RUSH: Now, here’s another reason, ladies and gentlemen, why this is especially helpful today for our cause. And our cause, basically, is the failure of Barack Obama. Which reminds me, I need to find something very quickly here in the audio sound bites. Yeah, grab number 19. Okay. Here we go. The Limbaugh AP Tweak of the Day. Headline: ‘Initial Jobless Claims Rise Unexpectedly.’ Now, just yesterday we had news that there was an increase in mass layoffs, which is 50 or more, and that was not unexpected; and yesterday we heard 20% of ABC is going to bite the dust. That’s not ‘unexpected.’ But they’re blaming it now on the snow. They’re blaming it on the snow. Global warming! At least they’re not blaming it on Bush. ‘The number of new claims for unemployment benefits jumped unexpected last week as heavy snows led to higher layoffs.’
Let me see if I understand this. You’re working and you’re running a business, you see a forecast for blizzard conditions, and you say, ‘A-ha! I’m firing ten people.’ Is that how this works? AP has economists telling them that when it snows people get canned? ‘In addition, many state agencies in the mid-Atlantic and New England regions that process the claims were closed due to the storms and are now clearing out backlogs. Labor Department said first-time claims for unemployment insurance rose by 22,000 to a seasonally adjusted 496,000. Wall Street analysts polled by Thompson Reuters expected a drop to 455,000.’ Every month the same experts are wrong! Now, that’s the AP version. ”The job market remains quite stressed as robust employment growth remains elusive,’ said Dan Greenhouse,’ one of the AP economic experts.
”The economy’s grown for six months but it’s not yet spurring new hiring.’ Many economists point out that the current recovery is weak compared to the aftermath of previous deep recessions. But there are now many more people receiving extended unemployment benefits that are not included in the continuing claims figures,’ so the unemployment rate is actually much, much higher. The number of people out of work is much, much higher. If snow causes layoffs, how come nobody at the federal government lost their job when it was shut down for a whole week? How did that not happen? Now, from Reuters. My point here is while the economic news and the job news continues to worsen.
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RUSH: A couple of more stories on the employment, this is CNN: ‘Jobless claims up 12% in past 2 weeks.’ It’s a good thing we got that stimulus bill passed, twice, good thing, right? ‘The number of Americans filing for initial unemployment insurance surged to just below the 500,000 level last week, and have climbed more than 12% over the past two weeks, the government said Thursday.’ ‘Jobless Claims Rise Due to Weather-Related Factors.’ You know, it’s amazing to me as I go through these stories every month, however often they come out, how far our great watchdog media is willing to go to try to explain away the bad numbers. It’s always something. It’s the weather, it was Thanksgiving and offices were closed out there.
It’s just amazing they go out of their way to explain all of this. It’s gotten to the point that they’re blaming it on snow, blaming unemployment on snow. They actually in these stories say, yes, employers tend to lay off more people when a blizzard comes. But we’ve got a weatherization program going on out there. Well, actually it’s not going on out there. But I want to see in the policy manual, at say the ABC Widget Company where it says: ‘If it snows, you’re fired.’ I mean they’re contorting themselves like pretzels here in order to explain this away. I really wish somebody would point out, besides me, we’ve had all these jobs summits. How many have we had of those? We had one in December where the focus was not even on creating jobs. We had a jobs summit. And yet unemployment just continues to skyrocket.