Jobless Numbers Fall - GOP Conspiracy Claims Rise

It is almost entertaining to watch the spittle and bewilderment emanating for Romney/Ryan and the usual demagogues of the GOP as the react to the latest unemployment figures which show improvement notwithstanding all of the efforts of the GOP to destroy the U.S. economy in the hope of defeating Barack Obama.  All those efforts of total obstruction and throwing millions of Americans down the financial toilet and yet the economy is improving.  They simply cannot deal with it and as a result are claiming that somehow Obama conspired to cook the numbers.   To me, it's yet the latest example of how low and untethered to reality today's Republican Party has become.   The GOP would rather see the nation in a depression rather than see Obama re-elected.  Pretty f*cked up priorities in my book.  The Washington Post looks at yesterday's jobs report and why the GOP demagogues are so flummoxed.  Here are highlights:

For Mitt Romney, it was the number that proved everything. Since the very first speech of his campaign, the Republican candidate has used a simple figure to bolster his argument that President Obama couldn’t fix the U.S. economy: 8 percent.  For Romney, any number above 8 percent proved he was right and Obama was wrong.

Obama had promised, Romney told audiences repeatedly, never to let unemployment get that high. Instead, Romney said, the jobless rate blew past 8 percent and got stuck there.  Until Friday.

The 0.3 percent dip in unemployment in September, from 8.1 to 7.8 percent, deprived Romney of one of his central campaign themes.  It was enough to put him on the defensive just as he was basking in the afterglow of his debate performance Wednesday . . . . the economy had crossed a threshold that Romney had implied it would never cross without him.

The political importance of the 8 percent threshold was driven home, in a backhanded way, by a few conservatives who floated a conspiracy theory that Friday’s dip had been engineered to give Obama a boost.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, a branch of the Labor Department, uses two main sources. One is a survey of 141,000 businesses. The other looks at 60,000 households, asking if the people in those households were working or looking for work in the last month. The household survey captures data that the business survey doesn’t, such as people who are self-employed or who work on farms.

The September survey of businesses indicated a relatively modest gain in hiring: Payrolls rose by about 114,000. But the household survey indicated a much greater boost in hiring, with about 456,000 people no longer unemployed.

Later in the day, Welch told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that he had no hard evidence that the data had been fudged.  But he said he stood by his suspicions. “I don’t want to take back one word in that tweet,” Welch said. “These numbers defy logic.”

It is truly frightening that Republicans want to see the economy in decline and more Americans in dire straits solely so that they can be political opportunists.  It is truly sickening.  But then, the GOP leadership doesn't care about nearly half the population anyways.  Romney said so himself and said it wasn't his job to worry about such citizens.