'Greg, who is the worst Senator in this Congress?' 'Well that would be hard to say, sir. They're each outstanding in their own way.'

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid certainly has a way with words. Reid's authored such classics as "This war is lost"... "Obama is a light-skinned black with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one"... and who could forget "You could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol"?

Friday, Reid tried to top all of his past gaffes in one swell foop stating, "Today is a big day in America -- only, only 36,000 people lost their jobs in America, which is... really... good."

Yes, the excellent economic news continues apace, dampened only by the delay in nationalizing one-sixth of the economy. And, dammit, I can prove it.

At first blush, unemployment appears to be stabilizing. The February 2010 Unemployment number remained at 9.7% with an under-employment (or U6) rate of 16.8% and 36,000 more jobs lost, "which is really... good".

Total non-farm payrolls appear to be in a trough as well. Is this good? Well, no, as The Economic Populist points out. Good would be 200,000 jobs added to the non-farm payroll. Good would be anything [over] 100,000 jobs added to the non-farm payroll. It's pretty clear many out there are trying to make less bad the new good. Uh, no, good is not on a relative scale, it's an absolute folks. We need anywhere from 85,000 to 145,000 jobs created each month just to keep up with the population rate. That's reality.

But have things really stabilized?

A record high number of people -- 40% of the officially unemployed -- have been seeking work for 27 weeks or more. And part-time employment (in situations where full-time work is desired) increased to 8.8 million from 8.3 million.

The ratio of the employed to the civilian population continues to plummet, and is now at a record low of 58.5%.

As for workers in high-tech, contrary to the press releases of the offshore outsourcing industry, there's no shortage of available talent here in the states.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I'll tell you what, Barack. We'll tell John Q. Public you were doing a great job taking care of the economy, but you parked it out back last night... and this morning it was gone!


Hat tip: Economic Populist.