Saturday, October 6, 2012

Unemployment Statistics for Dummies

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J.P. Travis
Conservative Resources

"We’re in the middle of campaign season and it’s a presidential election year, so naturally the lies are flying around like winged monkeys on a kidnap mission. Dishonest politicians are so common we’re used to them, which is kind of sad, but one thing I hope we never get used to is blatant dishonesty from a sitting president.

The first time it happened, with Richard Nixon, Americans were so upset the man had to resign before he was impeached. The second time it happened, when Bill Clinton looked into national TV cameras and said “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” he was impeached.


Generally, we don’t like it when our president callously spouts bald-faced lies at us... but that’s exactly what the current president does on a daily basis. An opinion piece published this week at Power Line was titled, “Is Barack Obama America’s Most Dishonest Politician?” That’s a good question, one I’ve been answering with a definite “Yes!” for the last four years.

Our current president seems incapable of shame.

The opinion piece specifically refers to Obama’s appearance on David Letterman Tuesday night where the president claimed George Bush left him with a $1 trillion deficit, which is untrue by a factor of two and a half, and said he didn’t know what the national debt was when he took office and doesn’t know what it is now.

Although that’s an impressive string of unadulterated bullshit, especially for a sitting president, I don’t think it’s Obama’s biggest lie – not even close. His biggest lie is the one he utters in every campaign speech, which means about twice a day, every day, seven days a week, because – let’s face it – campaigning for election is pretty much all he does.

His biggest lie is about the unemployment situation.

The the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), a branch of the Labor Department, is fudging unemployment numbers to make Obama look better. The unemployment rate has been artificially lowered by dropping unemployed people out of the labor force so they no longer count as unemployed. In a December column I explained exactly how that is done mathematically. To my alarm and disgust, since then I’ve discovered seven other techniques used to propagate Obama’s big lie: 

1. Seasonal adjustments are abused to artificially improve the employment rate. For example, for July the BLS reported the economy added 163,000 jobs, but 377,000 of that was added as a seasonal adjustment so actually we lost 214,000 jobs.

2. There is also a birth-death model used by the BLS to “infer” job creations. Like the seasonal adjustment, the birth-death model is abused to make things look better. For example, the July numbers also included another 52,000 jobs added by this adjustment. If you’re keeping track, the official announcement of 163,000 jobs gained was actually 266,000 jobs lost.

3. Under Obama there’s been a massive increase in Social Security disability rolls. Those people – 5.9 million since he became president – are automatically subtracted from the labor force making the unemployment rate look better.

4. New legislation this year allows the Labor Department to pass out $100 million dollars to businesses to prevent layoffs. This will keep people temporarily and artificially employed at taxpayer expense... hopefully until Obama gets through Election Day.

5. On November 1 the Budget Control Act of 2011 will require millions of 60-day layoff warnings to defense contractor employees. These layoffs are directly attributable to the president’s mismanagement of federal spending, but the warnings will hit four days before the election which is somewhat awkward for him. So the Labor Department is telling businesses to ignore the federal law requiring those layoff notices.

6. Obama, often with Labor Department-produced audio-visual aids, uses February of 2010 as a starting point when bragging about job creation – instead of January of 2009 when he took office – because February 2010 was the low point. Naturally, when you start with the low point, the trend looks positive.

7. Monthly BLS statistics are supposed to be kept secret until the day they go public to prevent anybody from taking advantage of advance notice, but Democrats in North Carolina were recently caught getting advance notice anyway, allowing the Democrat Party to craft appropriate spin ahead of time.


Notice that each of these seven techniques involves the complicity of the Labor Department. They’re either producing fudged numbers or leaking secret information to Democrats. Like so many government agencies, the Labor Department has become an unofficial branch of the Democrat Party.

President Obama’s lies about job creation are evil. Not only does the constant misinformation stop us from solving the unemployment problem, imagine the tens of millions of desperate jobless people who have been told for over three years now that the problem is not the economy, it's them.

