I was thinking the same thing. There is no earthly way that you can have only 36,000 new jobs and have the unemployment rate fall to 9.0 percent. The less people in the pool seeking work, the better the unemployment numbers seem.
Question: Do those who are no longer eligible for unemployment benefits or seeking assistance get figured into the unemployment number?
Surveys are funny things. You can use them to lie, or to support the truth. Surveys do not, however, provide hard empirical facts. If 600k people are not unemployed anymore, then they need to demonstrate that through the use of facts, not statistical samples.