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Auto Lie
Obama
botched his facts in a speech criticizing the U.S. auto industry for
"investing in bigger and faster cars while foreign competitors invested
in more fuel-efficient technology."
Obama stated that "while our fuel standards haven't moved from 27.5
miles per gallon in two decades, both China and Japan have surpassed us,
with Japanese cars now getting an average of 45 miles to the gallon."
But Toyota, which should know, has responded, "No carmaker gets 45 mpg; ours is closer to
30 mpg."
Well, we're glad to see Obama's shifting the blame from the consumer to
the automakers. That must explain why the Illinois Senator and
Presidential candidate owns a HEMI-powered
V8 Chrysler 300C.
Obviously it's Chrysler's fault Obama
bought a big 5.7-liter engine from them -- he just didn't have a choice.
Obama's Economic Plan
The Caucus Blog of The New York Times says that Obama’s
transition staff are claiming that his so-called
economic recovery plan will be a "paperless plan."
Forget the usual detailed
documents, cost estimates and announcement fanfare that capital watchers
expect for the unveiling of major initiatives. Obama and his
advisers suggested on Friday that he has provided the "framework" of a
plan in recent public remarks; now Congress, coordinating with the Obama
team, will flesh it out.
Obama and his advisers "wanted to set
the broad outline and, very smartly, want Congress to sort of fill in
some of the details," Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York,
said in an interview. "It just makes sense. There’s a lot of
knowledge here on the Hill."
Obama
admits his $800 billion dollar plan isn't a plan at all and is written
on a whiteboard in dry erase markers.
No Disagreement
On January 9th, 2009, Obama
said,
"There is no disagreement that we need action by our
government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy."
However, that statement is false.
Notwithstanding reports
that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big
increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe
that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance.
More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United
States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More
government spending did not solve Japan’s "lost decade" in the 1990s.
As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more
government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the
economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to
work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a
reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal
policy to boost growth.
Signed by 200 academic economists, including three Nobel prize-winners.
Obama's Jobs Claims Are "Wildly Exaggerated"
The Boston Globe has followed the $4 billion in federal stimulus
money sent to Massachusetts so far and found that the 12,374 jobs
reportedly saved or created in the state to be "wildly exaggerated."
The money went to state agencies, universities, hospitals,
businesses and nonprofit organizations. In some cases,
organizations and businesses "miscounted jobs, filed erroneous figures,
or claimed jobs for work that has not yet started." In other
instances, no jobs at all were created.
Nationwide, more than ten
percent of the jobs the Obama administration has claimed were "created
or saved" by the $787 billion stimulus package are
doubtful or imaginary, according to reports compiled from eleven
major newspapers and the Associated Press.
Based only on our
analysis of stimulus media coverage in the last two weeks, The Examiner
has created
this interactive map to document exaggerated stimulus claims.
The map, which will be updated as new revelations appear, currently
reflects an exaggeration by the Obama administration of about 75,000
jobs, out of the 640,000 jobs supposedly "created or saved."
The
map reflects reports from The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, the
Sacramento Bee, The New York Times, USA Today, the Las Vegas Sun, the
Detroit Free Press, the New York Post, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel,
the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune, and the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution. It remains a work in progress because
relatively few newspapers have scrutinized stimulus spending so far.
Obama has claimed that the $787 billion economic stimulus package
"saved or created" some 650,000 jobs. But almost as soon as the
White House trotted out this figure, news organizations found huge
exaggerations in the reported data. Many of the jobs reportedly
created do not exist or cannot be accounted for.
Obama is lying. He knows you
know he's lying, and he doesn't care.
Barack Hussein Obama Is Good At Deception
Lonely Conservative
says that if there is one thing Barack Hussein Obama is good at it’s
deception. The guy is one of the boldest liars I’ve even
witnessed.
Yesterday he shuffled off to Buffalo to tout this
great economy he created. Naturally, he led with the old blame it on
Bush meme we’ve been hearing for the past year and a half.
Having just inherited a $1.3 trillion
deficit from the last administration, the last thing I wanted to do
was spend money on a recovery package, or help the American auto
industry keep its doors open, or prevent the collapse of the Wall
Street banks whose irresponsibility helped cause this crisis.
No mention of his own role as a US Senator in
creating the mess he inherited, or that he’s taken the deficit he helped
create and expanded it exponentially with no end in sight. Then he
started lying. (More on those irresponsible Wall Street banks in a
moment.)
