Expect to hear more about this fake scandal in the coming weeks and months.
The House Oversight Committee will investigate a report from the New York Post that a jobs report was rigged before the 2012 election, but there’s a catch.
Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) told The Hill Tuesday that the Oversight panel plans to probe the findings, which he called “extremely serious.” [...]
The Post report claimed that a census employee fabricated data for survey respondents he could not contact. The employee, Julius Buckmon, told the publication he was told to do so by superiors, and the report claims there were multiple employees doing the same. It also indicates that the problem dated back to as early as 2010, and not just the months before the president’s reelection.
And here’s the catch that would seemingly disprove this conspiracy theory for any rational person.
However, the unemployment rate in Pennsylvania, where the alleged fabrication occurred, was actually reported to be higher than the national rate. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate in Pennsylvania was 8.1 percent in September, 2012, its highest level of the year. Several economists from both sides of the aisle defended the numbers and methodology in which they were gathered.
Are you telling me the Obama administration conspired to fix a jobs report only to make it appear as if unemployment had gotten worse? Is that the theory? They fudged the numbers only to report the highest level of unemployment of the year one month before the election?
It all makes sense now. The entirely-unsupported beltway theory that Pennsylvania may have been “in play” in the final weeks of the 2012 election was thwarted by higher than expected unemployment rates. Derp.
Stay tuned for the next GOP brain buster.
Update…
CNBC has learned census worker named in NY Post story on faked jobs #s has not worked there since Aug 11
— steve liesman (@steveliesman) November 19, 2013
Not that this revelation will stop Darrell Issa.