Right-Wind Meme Smackdown

It's amazing how ALL the right wing zealots fell for this stoopid piece of crap and how hard it is to fix the damage:

According to the latest meme ricocheting around the conservative blogosphere and Fox News, almost three-quarters of the new jobs created in the past five months have been government jobs.

The figure, first reported Friday by the social conservative news website CNS.com, has immediatly gained traction on the right.

...But this is much ado about nothing as the 73 percent figure is patently dishonest and misleading malarky. CNS’ Terence Jeffrey arrived at the figure by comparing the change in the total number of people employed in June through November to the change in the number of people employed in government jobs over the same period.

...Why five months? It’s sort of an unusual amount of time to look for a trend, if you think about it. Why not six? Looking at the very same data tables Jeffrey links to in his post, it’s clear he cherry-picked June as the start date because it had the lowest number of government jobs all year, thus making the increase through November look bigger.

...If Jeffrey had started his analysis from the beginning of the year, he would have seen that government employment is actually down for the year, from 20,583,000 in January to 20,559,000 in November. But an honest look at the numbers would conclude they fluctuate significantly month-to-month with no clear trend in either direction.