While the media and left-wing may be jumping on today’s unemployment news as signs that the recession is coming to an end, even the White House is warning that it’s not time to crack out the “Happy Days are Here Again” record. In fact, the Obama Administration is expecting unemployment to reach at least 10%.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the two positions don’t contradict each other.

“I would describe the report that came out today as the least bad report that we’ve had in a year,” Gibbs said. “But we still have a long way to go.”

The new Labor Department numbers show that employers cut 247,000 jobs in July, another job loss but also the smallest reduction of any month this year. The unemployment rate dropped marginally from 9.5 percent to 9.4 percent, although one of the reasons for that change is that hundreds of thousands of people left the labor force.

“Today, we’re pointed in the right direction,” Obama said in brief remarks in the Rose Garden hours after the report was released. “While we’ve rescued our economy from catastrophe, we’ve also begun to build a new foundation for growth.”

Even so, Obama said: “We have a lot further to go. As far as I’m concerned, we will not have a true recovery until we stop losing jobs.” He also said he won’t rest until “every American that is looking for a job can find one.”

Today’s unemployment data wasn’t so much good news as interesting news. The drop isn’t an indication that people are going back to work. Many people have simply decided to stop searching for a job, to stop working entirely. Let’s say that a woman who previously worked was laid off, searched for a job, and has now decided to permanently stay home with the kids after a futile search. She’s no longer “unemployed”, apparently.

For more about that, be sure to check out Jim Geraghty’s post.