There’s a lot more that’s frozen in D.C. this week than the usual fallout from a blizzard. The brains of many Senate Republicans are on ice as well. The House passed a jobs bill in December, but the Senate is dawdling, and worse—threatening to pass bits and pieces, taking apart what should be a comprehensive approach to jobs and turning it into minced cabbage.

The unemployment figures were so bad Friday—half a million U.S. jobs lost in one month—some in the corporate media actually sounded a bit alarmed. Still, the overriding impulse of mainstream journalists is to look on the bright side.

Like NPR for instance, which offers a handy chart showing how unemployment was worse in the early 1980s than it is now.