I mean – they were seriously considering having a man who knowingly and wilfully lied under oath to Congress and is to this day unapologetic about it on the panel? Oy.

unemployment numbers measure the recently unemployed and not the whole group of unemployed out there

That’s what I thought. One can feel the mass loss of jobs over the last years fundamentally changing the job market in spite of the low unemployment numbers. I believe my lyin’ eyes. The economy is a mess and has been for years.

IMHO R’s have been cooking the unemployment books for years. In the next few months we may start to hear the real numbers.

I find job numbers more informative than unemployment numbers because unemployment numbers measure the recently unemployed and not the whole group of unemployed out there. I prefer looking at job numbers. It’s important to remember that initial job numbers are mostly estimated with little underlying data so it takes a couple of months for real data to come in and for the numbers to firm up. The problem is that in dynamic situations the initial numbers are not very accurate.

I will go as selise suggests to revise my entry at 298 on Bush job creation. But if I remember correctly, Bush’s job creation numbers had already dropped below 5 million last month. I can not begin to tell you just how shitty a number this is. Economists during the bubble went through all kinds of gymnastics to explain away what has been throughout the Bush Presidency a vast and ongoing failure. And I found it obscene that a dingbat like Palin was pushing the line that the Republicans would create jobs. Like so much else of the McCain/Palin platform, it flat out ignored and lied about the Republican record.