Blix Book Former UN Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix has a book coming out, Disarming Iraq: the search for weapons of mass destruction. Based on this Blix interview in the Independent, Blix isn’t pulling any punches: “… My gut feelings [at the start of renewed inspections], which I kept to myself, suggested to me that […]

That Liberal Media In the NYT today: Because that group is patriotic and somewhat fiscally conservative, some experts said Mr. Kerry, a New Englander, would not appeal to them. The piece is otherwise an informative and interesting analysis of Florida. But seriously, what was the reporter, Abby Goodnough, thinking when she wrote that sentence? Goodnough […]

Winning the Senate? Josh Marshall links to a CBS News story indicating that Democrats have a shot of taking back the Senate this fall. The CBS story cites Alaska, Colorado, and Pennsylvania as states where Republicans could lose a seat. The American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Orstein is even quoted as saying “Look at the run […]

Relax Like many of my readers, I was a bit concerned when a poll (pdf) came out showing that Nader has 6% support in a three-way Bush/Kerry/Nader race. But I pretty quickly decided that that was either an anomaly or that it would fade over time. I didn’t post on the subject because I didn’t […]

Job Creation and Destruction in Service Industries Given the continued lousy state of the labor market, I wanted to know which industries are growing (in terms of numbers of workers) and which are shrinking. Here are the results for the past year, using the newest BLS figures (employment figures are in thousands of workers): My […]

Speaking of Funny Things What’s funnier? A cat wearing a lime helmet or this claim: ‘Bush Boom Better than Clinton Economy‘? I see via Mike Jones’ 18 Minute Gap that the charlatans good folks over at Blogs for Bush have a post with that exact title. No really, they do. Just click here and see […]

Friday Cat Blogging No, you haven’t mistakenly wandered over to CalPundit. This is a one-time only feature here at Angry Bear, because it makes me laugh. What happens when you have… 1) nothing to do 2) a sharp knife 3) a large lime 4) a patient cat 5) too much tequila 6) and it’s football […]

More on Employment Okay, so maybe it didn’t show much of an increase in jobs. But at least the BLS’s news release shows continued strong growth in the number of people outside of the labor force, i.e. people who aren’t working and who aren’t actively in the job market. Today’s BLS news release indicates that […]

Bad Employment Figures The BLS just released its new employment estimates. The unemployment rate in February is estimated to be 5.6%, unchanged from January. The more important statistic, the number of jobs in the US economy, grew by just 21,000 in February. This is a BAD number – average expectations among economists were that payrolls […]

Seen on The Front Page of CNN.com Today U.S. to launch 24/7 hunt for bin Laden: “U.S. forces searching for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden along the mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan will soon implement high-tech surveillance tactics in the region, enabling them to monitor the area 24 hours a day, seven days […]