Who knew? The Hill's Amie Parnes says that rising unemployment numbers help Obama!

Someone named "Amie Parnes", if that is his/her/its real name, posted an inadvertently comic article at The Hill entitled "As jobs picture improves, so do Obama reelection chances."

The latest jobs numbers, however, were a disaster.

Not only did the "official" unemployment number (or U-3) jump up a notch to 8.3 percent, but the real picture is far more dire. Mike Shedlock explains.

This month, those "not" in the labor force increased by 348,000 to 88,340,000, another record high. If you are not in the labor force, you are not counted as unemployed... In the last year, those "not" in the labor force rose by 2,027,000...

Over the past several years people have dropped out of the labor force at an astounding, almost unbelievable rate, holding the unemployment rate artificially low...

Given the complete distortions of reality with respect to not counting people who allegedly dropped out of the work force, it is easy to misrepresent the headline numbers.

Digging under the surface, the drop in the unemployment rate over the past two years is nothing but a statistical mirage. Things are much worse than the reported numbers indicate.

That's not all: James Pethokoukis relays a chart from the St. Louis Federal Reserve (above) that highlights the awesome failure of the Obama-Democrats: the economy needs to create 11 million jobs to return the country to Bush administration numbers.

And, as real journalists know, the true U-3 unemployment rate is in double digits.

Once again, a bad jobs report comes out, and both the White House and the media trumpet it as "good" news and a sign the economy's turning around. It is in fact a dismal jobs report, as the numbers clearly show.

On the surface, the headline numbers don't look so bad. The Labor Department reported that U.S. businesses created 163,000 net new payroll jobs in July, while the unemployment rate was "essentially unchanged" at 8.3%.

No sooner had the numbers come out than President Obama was standing at a podium before the cameras, claiming credit for the job growth and again blaming former President Bush for the bad state of the economy.

"This morning we learned that our businesses created 172,000 new jobs in the month of July," he said... But "we" haven't in fact created any jobs. As a matter of fact, since Obama has entered office, some 1.1 million payroll jobs have disappeared.

This year, businesses have created 151,000 new jobs a month on average — way below the 300,000-plus per month job creation in a typical recovery-expansion.

If that still sounds good, understand this: Just to keep up with the natural rate of growth in the workforce, the economy has to create about 130,000 new jobs a month. So at this rate, it'll take us four years and four months just to get back to the number of jobs we had in 2007.

Sound like progress to you?

Forward!

As for Blaming Bush: it never gets old for President SCOAMF. Every time he does it, he's simply telling us he doesn't know what the hell he's doing.

But you already knew that.