Bush officials "sought to find bright spots" in September job report

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6205119/

The report kept alive one of the principal economic complaints of Democratic Sen. John Kerry in his campaign to unseat the incumbent Republican. Even after accounting for an announced upward revision, the economy has shed more than 600,000 jobs since Bush took office, making it likely he will be the first president since Hoover to preside over a four-year term of net job losses.

Bush administration officials sought to find bright spots in the report, including an annual revision that showed the economy added about 236,000 more jobs this year than previously estimated.

In the first three years of the Bush administration, the economy lost more than 2.4 million jobs — losses that continued long after the recession formally ended in November 2001. Manufacturing was especially hard-hit, meaning significant economic pain in key battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

“One of the other disturbing numbers was the sharp rise in the average duration of unemployment to 19.6 weeks,” said David Wyss, chief economist for Standard & Poor’s. “The good news is that layoffs have been cut back, things have stabilized. But we’re still not seeing much hiring. The people who are out of work are staying out of work.”

[CarolynEC]

1. Sooo... this awful jobs report is actually the "good news" version?

Wake up, America. It's not even a matter of ideology anymore -- these people are just plain incompetent.

[tomfodw]

2. Except, there were a whole bunch of layoffs announced this week

And didn't Bush promise in 2002 that if Congress adopted his tax cuts, job growth would accelerate?

He has barely had one month of the kind of job growth that he promised his tax cuts would make the average.

[T Roosevelt]

3. This guy's not paying attention

“The good news is that layoffs have been cut back, things have stabilized."

AT&T and BofA just announced a total of almost 12k layoffs this month. Hmmm...

[rfranklin]

4. This is a fucking disaster! They have actually run a deficit...

They are in negative territory in a huge way

[central scrutinizer]

5. burger flipping became a manufacturing job

maybe they can spin it that being unemployed means you got a 100% tax cut. Or have prisoners make license plates again - there are two million prisoners and making license plates is manufacturing.