President Obama lays the blame for the bad jobs report right where it belongs, on the do nothing Congress and the obstructionist Republican party.

Courtesy of the Campaign for America's Future:

One cost of conservative obstruction is the loss of 28,000 construction jobs. Those are workers who would likely be on the job if the House had at least adopted a transportation spending bill that was passed by the Senate earlier in the spring. Instead, that bill is stalled in a House-Senate conference, and hundreds of state transportation projects are being stymied because there is no long-term federal funding commitment. 

Also in May 13,000 public sector jobs were lost, including 8,000 state and local government jobs. The Wall Street Journal noted Thursday that if state and local government payrolls had remained stable since December 2008, the unemployment rate would be 7.1 percent today instead of more than 8 percent. 

The austerity policies that congressional conservatives hunger to impose on the United States continue to be an epic failure in Europe. The unemployment rate in the Eurozone was reported Thursday to be 11 percent, a record high. Governments imposed a harsh regime of government budget cuts in an effort to lower deficits, and all those cuts did was put people out of work, making it even harder for those governments to close those deficits. 

With congressional Republicans continuing to vow that they would oppose any effort to increase government spending to put people back to work—House Majority Leader Eric Cantor dismissed any new government initiatives this morning on CNBC—we are in effect repeating the Eurozone failure. It's not to the same degree, but it is still the same wrong direction. 

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says today's jobs report reflects the failure of Obama administration policies, remember that even the Recovery Act that President Obama did get through the Congress was mortally compromised: It was not nearly big enough to address the crater left in the economy by the Great Recession (or as Paul Krugman calls it, the Lesser Depression) and half of the stimulus took the form of tax cuts that had less stimulative effect than the direct spending. 

Today's real lesson is that the de facto austerity that is the fruit of conservative obstruction is choking our economy just as it has choked the Eurozone. The faster that America can end the trip down this conservative austerity road, the better.

There is little that pisses me off as much as watching the GOP hamstring this President's efforts to turn this economy around, and then use his perceived "failure" to do so as a political weapon against him.

It is just about the ugliest thing I have seen in politics, and the truly horrific part is that there are REAL Americans who are losing their homes, their livelihoods, and their opportunity to provide a future for their children all in the name of partisanship and the desire to retake the White House.

As I have said before, what is happening today is NOT politics, it's a hostage situation. And we the people (Yes WE can use that phrase too!), are the hostages.