our friend diane swank is standing by, a chief economist with us from chicago tonight. ane, if i asked you to find good news in a bad number, could you? >> it would be hard, but there is some good news out there. the only good news is we're generating jobs. not enough jobs to accommodate those coming into the labor force let alone re-employ those who already lost their jobs for more than six months, most of them during the height of the crisis. there are some signs that those people who have just lost their jobs are finding jobs a little bit faster. that's i guess a sliver of hope out there. but we know that, of course, a lot of people have given up entirely on their job search. when they come back in, these unemployment numbers are go even higher. >> sadly to the bad news, first of all we're always told by folks like you that seasonal employment, people getting jobs to work in say retail over christmastime usually deflates the unemployment number. now some people are fearing there's kind of a baked in permanently unemployed number in this country. >> that's the real con