As Paddy noted earlier, hiring picked up, unemployment fell, so it’s time say it with me, in unison: Blame Obama. One of the best things about this news is that even Fox Business had to post it.

Of course, Republicans and their itchy sequestration trigger finger will get all kinds of thrills up their leg when they turn this good news around, so it’s up to us to point that out in our calls our Congress members.

And with that, it’s time to bring back the Bikini Graph! As always, red columns point to monthly job totals under the Bush administration, while blue columns point to job totals under the Obama administration.

Steve Benen at The Maddow Blog has more, but here you go:

[M]ost expected a fairly encouraging jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but few expected it to be this good. [...]

[T]he public sector lost 10,000 jobs. (It’d be easy for Washington to improve the latter number and lower the unemployment rate, but congressional Republicans still won’t allow it.) [...]

[T]oday’s report is genuinely good news on its own terms. The 236,000 jobs created in February is the second best total in a year, and the seventh best month of the last five years. Glancing through the report, it was also encouraging to see improving data from the construction and housing sectors. [...]

What’s more, we’ve now created 2.23 million jobs overall in the last year, and 2.33 million in the private sector alone. All Congress has to do is stop punishing the country on purpose, and 2013 may very well deliver a more robust economic recovery.

Key words: “Jobs created.” Millions of ‘em.

Damn that gay French Kenyan Marxist Obama, the most unAmerican radical socialist of all.