But I can say this beyond a shadow of a
doubt: Today, we are heading in the right direction. Those
tough steps we took -- they’re working. Despite all the
naysayers -- who were predicting failure a year ago -- our economy
is growing again. Next month it will be stronger than last
month. And next year will be better than this year. Last
month, we gained 290,000 jobs -- the largest increase in four years
and the fourth month in a row that we’ve added jobs. And last
month also brought the largest increase in manufacturing employment
since 1998 -- a good sign for companies like this one.
This guy is too much. Unemployment
went up in
April. Tax receipts to the government went down in April.
The number of Americans on food stamps
reached an all new high. Heck, Obama
quadrupled the deficit in a year! And he’s touting his
economic success? Does he really believe we’re all that stupid?
Here's the facts on jobs:
He went on to talk about how he needs to do more of what he’s been
doing to ensure economic progress. No mention of the bailout of
Europe with our tax dollars, or that unemployment is expected to go up.
Think about the mess his predecessor is going to inherit.
He then
traveled to New York City -- where he just cut anti-terrorism funding
and constantly bashes the city’s biggest industry -- to raise money for
the mid-term elections. He continued blaming Republicans for
everything that’s wrong in the world.
Obama said Republicans have "done their best
to gum up the works" and said they generated much of the country’s
fiscal deficit that they now complain about.
"Their basic
attitude has been, if Democrats lose, we win. After they drove
the car in the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to
pull it back, now they want the keys back. No. They
can’t drive. We don’t want to have to go back in the ditch,"
he said.
Talk about a ditch! He and his comrades not
only drove us into the ditch, they dug it!
Oddly, the evil Wall
Street fat cats who at one time contributed more to Obama than anyone
else, were nowhere to be found.
Wall Street bigs snubbed Obama last night at
a big-bucks campaign fund-raiser at The St. Regis hotel in Midtown.
The gala -- where tickets went for as much as $50,000 a couple
and whose proceeds were going to Democratic candidates -- featured
stars such as Sarah Jessica Parker and Democratic Party regulars but
few, if any, executives from the city’s leading financial
institutions. That was no accident, according to Democrats on
Capitol Hill and Wall Street sources who say those in the financial
industry are tired of being the punching bag for Obama and Democrats
crafting legislation to tightly regulate them.
This guy has turned lying and hypocrisy into art
forms. If he weren’t so dangerous it would really be something to
behold.
The Chasm Between Academics And Reality
Presents A Prodigious Expanse
Jim Byrd says Barack Obama catered another all
you can eat buffet of distortions topped with homegrown lies this past
week. The question is: To whom is he lying? Who could
possibly be left to listen? What character flaw would allow anyone
to continue to listen, much less accept? What could possibly be
sustaining this regime’s core of chicanery built upon a sententious
cycle of deceit and prevarication by Barack Obama? Another week in
the books for Obama, another series of questions from the peanut
gallery.
Friday, June 5th, The Bureau of Labor Statistics
released the employment numbers for May: 431,000 new jobs created.
Obama seized the headline and quickly articulated, "the economy is
getting stronger by the day…private sector hiring is growing, too."
This is behemothic lie number one.
In a purely academic sense,
there were 431,000 new jobs added in May, but the chasm between
academics and reality presents a prodigious expanse. Of the jobs
created, 411,000 were for Census Bureau employees–government jobs,
temporary jobs, jobs funded by taxes annexed from private capital that
would have provided legitimate jobs within the private sector. In
actuality, there were only 41,000 legitimate jobs created,
private-sector jobs that create or provide an end product of substance
and value to the American people. Quite frankly, the 411,000 jobs
created by the Census Bureau could be, in the academic sense, classified
as taxpayer funded expansion of the parasite industry.
The White
House had previously leaked to the media that 150,000 private sector
jobs would be created in May. The economy needs to create 100,000
private sector jobs per month to maintain pace with current population
growth. This was a remarkable statement from Obama, considering he
has only surpassed 100,000 private sector jobs once in 17 months, and
the economic indicators outside the Democratic Party confines paint a
bleak picture. The addition of only 41,000 private sector jobs can
be directly attributed to Obama’s failed policies.
The
unemployment rate dropped from 9.9% to 9.7% in May thanks to 322,000
potential gainfully non-government employed workers leaving the labor
force. This does not bode well for the economy either.
