Regular visitors are probably familiar with the Photo of the Day, a special pick selected by Pete Souza and the White House Photo Office daily.  But you may not have realized that each one is loaded up as part of a gallery for that month, and as it turns out, looking back through the photos of the day is a pretty interesting way to recap the month.  The gallery for August is below -- President Obama talks with soliders at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas as the combat mission in Iraq comes to a close; tours a new housing development in New Orleans, Louisiana five years after Hurricane Katrina; signs Elena Kagan's commission in the Oval Office before celebrating her confirmation to the Supreme Court; welcomes recipents of the 2010 Presidential Citizen's Medal to the White House; and takes a dip with Sasha at Alligator Point in Panama City Beach, Florida.

Click here to see the photo gallery.

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The Wall Street Journal ran a graph this weekend claiming, “The private sector is adding jobs … but the recovery is slower than in past cycles.”   In fact, even though it is not fast enough, the rate of job growth is actually faster now than was the case at comparable points of the past two recoveries.   

How did the Wall Street Journal get it wrong?  The problem is that their graph indexes job growth to the start of the recession, not the start of the recovery.  The economy stopped contracting at the end of the second quarter last year and has since expanded for four straight quarters.  So June 2009 is a reasonable date to pick for the start of the recovery, although the “official” date has not yet been set by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).   Private sector job growth started six months after GDP started expanding in the current recovery.  By contrast, in the 2001 recovery private sector job growth did not begin until 22 months after the official NBER end date of the recession, and in the 1991 recovery job growth did not start until 12 months after the official NBER end date of the recession. 

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Lindsay Graham has often shown that he’s fully capable of being reasonable and bipartisan. Which made it particularly disappointing to see his misleading use of numbers yesterday.  

On Meet the Press, the Senator, against a wave of evidence to the contrary, argued that the Recovery Act has been “an absolute disaster” and called for cancelling “a lot” of what’s left in the bill (transcript here). 

His evidence for this claim: “...we’ve lost two-and-a-half million jobs since the stimulus passed.”

Take a look at the figure below and you’ll see why this is so misleading. He’s conflating two periods of very different employment trends. In the first, when his team’s policies dominated, employment hemorrhaged at nightmarish rates. In the second, when the Recovery Act was on the scene, job losses in the private sector began to diminish, and this year, turned positive. 

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The President talks about his fight to make America work for the middle class and make sure hard work is rewarded -- rather than greed and recklessness .

Click here to see the video.

The delegations have departed, the speeches have been delivered, and the talks have begun. Re-launching direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians was of course a first step, but the meetings this week at the White House and the State Department went quite well, and represent a good foundation for progress.

As Senator Mitchell said, the tone was constructive and serious, and the two leaders began to establish a positive relationship. Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas met for nearly two hours one-on-one at the State Department on September 2nd. They talked very frankly and openly with each other, and got a sense of each other’s seriousness of purpose.

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