Lies, damned lies, and statistics
February 4, 2012

[25th J.P.'s Moment of Common Sense on Broad View, KBZZ 1270 AM Reno.]Yesterday, unemployment stats were released by the Labor Department. According to them, the unemployment rate dropped to 8.3% last month. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
The government, and by that I mean the Obama Administration, is lying to us, and the amazing part is the sheer brass-balls audaciousness of that lie. They can’t hide the actual numbers behind the calculation so they know that people comfortable with numbers – people like me – will examine them and scope out the truth. But they don’t care: they have a president to get re-elected, that’s the main priority, and they assume most people are too lazy or too gullible to check those numbers... [read the rest]

Tuesday, the last day of January, California state controller John Chiang sent a letter to lawmakers in Sacramento informing them that California will run out of cash by early March. This was a nasty surprise, since they were formerly under the impression they had enough money to last through June.
Most Americans think the annual State of the Union (SOTU) speech by the president is some sort of constitutional requirement, but it’s not, and after watching President Obama give his
Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina Republican primary on Saturday. He accomplished this feat by winning an overwhelming majority of conservative and religious voters in spite of the fact that he is neither, and by convincing South Carolinians that a former Speaker of the House and longtime lobbyist is a Washington outsider.
Last year at this time, on a lark, I wrote a column titled “





