Has the Obama Administration Turned Government Statistics into Soviet-Style Propaganda?

Right Wing News (h/t Larwyn's Links) discusses a New York Post article that claims that the Census Bureau has engaged in considerable fudging of its employment roll.  The Bureau hires people and then fires them after only a few hours work, then hires a replacement, then fires the replacement after a few hours, etc.  The churning of employment has, according to the article, potentially bloated the US Department of Labor's employment data. Thus, the Obama administration may have significantly distorted the non-seasonally adjusted 9.9% unemployment reported last month. John Crudele of the Post writes:

"Each month Census gives Labor a figure on the number of workers it has hired. That figure goes into the closely followed monthly employment report Labor provides. For the past two months the hiring by Census has made up a good portion of the new jobs...Labor doesn't check the Census hiring figure or whether the jobs are actually new or recycled. It considers a new job to have been created if someone is hired to work at least one hour a month...One hour! A month! So, if a worker is terminated after only one hour and another is hired in her place, then a second new job can apparently be reported to Labor . (I've been unable to get Census to explain this to me.)

I used to think that government statistics are accurate, even sacrosanct.  There have been increasing numbers of questions about inflation data.  For instance, the exclusion of house costs reduced the stated inflation rate from the early 1980s until the housing price collapse, when some pundits started to suggest that house prices should be included in the inflation rate.  It is not clear how quality adjustments are integrated into the inflation rate.  Nor is it clear how the size of a given product influences it.  For example, for the past 10 years or so I haven't bothered with a big charcoal grill, just purchasing a small hibachi from Wal-Mart.  Until recently they were about $20, but this year it was $25.  But the quality had been significantly reduced. It is much less steady and the materials used are cheaper.  Were those changes included in the inflation rate?

Increasingly government data seems like propaganda.  The Census Bureau's manipulation of the unemployment rate suggests that the Obama administration does not shy from the use of official information for propagandistic purposes.

Obama's Abortion Lie

Brutally honest (h/t Rick) has a blog about Barack Obama's position on abortion. The gist is that Obama lied about his position on abortion. What? I can't believe it. Obama really lied?

>"So Obama's goal is to reduce the number of abortions, a goal he deems worthy of pursuing:

"'Because the fact is that although we’ve had a president who is opposed to abortions the last eight years, abortions have not gone down.'

"Really?

"The number of abortions performed in the United States dropped to 1.2 million in 2005 -- the lowest level since 1976, according to a new report.

"The number of abortions fell at least in part because the proportion of women ending their pregnancies with an abortion dropped 9 percent between 2000 and 2005, hitting the lowest level since 1975, according to a nationwide survey.

"Well... I'm sure Barack simply made a mistake, after all there's nothing in his history that would suggest that he has anything in mind but to reduce the number of abortions...

"Last week Doug Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee drew my attention to a previously unnoticed January 2008 article by Terence Jeffrey stating Barack Obama actually did vote against a version of the IL Born Alive Infants Protection Act that was identical to the federal version, contrary to multiple public statements Obama or his surrogates have made to rationalize his opposition thttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=2555123713188257297o the IL bill for the past 4 years.

"Since then we have found 2 separate documents proving Barack Obama has been misrepresenting facts...

Read the whole thing here.