Barack Obama has played the same game of Three-card Monte to redirect
the insignificance of his enumerated jobs since an accounting of his
antics has been on record. Almost daily, from different cities,
different counties, different states, Census Bureau employees are coming
forward with the same stories of being hired, trained, working for a
week, laid-off, rehired, then counted as new jobs in the system.
The average seems to be four fires and rehires per Census
whistle-blower. By calculating with a rudimentary algorithm, the
actual number of Census workers hired would be 102,750. Even
though this is anecdotal, with a flavor of mathematical burlesque, Obama
is lying to the public about the state of the union.
The Hill Blog
is reporting that Obama actually said, "So while we have fought
back from the worst of this recession, we've still got a lot of work
to do. We've still got a long way to go. And I'm more
determined than ever to do every single thing we can to hasten our
economic recovery and get our people back to work."
Related:New applications for
unemployment insurance rose last week to their highest level in
almost six months, the latest evidence that some employers are still
cutting their staffs.
Related:Obama administration to
distribute $3 billion to help unemployed keep homes.
Related:Obama July deficit of $167
billion tops Bush deficit for entire year of 2007.
Obama Got Stimulus Facts Wrong
Mark Niquette
says a local project that Barack Obama cited during a visit
Wednesday to Columbus as an example of how the federal stimulus package
has worked isn't actually being funded with stimulus dollars.
Obama spoke at the North Side home of architect Joe Weithman, and both
Obama's comments and information from the White House touted Weithman's
work on a project that he said was being at least partially funded by
the $787 billion stimulus bill passed last year.
"What we've been
trying to do is to build infrastructure that puts people back to work
but also improves the quality of life in communities like Columbus,"
Obama said in his remarks. "So Joe is an architect, and he's now
working on a new police station that was funded in part with Recovery
Act funds."
But although federal money is being used for the
project in question, there are no stimulus dollars involved, said
Columbus Finance Director Paul Rakosky, a Democrat.
Background
information the White House provided before Obama's visit didn't
identify the stimulus bill as the source of funding for the work, but it
said the architectural firm that Weithman runs "was able to keep two of
their employees that otherwise would have been laid off due to work on a
police station renovation that received infrastructure funding."
It also said Weithman hopes to hire an additional employee as the
economy improves and as "additional projects, some of which could be
funded by the Recovery Act, are secured."
The White House did
properly credit the stimulus bill for tax subsidies that Weithman's
wife, Rhonda, used to maintain the family's health-care coverage after
she lost her job last year.
The thrust of Obama's entire speech was a lie -- it wasn't a police
station, and it wasn't funded by stimulus money either -- looks like the
Weithman's are doing well under the Obama regime though.
Political Fables
Thomas Sowell says Barack Obama boldly
proclaims, "The buck stops here!" But, whenever his policies are
criticized, he acts as if the buck stopped with George W. Bush.
The party line that we are likely to be hearing from now until the
November elections is that Obama "inherited" the big federal budget
deficits and that he has to "clean up the mess" left in the economy by
the Republicans. This may convince those who want to be convinced,
but it will not stand up under scrutiny.
No President of the
United States can create either a budget deficit or a budget surplus.
All spending bills originate in the House of Representatives, and all
taxes are voted into law by Congress.
Democrats controlled both
houses of Congress before Barack Obama was elected. The deficit he
inherited was created by the Congressional Democrats, including Senator
Barack Obama, who did absolutely nothing to oppose the runaway spending.
He was one of the biggest of the big spenders.
The last time the
federal government had a budget surplus, Bill Clinton was president, so
it was called "the Clinton surplus." But Republicans controlled
the House of Representatives, where all spending bills originate, for
the first time in 40 years. It was also the first budget surplus
in more than a quarter of a century.
The only direct power that
any president has that can affect deficits and surpluses is the power to
veto spending bills. President Bush did not veto enough spending
bills, but Senator Obama and his fellow Democrats in control of Congress
were the ones who passed the spending bills.
Today, with Barack
Obama in the White House, allied with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in
charge in Congress, the national debt is a bigger share of the national
output than it has been in more than half a century. And its share
is projected to continue going up for years to come, becoming larger
than national output in 2012.
Having created this scary
situation, Obama now says, "Don't give in to fear. Let's reach for
hope." The voters reached for hope when they elected Obama.
The fear comes from what he has done since taking office.
Michael O'Brien
says Obama misstated the official unemployment rate during his White
House news conference on Friday.
