Zogby poll: Americans fed up on illegal aliens Majority against Bush plan for workers... 102

You bet! Who would have a better grasp of the state of the manufacturing sector than the workers themselves? Do you think Ken Lay or Martha Stuart are more honest than a union blog?

The AFL CIO has been an ardent supporter of undocumented workers and other minorities. It's a cheap shot on your part to equate them with white supremacists.

The Democrat party is not a white supremacist organization either.

I provided cites that clearly show the loss of nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs since Bush was appointed to the White House by the Supreme Court.

Would you have us go back to the good old days of the Love Canal and Times Beach?

Then, in that same report, we found a hint of the President's solution for the sinking manufacturing jobs numbers: just clbuttify burger baggers as manufacturing workers see footnote, later.

The follow-up is a third Chapter that has to be seen to be believed (or not, depending on your Credulity Quotient). I'll let Business Week tell the tale:

"Inventing The "Clinton Recession"

"No one should be surprised when economic or budget forecasts coming out of Washington are influenced by politics, especially during an election year. But when economic history is rewritten -- with political consequences -- that's going too far.

"President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, chaired by Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw him again, is trying to get away with exactly such revisionist history. The CEA's Economic Report of the President, released Feb. 9, unilaterally changed the start date of the last recession to benefit Bush's reelection bid. Instead of using the accepted start date of March, 2001, the CEA announced that the recession really started in the fourth quarter of 2000 -- a shift that would make it much more credible for the Bush Administration to term it the 'Clinton Recession.'

"For almost 75 years, the start and end dates of recessions have been set by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private nonpartisan research group based in Cambridge, Mbutt. The NBER's decisions have been dragged into the political arena before, but without impact. In the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the NBER to combine the 1980 and 1981-82 recessions into a single downturn that could be called the 'Carter Recession.'

"Economists who go to Washington always struggle to maintain their objectivity against the political demands of the administration they work for. Based on its latest performance, the CEA seems to have lost the battle." Business Week 02-23-2004 subscription

For this administration, it appears that truth is stranger than fiction. Congratulations on the well-deserved award, Mr. President.

Footnote:

President Bush can fix the problem of lower manufacturing jobs numbers with a stroke of his pen. His solution is buried as a trial balloon inside the "Economic Report of the President."

The fix? Easy - call burger baggers manufacturing workers:

But reclbuttifying fast food workers as manufacturing employees could have other advantages for the administration.

It would offset somewhat the ongoing loss of manufacturing jobs in national employment statistics. Since the month President Bush was inaugurated, the economy has lost about 2.7 million manufacturing jobs, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. That continues a long-term trend.