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Alot to read out of this report, mostly good, but some of the negative trends remain. As others have pointed out, you have to take the 70,000 CA grocery workers out of the mix. Still its a good number.

Alot of people talking about the Fed now moving rates up, but if you look at the report, the unit labor cost numbers are still going nowhere. That just confirms what we've been saying - private sector wages are going nowhere, likely declining. You can see that even in anecdotal evidence from today's financial news - Sun Microsystems fires 3300 people, all of them making over $75K (Sun pays/paid well). That would be OK if IBM, Dell and HP were hiring, but they are using offshore labor. Most of those Sun employees will likely be taking a pay cut, wherever they end up.

That said, the diffusion index in the report was fairly good - hiring across a wide range of sectors. Even manufacturing stopped the 43 month decline of job losses (it was flat), and if you believe the recent ISM numbers, there may well have been some growth in manufacturing jobs.

Bush needs to get a string of these kinds of reports for a few months in a row. Not 300K, that's too high, but anything around 150K+ per month. We can argue about the quality of the jobs later, right now, for political considerations, Bush just needs numbers.

And let's see all these freepers put their money where their mouths (or keyboards) are to help keep this going - GO OUT AND SPEND MONEY. And don't buy chinese made junk. Go take a look at your washer/dryer and other appliances, sure they may work, but if its 15 years old, consider replacing it with a made in the USA model. Buy some new Craftsman tools. Also consider how much of our economy is built on services - take the family out to eat once or twice more per month. Take a vacation. Subscribe to cable modem service. Basically, spend money in and on US products, that's the only way to help our economy. You can worry about saving money again after Kerry is defeated.