Nothing special in yesterday’s financial news. So let’s turn from farce to fraud…that is, to politics.

President Obama has to defend his policies, pretending that they have brought a real recovery. One of the pillars of his case, say the papers, is that unemployment has gone down.

The trouble with this as a re-election strategy is that the people who need to vote for Obama are the people who know it isn’t true.

Washington Blog reports:

There are 243 million working age Americans. There are 142 million employed Americans. Only 101 million of the employed Americans are working more than 35 hours per week. This means that only 41.6% of all working age Americans have a full-time job. According to the government drones at the BLS, 88 million Americans have “chosen” to not be in the labor force — the highest level in US history.