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Consumer sentiment cooled again in early July to its lowest level in seven months as Americans took a dim view of their finances and job prospects, a survey released on Friday showed.

Senators rejected dueling Democratic and Republican small-business tax cut plans on Thursday, the latest futile effort to break the election-year gridlock that’s consumed Capitol Hill on issues dealing with jobs and the economy... “There is no reason for [Republicans] to have killed this bill other than they are trying to hurt President Obama, small businesses and the middle class,” Reid, who introduced the bill, said at a news conference.

The number of Americans signing up for new jobless benefits last week fell to a four-year low but an unusual pattern for summer factory shutdowns marred what would have been a hopeful sign for the struggling labor market.

U.S. employers advertised more jobs in May than April, a hopeful sign after three months of weak hiring. Job openings rose to a seasonally adjusted 3.6 million, the Labor Department said Tuesday. That's up from 3.4 million in April. It's also the second-highest level in nearly four years, just behind March's 3.7 million.

No question about it, Friday’s jobs report was a disappointment ... But beneath the dreary headline lay some encouraging signs: Demand for labor was relatively strong ... Jobs growth is broad-based ... Workers are re-entering the labor force ...

Irene Fernandez lost her job with Spain's postal service five months ago, a victim of government spending cuts. Since then, she's been getting by on spending money from her mother and the $530 a month she earns grooming dogs for neighbors.

If high unemployment "was a killer, he'd already be dead," said Republican pollster and consultant Mike McKenna. "The survey data tells you he's not dead." There's a problem with applying historical precedents and conventional wisdom to Obama. He sometimes defies them.

"[B]usinesses have created 4.4 million new jobs over the past 28 months," the president said, "including 500,000 new manufacturing jobs. That’s a step in the right direction. That’s a step in the right direction. But we can’t be satisfied, because our goal was never to just keep on working to get back where we were back in 2007, and I want to get back to a time when middle-class families and those working to get to the middle class have some basic security. That’s our goal.”

Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt responded in a statement. “The President brought us back from the brink of another Depression but he doesn’t believe our work is done -- he’s got a plan to restore the middle class and create a million jobs now that Mitt Romney opposes and Republican leaders have blocked," LaBolt's statement read in part. "Mitt Romney says he has a better path, but over the past decade we saw where that took us -- to the slowest job growth since World War II, the collapse of our financial system and the deterioration of the middle class."