"In terms of the unemployment rate, look, I'm glad to see it come down, I'm glad that we've created jobs last month, I hope we continue to create jobs but let's not forget, the labor force particpation rate has dropped a full two percentage points since Obama took office..." - Ed Gillespie, Republican strategist, on Meet the Press

Wow. Let's take a look at the chart...



Yep, sure enough, down a full two percent.

Wait. Ah crap, that's 2000 through 2004, Bush's first term. My bad.

[Source: United States Dept. of Labor Statistics, 2000 - 2004]

This morning I received an email from The American Spectator. It's a conservative publication, I like to keep myself at least tangentially aware of how the political opposition thinks. Here's how it opens:

"Something very big will happen in America within the next 180 days. It will be more devastating than the credit crisis of 2008. For most people, it will hit them like a brick wall. It will touch Americans harder and deeper than anything else we've seen since the Great Depression."

Jesus. 180 days? Brick wall? I'd better investigate!

So I did. This Michael Lombardi person seemed like he knew what he was talking about. The article goes on to mention that the author "in 2006, [Mr. Lombardi] begged his readers to get out of the housing market...before it plunged. He was among the first (back in late 2006) to predict that the U.S. economy would be in a recession by late 2007. Michael correctly predicted the crash in the stock market of 2008 and early 2009."

Still, it involved buying something so point was moot. Then I did a search of my email archives and found:

9/19/2011 - "Something very big will happen in America within the next 180 days."
11/13/2011 - "Something very big will happen in America within the next 180 days."
12/1/2011 - "Something very big will happen in America within the next 180 days."
1/19/2012 - "Something very big will happen in America within the next 180 days."
1/18/2012 - "Something very big will happen in America within the next 180 days."

Clearly we have the second coming of Nostradamus in Mr. Lombardi. I do this sort of thing myself at red lights; every three seconds or so I go "light, become green!" and wave my hand. Works every time.

So I went to Google, used the advanced search option to look for this same phrase, turns out this warning was being pushed in banner-style advertisements as far back as late 2010.

Thank you, American Spectator, for being a shill for frauds. Not just any frauds, mind you, ones that could be sussed out by Jr. High School students with ten minutes and The Google. So your failure to catch it is, at worst, complicit and, at best, rank stupidity.

You will understand if I take your Obama prevarication with a salt lick.