Unemployment and recession comparisons

There's a nice pair of posts over at Time Magazine's Swampland blog, starting with this graph from Speaker Pelosi's office:
which commits the endlessly recurring error of not taking into account the change in population. I had this on my to-blog queue, but they got enough comments that their economic commentor, Justin Fox, came up with a version that uses the appropriate percentages, instead of raw numbers:

It's still ugly, but no where near as extreme as the original version was. Of course, we still don't know where that pale blue line is going...