waaaaaaaah! This is opposed to what? The 300 hundred other stories in the MSM that are reporting the same numbers but with a more positive bent?
This post should have contained a “BARF ALERT” tag.
The three critical data points in play here:
Bloomberg reports that initial jobless claims rose again last week by 25,000 as more that 584,000 Americans applied for unemployment benefits for the first time...
The four-week average hit 559,000, and last week’s number was 554,000...
Here were the job losses from February to May of 2009, 710,000, 663,000, 539,000, and 345,000.
Now, here is the critique of the Hot Air post:
Now, there's a pattern there and that pattern was that things were improving. (that pattern was of course broken in June when numbers when the Bureau of Labor and Statistics reported a loss of 477,000) If you were to report the jobs numbers honestly, you would have to acknowledge that things were getting better.
That makes utterly no sense unless the blogger is looking for any ol' place to grind his axe. The Obama Admin is saying Porkulus is working. MSM pundits are saying the economy is turning around. Yet the rate of change in unemployment steepened significantly from May to now - well beyond any statistical margin of error - by the very numbers the blogger is calling out here - and the rate over the last two weeks seems to be increasing that trend.
What Hot Air is doing is trying to counter the massive MSM and Dem propaganda campaign to sell Obamanomics as a success - by simply pointing out the current unemployment figures do not support those claims. The fact that the blogger calls propaganda the act pointing out obvious unemployment trends - trends the blogger himself acknowledged - is a truly bizzare attempt at moral equivalence. Which is a favored tactic of liberals, which in turn calls into question the underlying political views of the blogger.