Yet Another Scandal

Hopefully, you'll hear about it where it might make a difference:

• 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.

So the government manipulated data to make the unemployment rate look better for political purposes. And guess who pioneered the work?

• Obama moved the Census Bureau into the White House chain of command, under Rahm Emmanuel, just three weeks into his first term.
  
  
• Utah's congressional delegation is calling President Obama's decision to move the U.S. census into the White House a purely partisan move and potentially dangerous to congressional redistricting around the country.
  
  Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told FOXNews on Monday that he finds it hard to believe the Obama administration felt the need to place re-evaluation of the inner workings of the census so high on his to-do list, just three weeks into his presidency.
  
  "This is nothing more than a political land grab," Chaffetz said.

It was a grab all right, the trouble was the republicans thought it was to manipulate census data instead of unemployment numbers. The phrase, "It's the economy stupid" means a lot less if you're the party issuing the numbers and running campaigns based on the false data. Chicago politics strikes again, and the story will be buried as all Chicago political stories are buried.