Can I have some, please?

What I want is whatever the jobistas and the reporters who cover them are smoking or sniffing when they look at today's hiring report and see bouncy good news:

• The 13 percent of firms polled plan to hire in the next quarter; this—and an unknown controlled substance—are the source of the euphoria. However,
• 13 percent plan layoffs, and
• 73 percent are still going to stand pat with the workforce they have.

If I tried to sell you on something that showed a success rate of about one in seven, then told you it was the best news since sunshine, you'd probably lock me up.

[Late news, Wednesday: I went to my primary networking group today. Even the moderator, who is usually one of those uber-optimist types, expressed extreme scepticism about the last couple of rounds of jobs data.]
[Still later news: new claims jumped to 474,000. Note that the "continuing claims" data includes no one on extended benefits, like me.]

There is one thing I'm quietly betting on. It is that those grand and spectacular reductions in job losses just announced, on the order of a 90 percent reduction, are somebody's clerical error. We won't get that confirmed until six months or so from now, and by then we'll all have something else to worry about.