"Wednesday's report also showed..."
Wednesday's report also showed that the number of unemployed people collecting jobless benefits for more than a week rose by 81,000 to 3.3 million for the week ending Dec. 20, the most recent period for which that information is available. This suggests that jobs are still hard to find for some workers.
That's just those collecting benefits, not including the people who have already exhausted theirs, the ones who never qualified, and the ones who, for reasons of their own, may not have applied at all.
I have a simple criterion for the so-called "recovery" - when I'm employed again, maybe I'll believe in it. Meanwhile, I find it suitably ironic that the last time the numbers for new claims were this low was the day Bush was inaugurated.