A Glimmer Of Hope Amid Simmering Anger.

While roving bands of angry, misinformed Americans are spending August making spectacles of themselves by screaming like caged banshees about health care reform at town hall meetings across the country, there is a glimmer of hope today. Still, times are tough and it's not time to turn cartwheels of joy just yet.

From the New York Times:

The economy lost significantly fewer jobs in July than expected. Forecasters were predicting a loss of about 325,000 jobs in June. The actual loss was 247,000 — the smallest since August 2008.

The average hourly pay of rank-and-file workers, which had been flat in June, rose 3 cents in July, to $18.56 an hour. That wage is up 2.5 percent over the past year, while inflation has been roughly zero. So the average person who’s still employed has actually received a raise in the last year.

The average private-sector workweek increased by one-tenth of an hour, to 33.1. It was the first increase since last summer.

And the government said that the economy had shed somewhat fewer jobs in May and June than previously estimated.

The one thing that doesn’t deserve much excitement is what will probably garner many of the headlines: the drop in the unemployment rate. It happened only because more people stopped looking for work and were thus ineligible to be counted as officially unemployed. The share of adults with jobs actually fell: to 59.4 percent, from 59.5 percent.

So we shed fewer jobs than we have in almost a year and wages made a modest gain. At the same time, more people dropped out of the job market altogether and 14,000 people lose health care every day. Millions more are a pink slip away from losing their coverage and many are under-insured and may not even know it.

Meanwhile, the ignorance of those town hall jammers is on full display, as they howl in full-throated support of a broken status quo.