RUSH: Here’s Vern in Lawton, Oklahoma. Vern. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. I can’t believe I got in to you.

RUSH: Well, you did. Your big day.

CALLER: Pardon? Oh, yeah. Of course. You just got too many followers. My question was, this morning I was listening to Fox News when the unemployment figures came out.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: They had an individual named Stuart Varney, I guess he’s been doing it for 30 years, reporting on business and everything. He said he had a habit of looking at the narrative, whatever that is, that comes along with the numbers.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: And he saw in the narrative that they were reporting that, quote, a large state did not report any numbers.

RUSH: Yep.

CALLER: And he’s saying, “Hey, this is an incomplete report. Why did they put it out?” Now, at the time I had to leave the house. I could only listen on the car radio, I could only pick up CBS, and they’re not saying anything about this at all. They’re touting how good it is for Obama.

RUSH: Yeah, well, it really isn’t.

CALLER: No.

RUSH: It’s the second week in a row that doesn’t make any sense. I wasn’t gonna spend any time on it today because I looked at it today, I said, “This is just as off the wall as last week’s unemployment number.” I said, “I’ll just leave this to Jack Welch. He’s got it covered.” And then I see that there’s a state that didn’t report on time! Whoa! There’s a state that didn’t report on time. So that got my interest. ‘Cause, folks, I don’t believe anything this regime puts out. And look, for those of you in the conservative blogosphere, if you think I’m seeing conspiracies, deal with it. I’m not seeing conspiracies; I’m seeing leftists. I know how leftists play the game. If they have a chance to falsify things to make themselves look better than they are, they’ll do it. It’s time you woke up to realize their potential.

At any rate, Henry Blodget today writing at Business Insider: “We’ve Gotten to the Bottom of the Mysterious Jobless Claims Report! — After this morning’s surprisingly positive jobless claims…” Folks, the real numbers before any of the adjustments are made… It may be unfair to go back and look at the unadjusted numbers because I could be guilty of what I’m accusing the regime of ’cause the unadjusted numbers are never reported, everything’s always seasonally adjusted, and everybody accepts that. But I still thought, I want to go see what the real numbers are before they started adjusting things, because every week they always revise the adjustment, and it always gets worse than it was when originally reported.

So here you go. The real live number of new claims… well, it’s pretty hard to see what seasonal adjustment can… actual increase of 25,990 claims. The hard number, in real life before any adjustment, there was an increase of nearly 26,000 claims for unemployment. By the time the BLS puts their story out with the adjustments that they make, and they do this with every report, so I’m not being accusatory here, but there was an actual increase of 26,000 new claims for unemployment. That became a decrease of 30,000 from the previous week.

In other words, a net difference of 56,000 claims. Real claims for unemployment insurance up 26,000. Then they do their adjustments, and that results in a decrease overall of 30,000. So we’ve had in their adjustment a difference of nearly 56,000 claims. Now, they say they’ve got a formula that is tried and true and it’s used every week, every month, and it’s seasonal and so forth, but Henry Blodget, Business Insider, guess what state didn’t get its data in on time? California. It’s the eighth largest economy in the world, unemployment rate out there is through the roof. California didn’t get its data in on time to make this report, according to the Business Insider.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. Now, here are the details from the Business Insider, Henry Blodget. “After this morning’s surprisingly positive jobless claims number was released, three things happened:
1. Lots of people felt better about the economy
2. Democrats cheered because they thought the number would help Obama
3. Republicans seized on confusing reports that the numbers had ‘excluded claims from one large state’ (probably California) and blasted the number as wrong and misleading.
“Since then, the argument has raged on, and there have been a variety of different reports and interpretations. Well, we’re glad to say that we’ve finally gotten to the bottom of what happened. We spoke to a source at the Labor Department. According to this source, who is an analyst at the Department, here’s what happened: ALL STATES WERE INCLUDED in this week’s jobless claims. Assertions that ‘a large state’ was excluded from the report are patently false.”

But, all that means is, “No, we didn’t exclude a state. A state just didn’t report.”

“It is likely that some of the jobless claims in one large state — California — were not included in the claims reported to the Department of Labor this week. This happens occasionally, our source says. When a state’s jobless claims bureau is short-staffed, sometimes the state does not process all of the claims that came in during the week in time to get them to the DOL. The source believes that this is what happened this week.”

“See, we didn’t exclude anything. They just didn’t get us the data.”

So they’re playing semantics.

“Oh, wait a minute, we resent this accusation that we excluded a state.”

“Well, then what happened?”

“Well, California just didn’t get the data to us.”

“Oh! So you didn’t exclude it, you just didn’t have it. And yet you put the number out anyway?”

“Yeah. They’ll report next week, and then we’ll fix this later.”

