The International Olympic Committee is re-testing athletes’ samples from the 2006 Olympics to make sure that everyone competed fairly, ahead of the statute of limitations running out next year. Anyone caught cheating is subject to have their medals stripped and handed to honest competitors.
It’s too bad there’s no means to go back and correct political cheating. Barack Obama won election and re-election on a campaign of lies, and now, rank cheating on a major presidential performance statistic in the US Census Bureau, according to a report in the NY Post.
In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.
The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.
And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.
Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.
And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.
The cheating employee’s name is Julius Buckmon, according to the Post. Buckmon says that he cheated because others higher up in the government ordered him to.
“It was a phone conversation — I forget the exact words — but it was, ‘Go ahead and fabricate it’ to make it what it was,” Buckmon told me.
Census, under contract from the Labor Department, conducts the household survey used to tabulate the unemployment rate.
Interviews with some 60,000 household go into each month’s jobless number, which currently stands at 7.3 percent. Since this is considered a scientific poll, each one of the households interviewed represents 5,000 homes in the US.
Buckmon, it turns out, was a very ambitious employee. He conducted three times as many household interviews as his peers, my source said.
By making up survey results — and, essentially, creating people out of thin air and giving them jobs — Buckmon’s actions could have lowered the jobless rate.
Census never told the US Department of Labor, which ultimately compiles and releases the statistics, that its data was tainted by fraud.
The decline in unemployment had obvious political consequences — it helped take the edge off attacks on Obama’s poor jobs record just when he needed it most. Along with “If you like your healthcare, you can keep your healthcare,” it helped Obama coast to re-election. Add in the IRS suppressing Obama’s opposition during the three years leading up to 2012, and you have a stolen country.
More: The reporter Jay Carney mocked last week has left a flaming bag of dog poo on the White House steps.
Asked who they would vote for if they could have a mulligan on the 2012 election, 49% say Romney, 45% Obama in ABC/WashPost poll
— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) November 19, 2013
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