Will you look at that? New home sales jumped more than 11% compared to last month.

Gee. Maybe we've been all wrong. Maybe Obama's stimulus bill is working. Maybe his assistance to homeowners is having an effect. Maybe the trillions and trillions of debt Obama has piled up is starting to get the economy moving again.

Maybe pigs can fly:

The Commerce Department reported that sales of new single-family homes rose 11 percent in June; economists' expected a 3 percent increase. The pace of home sales rose to a seasonally adjusted rate of 384,000 a year, the highest level since November.

But the figures offered no sign that the housing market had returned to health.

Despite the monthly increase, sales of new homes were still down 21 percent from June 2008. The market is still swamped by a glut of for-sale houses. And new homes, facing competition from cheap foreclosures, are sitting on the market for close to a year before they sell, compared with a median time of six months on the market in 2007.

"These are still really bad numbers," an economist at IHS Global Insight, Patrick Newport, said. "The market just couldn't have dropped much further."