During a response to a question
on how Democrats are running away from him and the Democratic leadership
on healthcare, Obama stated that the jobless rate was 9.5 percent, a
tenth of a percentage point lower than it is.
The Bureau of
Labor Statistics, in a report issued last Friday, estimated that the
unemployment rate through the end of August was 9.6 percent, an uptick
from the previous two months, when the rate stood at 9.5 percent.
"We're in a political season where every candidate out there has
their own district, their own makeup, their own plan, their own
message," Obama said. "You know, in an environment where we've
still got 9.5 percent unemployment, you know, people are going to make
the best argument they can right now."
Republicans have made a
major campaign issue of the persistently high unemployment rate,
especially compared to the jobless numbers the administration had
projected if its signature $787 billion stimulus bill were enacted.
Obama Blames Economic Woes On GOP
Tom McGregor
says that Barack Obama is again blaming the Republican Party for all
of the nation’s ills, even though Democrats have a stranglehold of power
in Congress and the Senate.
According to Politico, "President
Barack Obama used a rare news conference Friday to criticize Republicans
for obstructing the country’s economic recovery, but he also lamented
his failure to change the tone of the political discourse in
Washington."
He demanded the GOP allow the Bush tax cuts to
expire for the richest Americans, accusing the GOP of "holding
middle-class tax relief because they’re insisting we’ve got to give tax
relief to millionaires and billionaires."
Obama said, "we came
into office with a different view. We believe in cutting taxes for
middle-class families and small-business owners. We’ve done that."
Obama is a liar. This simple
chart demonstrates who America's economic villains are:
Democrat or Republican president doesn't matter.
When Congress is controlled by the GOP the deficits fall. When
it's split or controlled by the Democrats it increases.
Oh, and
the reason that graph only goes back to 1994? Because Congress was
always split (and deficits pretty much always increasing) until we go
back 55 years to the Eisenhower Administration. And when we find
the one session of Congress that was under GOP control, we also find the
Federal debt dropping. No deficit, a surplus.
The Obama Code
Fred Barnes
gives us a heads up on what to listen for in Obama's State of the
Union address.
"Investment," Senate Republican leader Mitch
McConnell noted, is a code word when uttered by Obama and Democrats.
It means, he said on Fox News Sunday, "we want to spend." Indeed,
that’s what Obama and Democrats most want to do.
But "investment" isn’t the only code
word you’re likely to hear from Obama in his State of the Union address
tonight on Capitol Hill. He’s sure to use other words designed to
mask what he and Democrats are up to. More often than not, the
code words are invoked to hide one thing: more and more government
intervention in the economy.
Obama’s favorite new word is
"competitiveness." This doesn’t mean he wants to enact free market
reforms to increase competition in the private sector. Perish the
thought. He wants to fund programs that aid or subsidize
industries involved into global markets. Once again, it points to
more spending, more intervention.
Obama also wants to "win the
future," as he put it in a 4-minute video he sent last week to followers
from his 2008 campaign. Who takes the lead in achieving this?
Not the private economy unleashed by tax cuts and deregulation.
Free markets and free individuals can’t be trusted with this task.
The government must be in charge.
Both winning the future and
competitiveness have another role. Properly understood, they’re a
diversion from the present, with its weak economy and high unemployment.
You’re supposed to ignore what’s happening today and look to the future,
when competitiveness has kicked in a few years down the road and the
American economy is victorious.
Like it or not, Obama must deal
in his speech with deficits and the national debt, hardly his favorite
subject. He’s for cutting spending, naturally, but he wants to do
it "in a responsible way." That’s easy to interpret. Being
responsible means cutting very little from the Obama budget.
The
implication here is that Republicans want to reduce spending "in an
irresponsible way," though Obama isn’t likely to say that in so many
words. But you’ll know what he’s getting at.
Obama Understates Deficits By $2.3 Trillion
Bloomberg Businessweek
is
reporting that a new assessment of Barack Obama's budget says it
underestimates future deficits by more than $2 trillion over the
upcoming decade.
The Congressional Budget Office estimate says
that if Obama's February budget submission were enacted into law it
would produce deficits totaling $9.5 trillion -- an average of almost $1
trillion a year.
Obama's budget foresaw deficits totaling $7.2
trillion over the same period.
The difference is chiefly because
CBO has a less optimistic estimate of how much the government will take
in from tax revenues, partly because the administration has rosier
economic projections.
