Would the Bureau of Labor Statistics have considered the 40-man crew of Columbus’s shipwrecked Santa Maria (pictured) stranded on Hispaniola, as having dropped out of the work force altogether, or to have accepted part-time jobs?

Millions of self-”employed” Americans whose phones stopped ringing after Noon on Thursdays since the 2008 bursting of the housing bubble and the millions that have of late eschewed filing job application no. 12 at the nearest McDonald’s they can walk to, have been treated to several bureaucratic jewels describing their plight over the last two weeks. Except that none of their plights are “official” enough to be mentioned in polite company.

If everyone stopped looking for work, President Barack Obama could campaign on a ZERO U-3 unemployment rate, hence the irrelevancy of the U-3 construct, especially in the context of a growing national population in which, for the first time in American history, the actual raw number of Americans holding jobs nearly four years after the last Inauguration Day is lower. Well, “was” lower (see further below), but I digress.

But DeVine, the Obama campaign touts the creation of millions of “new” jobs since the end of the Great Recession in the Summer of 2009? Enter BS, er ah, BLS:

1. “Found” 386,000 jobs they had “missed” counting back between March 2011 through March 2012 , which, coincidentally, increases the total number of Americans employed today above the number employed on January 20, 2009.
2. Claims total employment, as measured by the Household Survey, rose by 873,000 in September to 142,974,000, the biggest one month jump since June 1983.
3. Claims 600,000 ”new” part-time employees with this caveat: “The number of persons employed part-time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) rose from 8.0 million in August to 8.6 million in September. These individuals were working part-time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.”

You know you’re being lied to when simple statistics, counter-intuitive of common sense and history, are accompanied by verbose “explanations” worthy of SNL’s Jon Lovitz.

If books are obviously cooked, voters won’t give credit to Republicans too timid to say so. I would advise, and have for over a decade, that the U-6 rate which has remained steady above 14% is a better reflection of the state of the labor market than the U-3, but both under-count the number of Americans involuntarily unemployed and underemployed and ignore altogether the self-employed that are struggling to stay self-employed. In one sense, the BLS numbers are always “cooked” to a certain extent.

But the gobbledygook released by Obama’s bureaucrats of late are so overcooked as to be obviously suspect and reasonable jurors, aka voters, considering the evidence presented, have a right to expect the GOP prosecutors to raise the issue of Obama’s lack of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Many were born at night, but not last night.

Republicans must stop accepting the liberal MSM Democratic Party narratives on polling and BLS jobs numbers, not to mention Stimulus-inflated baseline budgeting and spending cuts that don’t. Party registration matters. Say so. Raw employment numbers matter. Say so. That someone is only counted as unemployed if they “officially” applied for a job they know doesn’t exist defies reality. Say so.

The unemployed, under-employed and the employed that struggle to make ends meet are people, not statistics. Would it be too much to ask that conservatives in the media, much less Republican office holders, treat real suffering people as real even if Obama’s BLS stats don’t? I don’t think so.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor - Hillbilly Politics

Co-Founder and Editor - Political Daily

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist –  Examiner.com