RUSH: A couple of stories here from the Associated Press. The first one: “US Applications for Unemployment Aid Drop Sharply — The number of people seeking unemployment benefits fell last week by the most in nearly a year. The figure was a hopeful sign that hiring could pick up in coming months.”
This is a seesaw. Just yesterday we had the news from ADP that new jobs were paltry, 119,000. Now, this report contradicts what ADP put out yesterday. “US
Applications for Unemployment Aid Drop Sharply,” which means fewer people are supposedly out of work.

Now, we’ve told you before, both the AP and Reuters have made this claim for about six weeks. Back on April 5th, a month ago, AP’s headline: “US Unemployment Claims Hit Four-Year Low of 357,000.” Today’s headline: “US Applications for Unemployment Aid Drop Sharply,” and the first sentence talks about it being lower than it’s been in three months. Reuters on March 29th: “Jobless Claims Fall to Four-Year Low in Latest Week.” They keep talking about how great it is, and then every week the number is revised.

Every week the number is revised, which we don’t hear about. Well, you do because we tell you. But the revised number is never reported. It’s always revised up or worse. The original report that we get from the BLS is never accurate. They do “seasonal adjustments” and “revisions.” So this is a purely political number. AP goes on to say this is “a hopeful sign one day before the government releases the April jobs report.” Now, there’s another AP story, and the headline of this story is: “AP Survey: Steady Job Gains to Sustain US Recovery.”

Now, there was a piece by Mortimer Zuckerman. I didn’t have a chance to share any of the details with you. Mort Zuckerman is the publisher of the New York Daily News, and he’s been writing negatively about Obama and the Obama economy and the “recovery” for a while. He had a piece yesterday or the day before talking about how we may be headed to a double-dip recession. There’s no indication here that we have a genuine, real recovery to sustain.

But that doesn’t matter to the AP.

Look at the headline! “AP Survey: Steady Job Gains to Sustain US Recovery.” What “steady job gains”? What “recovery”? The economy has grown at the slowest rate after a recession ever. Folks, the reason I’m spending time on this (every week, on Thursday) with these numbers is twofold. And again, I remind you: We have an amazing number of new listeners and so it’s an opportunity to catch them up so that they listen to each day’s program in context.

The second opportunity here is an ongoing effort to teach people and instruct people about the media and specifically how the media is aligning itself for Obama’s reelection. Lying. Making things up. Taking little bits of data and amplifying them beyond what’s factual. And that’s what’s happening. Then they come out with the story saying, “Guess what? We got a survey! We went out and talked to economists.” Now, these are the same economists that every month say they are “surprised” or that the news was “unexpected.”

These are the same “experts” who are always wrong, by virtue of AP’s own reports. Every report on jobless numbers, the AP has the word “surprised” or “unexpected,” meaning: Whatever the number is, everybody that they talked to prior is “shocked” that the number is what it is. So the experts they’re talking to are always wrong. And thus they’ve gone out and talked to these experts and they’ve surveyed their own experts, and their own experts (who are never right) are now predicting the unemployment rate will be below 8% by Election Day.

Now, why is that important? Well, because, no incumbent president has ever been reelected with the unemployment rate above 8%. It’s never happened. So it’s now an objective. Marching orders have been given: The media must find a way (and the regime, too) to get the unemployment number under 8%, to satisfy this statistic that has never been wrong. So the AP is basically telling us: “Get ready! This is what we’re going to do. No matter what the facts are, we’re gonna have this thing under 8% by the time you go into the voting booth in November.”

And they’re gonna do it by hook or by crook.

One of the ways the regime is doing it (and I beg your indulgence in repeating this again) is the US job market is missing two million jobs since Obama was inaugurated. There are two million fewer jobs overall available to be filled in this country since Obama took office in January of 2009. So if the universe of jobs available is down by two million (and growing, by the way) then the unemployment number expressed as a percentage is always gonna come down. If you make smaller the universe against which the calculation’s being made, which is precisely what has happened, the percentage goes down. And this has been documented and illustrated by James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I checked the e-mail during the bottom-of-the-hour break. “How do you know, Mr. Limbaugh, these ‘experts’ being used by the Associated Press are always wrong?” I read the AP reports. Here, let me give you just an example. From the AP story headlined, “Steady Job Gains to Sustain US Recovery.” This is the story that predicts that the unemployment rate is gonna be 7.9% by Election Day. The story mentions that no president has ever been elected with an unemployment rate of 8% or above.

And they say that they’ve got their survey here of a bunch of economists, “32 leading economists who foresee a gradually brighter jobs picture. Despite higher gas prices, Europe’s debt crisis and a weak housing market…” Despite all that, they see “a gradually brighter jobs picture.” It’s a miracle! It’s wonderful! Despite worsening economic circumstances, unemployment’s gonna tick down. And how do they know this is going to happen? Because the game is rigged! Here. This is classic. ‘Cause they’re getting sloppy.

The AP’s getting so scared, they’re getting sloppy.

This article cites one of the leading “experts,” one of the leading economists. He’s an economist by the name of Phillip Swagel from the University of Maryland who says in the story, quote, “Businesses are finally confident enough to hire and invest.” Now, we just had a call yesterday from a woman who just got laid off at a construction company, and a number of other people have called here who have said the businesses for which they work (or the businesses they own) are not hiring and are not making capital investment.

‘Cause they don’t know what the future holds. They’re worried about Obama being reelected. They’re worried about what’s gonna happen to the tax bill that they have. They’re holding on to their capital, their money. They’re not spending it. They’re not hiring people. This is just absurd. There’s no evidence for this claim from this professor: “Businesses are finally confident enough to hire and invest.” We’re getting pure propaganda in the media. None of it’s believable, and I just want to remind you of it every day ’cause it’s an onslaught. We’re surrounded by it; it’s easy to succumb to it.

But ten paragraphs later, after Mr. Swagel — Professor Swagel, excuse me. After he says, “Businesses are finally confident enough to hire and invest,” ten paragraphs later, the same Professor Swagel is quoted as saying, “There’s still a ton of uncertainty about the future of tax and regulatory policy. Business that might be tempted to expand say, ‘I don’t know what my taxes will be in three years.” Can I read those two quotes back-to-back without putting ten paragraphs between them?

Here is one of the 32 “experts” that the AP found to predict the unemployment rate will be below 8% on Election Day. Phillip Swagel, University of Maryland: “Businesses are finally confident enough to hire and invest.” But, “There’s still a ton of uncertainty about the future of tax and regulatory policy. Business that might be tempted to expand say, ‘I don’t know what my taxes will be in three years.” This is hilarious! The guy just cancels himself out, but you don’t know that if you don’t read ten paragraphs. Not sentences, but ten paragraphs. So, again, it’s just an example of what is an ongoing media smother job being performed on this whole country.

We are literally being smothered with this propaganda.