BULLETIN:  JOB CREATION AWFUL – AT 8:46 A.M. ET:  The much-awaited job-creation figures for April have just been released, and they are awful.  From The Wall Street Journal: 

WASHINGTON—U.S. job growth slowed again in April, a fresh sign that the economy could be settling into a sluggish spring.

Nonfarm payrolls grew by 115,000 last month, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate, obtained by a separate survey of U.S. households, ticked down a tenth of percentage point to 8.1%.

Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires expected a gain of 168,000 in payrolls and for the jobless rate to remain at 8.2% in April.

On a positive note, March payrolls grew by an upwardly revised 154,000 from an initially reported 120,000, and February payrolls posted a gain of 259,000, compared with an earlier estimate of 240,000.

Hardly positive.  It takes 150,000 new jobs every month just to keep pace with population growth.   And the dramatic downward trend since February has just been confirmed by the new figures.

The unemployment rate has dropped since August, when it was 9.1%, though some of the decline has resulted from people leaving the work force. Federal Reserve officials have said that they expect only gradual progress the rest of this year. The Fed last week forecast that the unemployment rate would fall to somewhere between 7.8% and 8.0% by the end of this year.

One source claims that the labor-force-participation-rate has dropped to a 30-year low.

Even Bloomberg, which tries hard to help out the Obamans, puts it this way in its lead, just out:

Employers in the U.S. added fewer workers than forecast in April and the jobless rate unexpectedly declined as people left the labor force, underscoring concern the world’s largest economy may be losing speed.

COMMENT:  If we're in a recovery, we're in a jobless one.  While the administration will spin the unemployment number as progress, it really isn't.  And the underemployment number is somewhere in the teens.

Numbers like this will not guarantee Romney's election, but if Obama is re-elected with an economy like this, one would wonder about the rationality of much of the electorate. 

May 4, 2012