The jobs numbers and new, uh, absolutely not stimulus | Michael Tomasky

The White House's latest play: too late substantively, maybe just barely not too late politically

To utterly no one's surprise, the August jobs report is bleak. Just more than 50,000 jobs were lost overall, but that was mostly because of the foreseen end of temporary employment by the Census Bureau. Private companies added 67,000. June and July figures were also revised up, but it's all not nearly enough to drive the unemployment rate down.

It went up by 0.1%, to 9.6%, an increase that is...