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"The American people are tired of liars and people who
pretend to be something they're not." – Hillary Clinton
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Friday, October 5, 2012

Fishnet Friday


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How to get health care in a socialist country:

City Square

Swedish man fakes stroke to get approved for an X-ray

Mats Johannesson suffered from debilitating headaches, requiring 47 ambulance trips to the hospital, and Swedish medicine would only give him painkillers. Finally, he fakes a stroke so that Sweden's government medicine would approve him for an X-ray. The X-ray showed that he had a brain tumor. Sweden's The Local reports:
"Johannesson, who is in his forties and was working as a truck driver, fell ill some five years ago. After seeking medical help from his local clinic in Mellerud he was referred to the nearest hospital, the Norra Älvsborgs lasarett, but was sent home again with some painkillers.
 “I asked for an x-ray but they didn’t think there was enough reason to carry one out,” Johannsesson said.
This continued on and off for the next five years. By last summer, Johannesson had gone to hospital by ambulance 47 times. Every time he was sent back by taxi – and without the x-ray he asked for....
On the May 20th this year, Johannesson collapsed again but was sent home once more without an x-ray. When it happened again on July 19th Johannesson was determined not to be brushed off.
“I thought to myself ‘ I am going to get a scan this time’,” Johannesson told The Local.
When the doctor came to check him over, Johannesson therefore pretended to have had a stroke, making himself go limp on the left side of his body . When the attending physician asked him to touch his nose with his fingertips, he missed on purpose.
 “And then they got worried and I was taken for an emergency x-ray straight away,” Johannesson said.
When they had performed the scan the doctor told him that there was no haemorrhage but that they had detected a tumour in his brain."
Sweden has had socialized medicine since 1955. The single payer system led to waiting lists. Waiting lists can lead to increased costs, as the National Center for Public Policy reports:
"One study that examined over 1,400 Swedes on a waiting list for cataract surgery found that 5.2 million kronas were spent on hospital stays and home health care for patients waiting for surgery. That was the equivalent of what it would have cost to give 800 patients cataract surgery."
It also leads to higher mortality rates:
"A recent study that examined over 5,800 Swedish patients on a wait list for heart surgery found that the long wait has consequences far worse than pain, anxiety or monetary cost. In this study, the median wait time was found to be 55 days. While on the waiting list, 77 patients died. The authors' statistical analysis led them to conclude that the "risk of death increases significantly with waiting time." Another study found a mean wait time of 55 days for heart surgery in Sweden and a similar rate of mortality for those on the waiting list. Finally, a study in the Swedish medical journal Lakartidningen found that reducing waiting times reduced the heart surgery mortality rate from seven percent to just under three percent."
Swedish politicians have tried some free-market reforms but they didn't seem to understand what is needed for a free market to work. For example:
"Although patients were free to choose which hospital in which they could get treatment, there were few penalties on providers that failed to attract patients. For example, in Stockholm, the county council did not permit any emergency hospital - public or private - from shutting down."
Welcome to America's future under Obamacare.

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Thursday, October 4, 2012

The Day After......


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Enablers of the Obama Myths Since 2008

NewsBusters - "An angry Chris Matthews sharply denounced President Obama's performance in the presidential debate lastnight, implying his knowledge of the facts was "first grade." Matthews also urged Obama to tune in to MSNBC so he could learn a thing or two....."
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Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Tonight's the Night



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Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Obama Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter Visits the Ladies of "The View"



Things aren't going well at 'Obama For America 2012' Headquarters these days.....

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Famed Political Scientist / Hollywood Actor Ben Affleck Says Election is Over



"I think Republicans really had a chance to win, and they kind of ended up with like a sort of Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, Bob Dole type - who just couldn't get people to see him as a real person somehow. Romney just had such trouble coming off as just like the kind of person you see at the grocery store. And I truly believe that has cost him the election....." Read More
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Monday, October 1, 2012

Free Offer From The Democrat National Committee:


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Obama Campaign Spokeswoman Worried He Will Be Too “Professional” Sounding During Debates For Normal People To Understand…

Because, yes, they really do think you’re that stupid.

