May 2014 Archives

Once again, the unemployment rate dropped a lot in the U.S., and it is a bad thing. People are reporting it is good. It is not. There is nothing good about it.

It can only be good if it drops for the right reasons. It essentially represents the percentage of people who are in the workforce who have a job, so the good way to decrease the rate is for people in the workforce without jobs to get jobs. But it decreased instead by losing 700,000 people from the workforce entirely. Basically, we just stopped counting them.

The increase in the number of jobs -- and of course, this number is just preliminary -- is good. We got 288K last month, which is above our average for the 12-month period of January 2004-2005 (220K), when we hit our last recovery in full swing. Our current 12-month average is a little under 200K. So, it's comparable.

But the problem is that we are way behind. The real stat that matters is that in 2005, 62.7% of the population was employed, and now it's 58.9%. We need to keep up 288K a month for a few years to even hope to get back to that.

It's well beyond reasonable doubt at this point that President Obama and his administration engaged in an organized deception in the wake of the September 11, 2012 attack on Benghazi, to portray the attack as caused by a video so that it wouldn't be seen as a failure of policy, which might have hurt the President's reelection chances just a couple of months away.

We have Susan Rice in the days following alternately blaming the video directly, and claiming the evidence said the video was the most likely cause. While the former was an outright lie, the latter might seem to be reasonable, except for the fact that no such evidence ever existed. They lied about that, too.

And the lies continue today, years later: Jay Carney said just the other day that the memo -- which explicitly said the video should be blamed so that it wouldn't look like a policy failure, and which was withheld by the White House for years -- was only drawing from the CIA talking points. But the CIA talking points never blamed the video. Even the White House press corps couldn't swallow that, with ABC's Jake Tapper calling the claim "insulting."

But why shouldn't Carney tell such obvious lies? Obama is never hurt by telling lies, except in the case of broken promises about Obamacare. But lies like this? He's literally never been seriously held accountable by the public. He lies all the time, about how many people have insurance, about the motives and policies of Republicans, about jobs and the economy ... yet, apart from lies about keeping your insurance and your doctor, he just isn't held accountable.

You can say that all politicians lie, and there's truth in that, but never have a President's lies just been ignored by the public like his have. And this is, to me, a big problem, especially when it is a lie about the death of an ambassador so that he can win reelection.

So when Gwen Ifill tells us there's more important stories than this, and we should just move on ... no. I won't just move on. The President lies with impunity and he does it to win elections and I want him to be held accountable, and I want a message to be sent to future officials that they will be held accountable, too. I want the Congress and the media -- not that I think Ifill will participate -- to stand up and say that when President Obama and his administration said the evidence pointed to a video, they were lying, and they were doing it to try to win an election.

I don't think that's asking too much, given that it is obviously true. If you want us to move on, then give me that, and, we'll be happy to move on.