Peter Coy is ordinarily a pretty good reporter, but he really misses the boat with this chart, with the comment, “this jobs recovery is weak, all right, but right in line with the past two recoveries.”

Job growth last month was disappointingly weak according to new jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nonfarm payroll employment rose by only 115,000. The is well below the 154,000 jobs added in March according to the revised estimates.

On Monday morning, just a week before the recall primary, Scott Walker, with his entourage of Lt. Governor Becky Kleefisch and Workforce Development Secretary Reggie Newson, comes traipsing to Milwaukee to take a shot at potential recall opponent Mayor Tom Barrett by announcing a scheme he dubbed “Transform Milwaukee.”

To make a long story short, Walker wants to take credit for taking WHEDA funding and use it for what it’s meant to be used for.

Pete Stark has introduced his bill called the Women’s Option to Raise Kids (WORK) Act, which would allow low-income mothers with children up to 3 years old to classify their child-rearing responsibilities as work, just the way Ann Romney did. Will Mrs. Romney support it?

A premise of the 2012 election is that it represents a crossroads, where we can either dump the failed elites, and continue to bestow upon them every gift in the government’s arsenal. But that’s not actually the case, or it least it hasn’t been in the past several years. As Matt Stoller points out, using the graph above, income inequality has actually accelerated over the past three years, for a variety of reasons, with a Democrat in the White House and Democrats partially or fully in control of Congress.

With the general election kicking off yesterday, we will have seven more months of the kind of “I know you are but what am I” politics we saw on display yesterday. It’s almost too depressing to even contemplate. Mitt Romney started it off with a claim about the recession’s impact on women, which gave new work for the folks at PolitiFact. We have seven months of this coming.

We experienced unexpected jobs growth earlier this year, partly from unseasonably warm winter weather. But the catch-up growth just moved some economic activity forward, and the same seasonal adjustment models that didn’t catch job growth in January and February, according to this theory, caught too much in March

The US enacted the Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform in the midst of the largest postwar expansion in four decades. It was not put to the test for many years, and really not until the Great Recession. And now we’re seeing that it doesn’t work for most of those who need it.

As I skimmed this paper, it reinforced for me that there is no economic recovery, at least not in this part of Florida. When I picked the paper up, I noticed it was awfully skinny so I counted pages. Eight whole pages. With large ads covering each page so I counted up all the ads. Thirty-nine ads for 8 pages. Then I looked even closer. Two ads were for the paper itself. Another two ads were for “start your own cleaning company” services. Then I counted nineteen ads for various types of training programs.

A disappointing 120,000 jobs were added to the economy in March, well below expectations. However, the topline unemployment rate fell again to 8.2%. The revisions for January and February were mixed, with employment revised down a bit for January (to +275,000 from +284,000) and up in February (from +227,000 to +240,000).

The drop in the topline rate can be explained by a small drop in both the labor force participation rate (to 63.8%) and the employment-population ratio (to 58.5%).