Today in framing

O labor force participation rate, where art thou? Actually, that's not a fair question. The labor force participation data won't be released until Friday, along with the other data in the monthly BLS employment report. Drudge is linking to the (ahem) scrupulously accurate Daily Mail's account of ADP's estimate of the February job market total:

Even Fox is a bit more cautious:

The ADP National Employment Report showed on Wednesday that private payrolls grew by 298,000 jobs last month, well above economists' expectations for a gain of 190,000. January's private payrolls gains were revised up to 261,000 from 246,000.

The report, jointly developed with Moody's Analytics, came ahead of the release on Friday of the U.S. Labor Department's more comprehensive employment report. The ADP report, however, has a poor track record predicting the private payrolls component of the government's employment report.

Could it not quite three years since -- how did the the Murdoch press treat a gain of 288,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in May 2014? Let's ask Lexis-Nexis:

There was a job boom in the US economy in April that was as phony as any Hollywood explosion.

If you keep up with these things, you might have noticed that drooler outlets like Drudge essentially abandoned the the job-creation stat in favor of labor force participation a while ago, once job creation and the unemployment rate seemed to be consistently in the Kenyan's favor. I have no idea what the numbers will look like on Friday, but I do expect it'll be interesting to see how the patterns of the past few months hold up.