video

News of a rather stunning and significant drop of the jobless figures released today, appeared to not only catch the world of opinion journalists flat-footed today, but professional politicians as well. GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney appeared this morning on Fox and Friends just as the news of the 8.6% unemployment rate broke (down .4% from last month’s 9%), and host Gretchen Carlson immediately asked the former Massachusetts Governor if he thought this was a “big boost for Obama.” Romney’s reply seemed to reveal that he put politics over the nation’s improved fortune, as he diminished the news as a “silver lining.”

When President Obama appeared on The Daily Show Wednesday night, he made a claim that may have caused some viewers to take pause. “Most of the jobs that we lost were lost before the economic policies we put in place had any effect,” Obama told Jon Stewart. But Politifact, the St. Petersburg Times‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking operation, has taken a closer look at the President’s statement—and found that it holds up.

On the heels of what might be the beginning of a truce between Fox News and the Obama administration, the White House is now calling out another major news organization. Late last night, the White House’s Recovery Implementation Office released a detailed rebuttal of what it called a “misleading” report by the Associated Press. While the AP hasn’t been stripped of its legitimacy, the reaction does seem a little bit harsh.