Hurrah, it is a very short YouTube clip! Joe Biden says the middle class’s biggest problem is a three-letter word: jobs, J-O-B-S. Three letters, literally. Literally. [Joe Biden Can't Count]

If you played a leading role in disastrous Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign, can you really expect to find employment ever again? Why, you’d be lucky if the U.S. government didn’t deport you to Gitmo for embarrassing America’s good so-so name! One ex-Thompson aide, Sean Hackbarth — the “Co-eCampaign Director” for Grampa Freddy — is finally facing this reality, and it hurts. On his personal blog, Hackbarth posted a shameless, whiny plea under the headline “Job Hunt Continues.” It starts, “After Fred Thompson ended his Presidential run I thought landing a new job wouldn’t be as hard as it has been.” Yes, well, that kind of illogical thinking neatly sums up his current hobo status. MORE »