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 »

America might be busy ejaculating in its collective pants about the end of Racism and the beginning of Hope, but that doesn’t stop our nation’s bankers from the very important work of booting the elderly from their homes. That’s right, our mortgage-foreclosure-housing-bubble crisis marches on, and it looks like the next stop on the hobo train is swank Beverly Hills, where former Johnny Carson sidekick and Howard Stern prank call subject Ed McMahon has run into some financial troubles. MORE »