Obama
didn't understate anything. He lied -- again.
Let's Just Lie
Ken Carroll
says that on April 13th, Barack Obama abandoned all pretense of
being presidential. Not only was his response to Representative
Paul Ryan's budget proposal not reasonable, it was dishonest and
childish.
Agree or disagree with his ideas, Ryan (R-WI) has done
the heavy lifting on the 2012 budget and he did so knowing that it would
immediately make him a target for those on the left. This alone
should bring to him some well-deserved respect. Obama, rather than
give a nod to Ryan's work and then list where he disagrees simply
attacked the character of Congressman Ryan and other Republicans and
then pretended he has a legitimate budget proposal.
Obama makes
some pretty wild assumptions in his -- well, we'll call it a "budget"
for lack of a better word. How likely are Obama's assumptions to
become reality?
Let me answer this way: What are the chances that
you own a DeLorean automobile? It gets struck by lightning while
you're driving it at exactly 88 mph? And you get sent back in
time? Well, that's about the chance that the US economy will grow
at four per cent per year in 2012 and 2013, while inflation remains
under two percent. In fact, "Back to the Future" has more science
and less fiction than Obama's "budget".
I'm not sure what Obama
is attempting to achieve. Surely he understands that if spending
and government growth continue at the rate Democrats want then our
economy will be in ruins. Despite the circumstantial evidence, I'm
reluctant to believe that Obama could possibly be as ignorant of simple
economic theory as it appears. In addition, his vitriolic attack
on Republicans indicates to me that he is desperately trying to distract
attention from his fatally flawed and unrealistic budget. It's an
insult to the intelligence of the American public to take the Obama
"budget" proposal seriously. If I'm right and Obama is not
amazingly ignorant of economic theory and not lacking in common sense,
then he's being brazenly dishonest with the American people.
Congressman Paul Ryan made an interesting point on the news talk shows:
Obama's budget speech was not coordinated with the White House economic
advisors; it was coordinated with Obama's campaign people. The
speech was written to influence voters, not to solve problems.
Style 1; Substance 0.
So Obama is launching his campaign.
He can't run on accomplishments, so he is running on convenient
fictions. Then while he goes to his "happy place," you and I can
deal with $4 per gallon gas -- until it becomes $5 per gallon gas, 9%
unemployment and a man who hides from reality.
It's time for
Democrats to acknowledge that if growing government translated into
growing the economy then we would be in the midst of a tremendous
economic boom. In case you haven't noticed, we're not -- and won't
be next year either. Obama is pretending our economy will grow at
four percent next year and at 4.5 percent in 2013 and he will look you
in the eye and speak the words. Too bad they are just words.
Untrue words. Lies.
An Out-Of-Touch Economic Illiterate
Bryan Preston
says we either have an out-of-touch economic illiterate or a bald
faced liar in the White House. Or both, I guess.
CBS's Mark Knoller, covering a
town hall on the economy with Barack Obama this morning, reports:
"President Obama blames high unemployment
rate on 'huge layoffs of government workers' at federal, state and
local levels."
This is completely wrong.
Extremely and mind-bogglingly wrong. Epically wrong.
And Jim Geraghty, who wrote
that post, goes into a look at employment trends over the past few
years. He finds that government sector employment has been steady
to increasing over the years, while the recession has killed of a
massive number of private sector jobs. Here, for instance, are the
government sector numbers since 2007.
Steady. And actually, a
modest increase over the past four years. Meanwhile, the private
sector has lost about 8 million jobs over the same time span.
Gallup even found that government sector job growth is outpacing private
sector job growth right now. That's not because government is
better, it's just bigger, thanks in no small part to Obama's own
policies.
Once again, Obama shows where his heart is:
Government largesse, not private enterprise. He consistently
attacks the latter while growing and promoting the former.
Related:Barack Obama Says There’s Nothing More Important Than
a Government Job (Video)
Loss To Taxpayers Is $6.44 Billion
Conn Carroll
says Obama told a Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio, today: "Chrysler
has repaid every dime and more of what it owes the American taxpayer
from the investment we made during my watch."
That is
just not true. Here are the numbers.
Chrysler received the
following loans from the federal government:
January 2009:
Chrysler receives $4 billion loan from TARP January 2009: Chrysler financial
receives $1.5 billion from the Treasury Department May 2009: Chrysler receives a $1.9
billion debtor in possession loan from the Treasury Department June 2009: Chrysler receives a $6.6
billion loan from the Treasury Department
Total loaned to Chrysler was $14
billion.
