The Unemployment Numbers are Bad: So How Will Obama and His Media Friends Spin it?

The unemployment rate went up to 8.9% as "only" 539K jobs were lost during April. Here's the the high-level job loss summary:

• Construction employment down 110K
• Factories down 149K
• Business and professional services companies shed 122K
• Financial-sector lost 40K
• Retail trade cut 47K
• Leisure and hospitality down 44K
• Temporary employment down 62K
• Good news for health care, which added almost 17K new jobs.

The government added 72K jobs due to hiring of temporary workers in preparation for Census 2010. Of course, without that we would have been back at the 600K plus job loss range.

I expect to see headlines such as "Obama's stimulus policies begin to turn the tide" and "Numbers reveal new hope for recovery" and so forth. But the sad fact is that this is very bad news. As I've stated before -- http://rightreturn.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-jobless-claims-drop.html -- just because the rate of growth has slowed, does not mean the economy's coming back. I hope things will eventually level out and jobs will start to be added. But with Obamanomics, it's really hard to be hopeful.