the all ‘new’ huffington post

Headline on the site today:

Here’s what Wanda Sykes had to say:

“Rips”? Really? She ripped Sheen & Gaddafi, she spoke sympathetically about the President.

As Tally pointed out, could this genius headine-writer possibly have meant “riffs”? Oh dear.

yahooooooooooo!

You know, when the media tries to set a narrative it’s comically stubborn in trying to back it up with evidence, even when the ‘evidence’ is a little shaky.

Take this report I saw today on Yahoo News.

The headline? “Obama Shows Alarming Loss of Ground with Independents, Poll Indicates.”

Okay, that didn’t sound good.

“A new Reuters/Ipsos Poll shows President Barack Obama’s job approval rating among independents (37%) dropped sharply when compared to last month’s rating. According to the poll, the president’s approval rating fell a precipitous 10 percent. Could it spell trouble for his re-election?”

Uh oh.

But wait. Buried right at the bottom of the article were the findings of two other polls, by Gallup and Rasmussen, which put the President’s approval rating among independents at, respectively, 43% and 47%. Yes, 47% – a whole 10% higher than the Reuters/Ipsos poll. That’s just 4% lower than he got in the 2008 election.

“The numbers might be more worrisome for the president … if other polls corroborated the fall in approval ratings … Gallup, which daily tracks the president’s approval rating, showed Obama at 43 percent approval among independents during the same time frame, down only 2 percent from a month ago (and still up by a point over January).”

But it was the Reuters/Ipsos Poll that Yahoo chose to highlight, and feature in their headline.

I dunno, if you had three polls showing wildly different findings, wouldn’t you focus on the middle one?

Or mention that two of the three polls were rather positive for the President?

Then again, “Independent support for Obama down only 2 percent from a month ago (and still up by a point over January)” doesn’t quite fit that narrative, eh?

‘we might need a jobs recount’

Time: The employment numbers for November were far lower than people were hoping for. But here’s the problem: The employment picture might not be as disappointing as the number the Department of Labor reported. Why’s that? The Labor Department failed to count just over 350,000 jobs in its final tally. Include those jobs into the mix, and….

…..the economy actually added nearly 400,000 jobs in the month of November……

…..In reality, the retail sector added just over 300,000 new hires in the month of November. But the Labor Department didn’t count those hires. That’s because the Labor Department’s final number of employment is seasonally adjusted. And since the retail sector disproportionately adds more workers this time of the year than the other 10 months, the Labor Department adjusts down the sector’s employment numbers in November and December. So retail employment gets over counted in January and February when hiring is slow, and undercounted in November and December….

The result: In the Labor Department’s final count, 350,000 retail jobs got excluded.

And that may make sense. Many of those jobs are seasonal and temporary. But if the retail sector continues to do well this holiday season, some stores may keep a good number of those employees. If so, November’s disappointing job report might be just be setting the economy up for a surprisingly strong employment number for January.

Full piece here

Thank you Brezzydee for the great link 😉