Chrysler made the following payments to the federal
government:
May 2010: Chrysler
pays the Treasury Department $1.9 billion to settle their January
2009 loan. May 2011:
Chrysler pays the Treasury Department $5.1 billion as partial
settlement for June 2009 loan. June 2011: Chrysler pays the Treasury
Department $560 million to settle the rest of the June 2009 loan.
Total paid back by Chrysler
was
$7.56 billion -- not $14 billion
Total loss to taxpayers is
$6.44 billion ($14 billion – $7.56 billion)
Obama didn't mention
the latest jobs report showing unemployment
back up to 9.1%. That
includied a 3,400 job drop in the auto sector.
Obama's Phony Accounting
Gregory White
says Obama spent last week talking about the success of the auto
bailout, but his conclusions about its success may be a bit misleading,
according to the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler.
The title of the piece is:
"President Obama's phony accounting on the auto industry bailout."
Kessler spells out four
examples of things Obama has said since June 4 on the topic of the auto
bailout that aren't completely correct.
Chrysler has repaid
every dime to the government: The U.S. government only got 90%
back of their combined loans to Chrysler, made during both the Bush
and Obama presidencies.
Auto industries
adding jobs at fastest rate since 1990s: Bureau of Labor
statistics don't back up Obama's claims (they say data isn't public
for three big auto manufacturers).
GM will bring all
workers back lost during recession: GM announced workforce
cuts of 68,000 in 2006. It cut 9,600 workers in Q4 2008.
8,600 of those are now back at work, and the others will soon,
according to GM.
Washington
thought we should "do nothing" to protect Chrysler and GM: Not
so clear cut; some questioned Obama's methods, but did not oppose
support altogether.
Go
here for Kessler's full breakdown of Obama's comments.
Obama Blames His Problems On The Actions And Policies Of Others
Ed Lasky
says Obama has earned quite the reputation for blaming his problems
on the actions and policies of others. There is always someone to
point the finger at as being the guilty party -- the scapegoat. He
actually has a history of doing so. In 2008, he continually blamed
"staffers" for mistakes that he had made. ABC news Jake Tapper (an
honest journalist) mocked him for using that tactic in "Obama's
Inability to Hire Good Help Rears Its Head...Again."
He blames
Fat Cats, Wall Street, Greedy Doctors, and Stupid Cops, for his litany
of problems. Then there is his Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder where
he blames economic problems on George Bush. Now a new scapegoat
has emerged for pitiful job numbers: Mother Nature---and, once again, he
has been caught in The Big Lie.
Daniel Henninger of the Wall
Street Journal catches this one:
Austan Goolsbee, Obama's top economic
adviser, used the Sunday morning platforms to argue that the
"variable" jobs numbers were "bumps on the road to recovery."
Pro-administration analysts, including Obama himself, argued that
the economy was battling tough but temporary "headwinds" such as
Asian tsunamis or Midwest tornadoes that disrupt supply chains.
In defense of the integrity of the government's data gatherers, the
Bureau of Labor Statistics put out a statement that "We found no
clear impact of the disasters on the national employment and
unemployment data for May."
We will be hearing a lot more
talking and a lot more lying as we head towards November, 2012.
We recently have seem a prime
example of how Barack Obama will package a lot of lies, exaggerations,
distortions and deceptions in one short speech -- the one touting the
success of the auto industry bailout (which he claimed was his own when,
in reality, the first step to bailout GM and Chrysler was undertaken by
George Bush).
Glenn Kessler makes hash out of that tissue of
lies in his Washington Post column, "President Obama's phony accounting
on the auto industry bailout" where he wrote:
With some of the
economic indicators looking a bit dicey, Obama traveled to Ohio last
week to tout what the administration considers a good-news story:
the rescue of the domestic automobile industry. In fact, he
also made it the subject of his weekly radio address.
We take no view on whether
the administration's efforts on behalf of the automobile industry
were a good or bad thing; that's a matter for the editorial pages
and eventually the historians. But we are interested in the
facts Obama cited to make his case.
What we found is one of
the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a
short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by Obama
regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine
print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.
Will journalist have the same
integrity and character as Jake Tapper, the Bureau of Labor Statistics
and Glenn Kessler in the months to come?
