Housing starts are bouncing back nicely!

Or so says a poster on one of the forums I frequent, referring to the news reports about same.  Captain Capitalism disagrees, pointing out that the reported "surge" in housing starts is a simple statistical manipulation of the data reported by the St. Louis Fed.  In fact all you need to do is limit the dataset and it paints a grand picture. 

Here is the surge that the oligarchs and their lackeys are proffering:

That certainly is a promising looking graph, and might make you feel good about the FED's MBS purchases (QE3 forever) and the actions of the federal government, but if you show all of the data, will you still feel that way?  What does it look like when you take off the limiter?

Owch, that sure looks like we're sitting square at the bottom, barely matching the lowest starts of the last 60 years worth of monthly starts.  When you take the same data but sum it up annually, it is even more telling.

So, is this a surge?  Or are we looking at the lowest number of housing starts since the FED started collecting the data?