You have to love the magical fungability of the Labor Department's unemployment statistics.  Dow Jones is reporting today:

The unemployment rate, calculated using a household survey, fell to 9.7% last month from an unrevised 10% in December, the Labor Department said Friday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had forecast the jobless rate would edge higher to 10.1%.

Meantime, nonfarm payrolls fell by 20,000 compared with a revised 150,000 drop decline in December. Economists had expected payrolls to be flat. The December figure was revised down sharply from an originally reported 85,000 drop.

How, you ask, can the unemployment rate fall when we lose 20,000 jobs?  Because we calculate unemployment based on those receiving unemployment benefits.  In essence, as more and more people fall off the unemployment rolls because they have exhausted their benefits, the government considers them "employed" for purposes of the unemployment rate.  If ten percent of the country falls off unemployment benefits, and another nine percent are on unemployment benefits, the unemployment rate isn't 19 percent -- it's 9 percent according to the government. 

Needless to say, this ain't how they used to calculate unemployment rate.  Back in the 1930s, any worker without a job but not retired was considered unemployed.  Now you have to be "seeking" work, which is, of course, a far more malleable category.  At the same time, more and more people are staying in college longer (this is the reason for the Obama "stay in college" strategy), and they're not counted as unemployed.

Here's the bottom line:

The Labor Department's annual benchmark revision to the survey that produces the monthly payroll report painted a bleaker 2009 picture. Last year, job losses were almost 600,000 more than previously reported, the revisions showed.

So we're losing jobs at a higher rate than the government is counting.  Things aren't getting better.  And there's a reason for that.  His name is Barack Hussein Obama.