Monday, January 16, 2012

Catch of the Day/Housekeeping

A catch of the day to Greg Sargent, who caught CNN's Candy Crowley repeating Mitt Romney's claim about job losses during Barack Obama's presidency. Crowley, following Romney, treats it as a "fact" that employment has shrunk by 1.7 million jobs, but as Greg has been pointing out the overwhelming bulk of job losses were in the first couple months of the administration. Indeed, a not-insignificant portion of the job losses in Romney's, and Crowley's, calculation took place in the first twenty days of January 2009, before Obama had even taken office. Steve Benen adds more detail, pointing out that after the first six months of 2009 the economy has added jobs, not lost them, and surely it's highly misleading to include at the very least the first two or three months of 2009 against Obama's record.

Romney, and Crowley, certainly have plenty of reasonable ground to attack Obama's jobs record. But that particular statistic is misleading at best, and Greg is right that Crowley shouldn't be using it. Great catch!

Meanwhile, Happy King Day to everyone. Speaking of Greg -- he's taking the day off, which means that I'll be over at Plum Line all day, including a debate wrap tonight (yup, they're at it again). I'll be posting here as well, at least a bit, but I probably won't link to each individual Plum Line post during the day. Enjoy the holiday!

1 comment:

  1. Two hours after the Titanic hits an iceberg you relieve the captain of command. The new captain manages to stop the flooding in time to save the ship and she limps toward port. It's then that the passengers in first class start complaining that the lower compartments still smell damp.

    All very reasonable.

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