Oh yes, Mark Gongloff (whoever you are), Obama did fake the unemployment rate

There is a process we go through whenever another example of malfeasance by the Obama Administration is exposed. First, conservative media like this site and my radio show tell you about it. Within the next day or two, a sampling of liberal pundits come out with columns headlined like this: "No, Obama did not (fill in the blank)."

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No, Obama did not run guns to Mexican drug lords. No, Obama did not lie about Benghazi. No, Obama did not have the IRS spy on conservatives.

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You get the trend. The headline is pretty much pre-written in accordance with the pre-ordained process, and then they proceed to parrot whatever is the left-wing narrative of the day to counter the revelation. So this brings us to some guy named Mark Gongloff, who I have never heard of, but he writes for the Huffington Post and knows me as a "failed GOP presidential candidate," which is an interesting description considering who his web site is named after. Anyway, he joins the ranks of left-wing interference-runners with his piece yesterday claiming that the Obama Administration did not, in fact, fake the September 2012 unemployment report - and he calls me out specifically for saying they did. His support for this argument? That comes from a guy at CNBC (our side has one of those too) and a statement of denial from the Bureau of the Census, the very people who did the faking. And of course, his own liberal heart, which is duty-bound to declare any accusation against the Obama Administration to be baseless right-wing fear-mongering. Here's how Gongloff makes his case:

Still, it's not possible for one employee alone, or even a few, to have altered the unemployment rate by submitting false data -- Census surveys 60,000 households in one week, a massive task involving about 2,200 workers. That makes a rate-moving conspiracy highly unlikely. "This fraud would have to be so widespread, to affect enough of the survey takers to affect the top-line numbers, that it seems implausible on the face of it," said Heidi Shierholz, an economist who studies unemployment at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. The 0.3-percent decline in unemployment in September 2012 was not an unusually large change, Shierholz pointed out -- the unemployment rate tends to be volatile. Unemployment also fell by 0.3 percent in November 2011, less than a year earlier. September's drop, though large, was not out of line with the overall trend in unemployment, which has continued to decline steadily, if slowly, in the year since the election. And cooked or raw, these monthly jobs numbers aren't precise measures, anyway. The Labor Department says it has90 percent confidencethem. That means a reported 6 percent unemployment rate might really be 5.8 percent, or it might be 6.2 percent. For an 8 percent unemployment rate, the variation would be slightly wider. In fact, if Obama really is cooking the unemployment numbers, he needs to send them back to the kitchen -- this has been the slowest job-market recovery since World War II. One month's unemployment report did not change that.

No, but one month's unemployment report wasn't designed to change that. It was designed to get Obama re-elected, specifically by providing him cover for the charge that he had failed to meet his 2009 promise to get the unemployment rate below 8 percent. Also, the original story written by John Crudele in the New York Post did not claim there was only one person involved in the falsification of data (although to be fair to Gongloff, we did identify employee Julius Buckmon in our headline as "the one who did it," which did sort of leave that impression). Buckmon himself said the falsification came on orders from higher up the food chain, which means it was systematic. If it's true, as a Gongloff source claims, that Buckmon left his job in 2011, that doesn't mean his on-the-record information about systematic falsification is any less credible. This is the sort of guy that liberals refer to as a "whistleblower" when they like what he's saying. But even that isn't the strongest proof that the numbers were faked. The strongest proof is the numbers themselves, which are simply implausible. Maybe Mark Gongloff will believe anything, but the rest of us are not that stupid. Consider: The unemployment report is based on two surveys - a household survey and an employer survey. Here are the new job creation results of both surveys, by month, for the entire year of 2012 (the numbers are in thousands):

Employer Survey

Jan: 311 Feb: 271 March: 205 April: 112 May: 125 June: 87 July: 153 Aug: 165 Sept: 138 Oct: 160 Nov: 247 Dec 219

Household Survey

Jan: 712 Feb: 411 March: 1 April: -86 May: 368 Jun: 146 July: -198 August: -86 Sept: 810 Oct: 354 Nov: -51 Dec: 28 So what Gongloff wants us to believe is that, consistent with the household survey, in November 2012, an economy that had struggled all year, and had actually lost jobs the previous two months, suddenly for no apparent reason created 810,000 jobs! This in spite of the fact that the employer survey shows no serious variation from the trend. I suppose you could cite the similarly odd number from January 2012, which purports to show 712,000 new jobs created, and use this as evidence that the household survey varies wildly and therefore what it showed in September is not all that unusual. But January 2012 did show relatively strong growth coming out of the employer survey, whereas September 2012 showed no such thing. The bottom line here is that we have to measure the strength of the argument of those who believe there was faking going on against those trying to deny it. In our camp we have a) implausible numbers; b) motive; c) sources inside Census Bureau, one of whom has given his name; and d) an administration we already know is willing to use manipulate government agencies for political purposes. In their camp is a) an official government denial; and b) a liberal media apologist who does not appear to even understand what was alleged, but is jumping in to follow the usual script whenever conservatives catch Obama doing something wrong. No, Mr. Gongloff, your attempt to cover for Obama isn't working. But you can tell the failed California gubernatorial candidate you tried your best.

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