Beltway Confidential:
"President Obama’s campaign spokeswoman said she’s concerned Obama will sound too “professorial” to resonate with the low-information voters tuning into the presidential campaign for the first time during this week’s debate.
“[W]hat the American [people] are looking for is not just a professorial list of facts or accomplishments or even goals,” Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said yesterday as part of her ongoing, almost-comical attempt to lower expectations going into the debates. She then lamented that Obama “has a tendency to give longer, substantive answers.”
Psaki’s concern that Professor Obama will appear during the debates is understandable given that “he was the third-lowest-ranked lecturer” at the University of Chicago Law School in 1999.
Still, Obama’s background as a professor is more of a running joke in conservative circles than a typical Democratic criticism of the president. So why would Psaki bring it up now (beyond, again, the absurd expectations game that both sides play)?
Maybe it has to do with their target audience. “He wants to speak directly to the families — the people who are on their couches at home, having snacks, drinking a beer, drinking soda, whatever it is, and tuning in for the first time — and that’s who he’s speaking directly to,” she said.
Psaki explained that Obama’s debate advisers “pointed out to him that he needs to work on tightening and shortening his answers.
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Leaked: Obama’s National Security Strategy



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Sunday, September 30, 2012

CNN to Release Entire On-Air Staff

Middle Finger News Service

Atlanta - It was announced in a hastily called news conference Saturday night that Cable News Giant CNN is to fire the entire prime-time on-air news reporting staff effective October 1. CNN President of Media relation, Jim "Pinky" Cogburn and Founder of the Cable News Network, Ted Turner spoke to reporters in a crowded room near CNN headquarters to make the announce that they could "no longer hide the obvious bias in their news organization. "

"That freakin rat bastard Pat Caddell spilled the beans on the media and now we feel as if we should just be open about it" said Turner "We are going full Tilt Obama, 24/7"

"To  facilitate the truthfulness of our agenda," said Cogburn "we will release all current CNN talking heads to seek employment at a less bias media organ such as PBS."  

The New Lineup for the network promises to be straight forward Pro-Obama and leftist to the bone.

Left to Right- Martino, Krass, Schwartz, Leggman, Berkowitz, Dubue'

The new Prime Time line-up will consist of Prime Anchor Hairy Leggman , formerly of San Francisco bay area television news fame, former professor of journalism and the media at NYU and a expert on the leftist political scene. The Business News Team will be taken over by Gary "Kneecap" Schwartz, former SEUI treasurer and retirement consultant, known for his no nonsense approach to business, and Tess Berkowitz, Berkley O.W.S. organizer and former NYSE receptionist. Reporting on the National Weather, underground and above, will be popular weather babe, Randy Martino of Key West Florida's Gay Island Radio News. 

Senior Political correspondent for the network is to be Lillian Krass, former senior adviser to Senator John Edwards and right hand man to NY Representative Anthony Weiner. Her savvy inside backroom knowledge of Washington puts the network well ahead of it competitors on the issues of the day. Entertainment news brings Christopher "Chrissie" Dubue' to the team. Christopher is a Toni Award winner for his leading role in the Off-Broadway production of "Mame". Dubue' is personal friends with entertainers such as Madonna, Cher, Joy Behar, Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon and many others, and was appointed national co-chairperson of the Samuel L. Jackson "Wake the F**k up" campaign.

The only holdover from the previous lineup are to be Anderson Cooper, who will be the war correspondent for the Republican War on Women and the Middle Class, and Candy Crowley who, after the debates will be doing regular features on Health and Fitness.

CNN awaits a new day at the network, one of not hiding behind a phony shield, of pretending of being non- partisan. 

"Our Mission" said Cogburn, "is to get Barack Obama's ass reelected and do it with all the integrity we can muster here at the nation's leading news source."
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