That’s exactly what the source told Business Insider. California’s gonna get their number in at some point and then we’ll get the right number. But based on the data that we have now, shazam, there were 26,000 new applications for unemployment but by the time we did our adjustments that we do every week, it was actually a reduction of 30,000.

(interruption)

Yes, Mr. Snerdley? A question? Doesn’t who put who in jail? Well, the IRS does put people in jail but that’s after an audit and so forth. No, we’re supposed to think that there’s nothing to see here. You know, California, it’s a big place, and there’s a lot of really committed, wonderful, hardworking bureaucrats out there, and they’re just overwhelmed. Do you realize it was Columbus Day last week, and it got to 75, 80 degrees in parts of the state? I mean, it was a tough week. The winds got up there and people were worried about the Santa Ana. There’s a lot of stuff. Those people, they’re really working hard in California. They tried to get the number in. But don’t worry because they’ll get the number in eventually and when they do, then we’ll report with an adjustment, but by the time that happens, all this will be forgotten.

So the regime’s out there, “Okay, 7.8% unemployment last week, and unemployment claims this week are at the lowest they’ve been since 2008.” Bam. Shazam. And I’m sure that I got conservative bloggers who will caution me later tonight, “Don’t go talking about conspiracies. Simply a statistical anomaly.” And it’s clear that if that’s said again, like it was last week with the unemployment number, it’s clear that we don’t have enough people that genuinely understand who we’re up against. We’re in a war with leftists. Leftists are liberals, socialists, Marxists, whatever, all of that, and they behave in certain ways and one of the things that we know they do is lie. They lie.

You want to know why Obama had a bad debate performance? ‘Cause he could not lie in that format without being a laughingstock. He couldn’t tell everybody how great this economy is, like he did the next day with his teleprompter. He couldn’t truthfully refute anything Romney said. And he’s not gonna be able to in the next debate, and the debate after that, and Biden’s not gonna be able to tonight. So they’ll have to do something else. And the tack they’re taking is, you know, Romney’s the guy lying, Romney’s the guy.

(Clinton impression) “You know, Rush, I didn’t even recognize Romney in that debate. I mean that’s not the Romney we all know. Have you seen the Romney in our TV ads? That’s the real Romney.” They’re trying to now say that Romney’s becoming a moderate and a centrist. The real Romney is this extremist, right-wing conservative kook, but that Romney in the debate, that’s not the real guy. That’s all they’ve got. That’s what they’re reduced to.

All you need to know is this, the real number, unemployment claims, 26,000, up 26,000 higher than last week. But then they did the seasonal adjustment, which they always do, not criticizing that. Don’t misunderstand. After the adjustment that they always do, that 26,000 new claims became 30,000 fewer than last week. So a net adjustment of 56,000. And then you read between the lines and you find out that not all states reported. It was originally reported as the BLS excluded a state, and the BLS got very, very mad, because they were accused of cheating, and they said, “We didn’t exclude a state. You can’t say that. We didn’t leave a state out. There just is a state that didn’t report to us.”

Oh, okay. The state that didn’t report is California, where there is a huge unemployment number. People are leaving that state to try to find jobs. Two thousand people a week are leaving California. And somehow they just didn’t get their numbers in. So California is not part of this number. But that’s okay. There’s no chicanery here. Next California will get the numbers in, we’ll report the adjustment, and everything will be fine, except when the adjustment’s reported it’s gonna be way too late because the impact will have already been made. Yes, the BLS has Obama appointments. It’s also got some Republicans in this. It’s got some career people. It’s like these State Department people that testified yesterday, they’re not Obama appointees.

This Charlene Lamb, who would not call it terrorism, kept referring to “attackers,” she’s career. She is not an Obama appointee. Now, that doesn’t mean she’s not a commie babe, liberal, but everybody’s going to great pains to point out that she’s not.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, Henry Blodget in this Business Insider story says that California would add 15 to 25,000 new claims to last week’s number. Now, last week’s number, the raw new claims was 26,000, which Blodget says became a reduction of 30,000. Blodget says that California would add 15,000 to 25,000 to the 26,000.

So the real life number of new claims, which is now 25,900 (we’ll call it 26,000), could actually be twice as high as that. But California was left out. So, in other words, not only was the real life number 26,000. That number could be twice as high after California’s added. Now, for those of you cringing and claiming that I have descended into conspiracy theory?

No, no, no, no! There’s no conspiracy here. What’s going on here is manipulation. Pure and simple. Plain and simple. Plain as day. There’s manipulation going on here, and to say it’s a conspiracy? There might well be one, but that’s not what I’m alleging. A state didn’t get its numbers in on time, and it wasn’t Rhode Island. Ha-ha-ha. It’s California.