That’s the number of people who applied for unemployment benefits last week. “Experts” are now saying the drop last week was probably because of the bad weather which kept people from applying.

Maybe the folks who gave a victory yell about how wonderful we were doing last week will now take it back.

The Associated Press reports:

The Labor Department said that 3.91 million people were receiving regular unemployment benefits. That data is one week behind the figures for new applications. Another 4.5 million people out of work for a longer period are receiving extended unemployment benefits.

But that’s not the big picture. The big picture is that there are hundreds of thousands of people who have fallen off the government radar meaning they don’t have a job and have exhausted all their benefits or they never applied.

I wrote a column about that last week and it’s receiving a lot of views.

Yesterday I read that the unemployment rate for female veterans is 13.5%. You can read the story HERE. The story concentrates on female veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which is fine but that’s only part of the story. There are thousands more who are out of work and not on the government radar.

Meanwhile, here in the State of Montana, some legislators are using their 90 days of stardom to introduce a “birther” bill or a “gotcha” healthcare disclosure bill instead of finding ways to help businesses create jobs.

And that, my faithful readers, is pretty screwed up…