Sunday Roundup (POLITICS)
With Friday's numbers showing the addition of 217,000 jobs, the U.S. finally restored the 9 million jobs lost in the recession -- five years after it supposedly ended. But we can keep the champagne on the shelf: we still need an estimated 7 million more jobs to keep up with population growth; if we count those who've dropped out of the labor force, our current unemployment rate would actually be 9.7 percent; and, adjusting for inflation, hourly wages are actually lower now than at the end of the recession. So we may have recovered 9 million jobs, but we seem to have lost all sense of urgency about saving the middle class.  Meanwhile, the swap of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five detainees held at Guantanamo was as messy and ambiguous as the overlong war it sprung out of.