Axelrod wanted to shoot the messenger, and ignore the fact that Obama’s message is the problem. Then after failing to intimidate Gallop, the racist attorney general Eric Holder and his DOJ stooges filed an “unrelated” lawsuit against the polling company-
“Since Gallup first roused Axelrod’s ire, Obama’s Justice Department revived old allegations against the firm that, according to now former Gallup employee Michael Lindley, the polling company violated the False Claims Act by over-charging the federal government for its services.”
Yeah right. Unrelated, my butt. If they really think anybody believes that, they’re delusional. This is just more proof that what we have in the Obama regime is the most corrupt executive branch in our nation’s history , and that includes the Nixon administration.
Emails confirm Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod tried to intimidate Gallup
David Axelrod and the Obama campaign have some explaing to do. The Daily Caller’s Matthew Boyle reports that emails between senior officials at The Gallup Organization, show senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod attempted to intimidate the polling firm when its poll results found Mitt Romney leading President Obama.
According to Boyle, after Gallup declined to change its polling methodology, Obama’s Department of Justice hit it with an unrelated lawsuit:
“Since Gallup first roused Axelrod’s ire, Obama’s Justice Department revived old allegations against the firm that, according to now former Gallup employee Michael Lindley, the polling company violated the False Claims Act by over-charging the federal government for its services.”
Boyle explains that “Michael Lindley was a field organizer in Council Bluffs, Iowa, for then-Sen. Obama’s 2008 run for president before joining Gallup, a fact omitted from the DOJ’s legal filings and from most press accounts.”
In a very Nixonian abuse of power the Obama/Holder Justice Department announced it was joining the lawsuit on August 22, 2012. The announcement also indicated that the Justice Department plans to assert additional claims related to Gallup’s subcontract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). During most of the two weeks before the announcement, Gallup’s tracking poll showed Romney leading Obama 47 to 45 percent.
Contrast team Obama’s treatment of Gallup to that of Nate Silver. As Buzz Feed Politics reports, team Obama was more appreciative of silvers work and rewarded him.
“Obama’s polling analysts, Issenberg writes, wanted to test their internal polls against Silver’s model. And so — in an unusual step for the closely-held campaign, and for the analyst, who was then running his own website, FiveThirtyEight.com — the Obama campaign offered Silver access to thousands of its own internal polls, on the condition Silver sign a confidentiality agreement, which he did. (Silver, who now writes a widely-read blog for the New York Times declined to comment on the arrangement.)”
You really must go to the Daily Caller and read some of what is in the emails. Here is a teaser:
“In response to that email, a third senior Gallup official said he thought Axelrod’s pressure “sounds a little like a Godfather situation.”
“Imagine Axel[rod] with Brando’s voice: ‘[Name redacted], I’d like you to come over and explain your methodology…You got a nice poll there….would be a shame if anything happened to it…’”
In a second email chain titled “slanderous link about Gallup methodology,” another senior Gallup official noted that a Washington Examiner story on Axelrod’s anti-Gallup tweet was “on [the] Drudge [Report] right now,” before writing that the episode was “[s]o politically motivated, it’s laughable.”
“As they say in b-ball: he’s trying to work the refs,” that official wrote to other senior Gallup staffers. “What a joke. Axel’s had a bad week. He got in the middle of the Ann Romney thing. Then said the country is going in the wrong direction. (Oops!) Now he’s swinging at us….””
The Axelrod vs. Gallup story is more evidence that Obama is losing and the campaign is desperate. The Good news is that Gallup did not cave in to the attempted “intimidation” and now the story is public. Does the Axelrod vs.Gallup story explain why we have seen so many skewed polls during this campaign?
The main stream media should Demand that Axelrod and Gibbs tell the truth about what happened. As Boyle writes, the emails contradict what Axelrod’s fellow Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs told the Washington Times’ Kerry Picket this week about the campaign’s dealings with Gallup:
Picket reported that Gibbs said he was unaware of any communications between the Obama campaign and Gallup.
Was Gibbs lying to Picket? Was he misinformed? The emails suggest its one or the other.
The unemployment rate is much, much higher and more than double the 8.1% we’re being told by the liars in the Obama regime and their media lapdogs. This Wall Street Journal op-ed by U.S. News And Business Report editor Mort Zuckerman says it’s nearing 20%!
Did you ever notice that every time the lying and corrupt Obama regime’s Department of Labor posts it’s new jobs numbers for each month, they ALWAYS have revise them down, meaning there were not as many jobs created as they “estimated”?
So why should we believe the regime when they tell us the current unemployment rate is 8.1%?
It’s not, and like the crooks at Enron, the regime “cooks the books” by not counting people who have grown so frustrated that they’ve stopped looking for work and are no longer eligible for unemployment benefits.
That’s why the real unemployment is nowhere near the 8.1% lie they and their lapdogs in the media are telling us, and is pushing 20%.
Mortimer Zuckerman: Those Jobless Numbers Are Even Worse Than They Look
Still above 8%—and closer to 19% in a truer accounting. Here’s a plan for improvement.Don’t be fooled by the headline unemployment number of 8.1% announced on Friday. The reason the number dropped to 8.1% from 8.3% in July was not because more jobs were created, but because more people quit looking for work.
The number for August reflects only people who have actively applied for a job in the past four weeks, either by interview or by filling an application form. But when the average period of unemployment is nearly 40 weeks, it is unrealistic to expect everyone who needs a job to keep seeking work consistently for months on end. You don’t have to be lazy to recoil from the heartbreaking futility of knocking, week after week, on closed doors.
How many people are out of work but not counted as unemployed because they hadn’t sought work in the past four weeks? Eight million. This is the sort of distressing number that turns up when you look beyond the headline number.
Here’s another one: 96,000—that’s how many new jobs were added last month, well short of the anemic 125,000 predicted by analysts, and dramatically less than the (still paltry) 139,000 the economy had been averaging in 2012.
The alarming numbers proliferate the deeper you look: 40.7% of the people counted as unemployed have been out of work for 27 weeks or more—that’s 5.2 million “long-term” unemployed. Fewer Americans are at work today than in April 2000, even though the population since then has grown by 31 million.
We are still almost five million payrolls shy of where we were at the end of 2007, when the recession began. Think about that when you hear the Obama administration’s talk of an economic recovery.
The key indicator of our employment health, in all the statistics, is what the government calls U-6. This is the number who have applied for work in the past six months and includes people who are involuntary part-time workers—government-speak for those individuals whose jobs have been cut back to two or three days a week.
They are working part-time only because they’ve been unable to find full-time work. This involuntary army of what’s called “underutilized labor” has been hovering for months at about 15% of the workforce. Include the eight million who have simply given up looking, and the real unemployment rate is closer to 19%.
In short, the president’s ill-designed stimulus program was a failure. For all our other national concerns, and the red herrings that typically swim in electoral waters, American voters refuse to be distracted from the No. 1 issue: the economy. And even many of those who have jobs are hurting, because annual wage increases have dropped to an average of 1.6%, the lowest in the past 30 years. Adjusting for inflation, wages are contracting.
The best single indicator of how confident workers are about their jobs is reflected in how they cling to them. The so-called quit rate has sagged to the lowest in years.
Older Americans can’t afford to quit. Ironically, since the recession began, employment in the age group of 55 and older is up 3.9 million, even as total employment is down by five million. These citizens hope to retire with dignity, but they feel the need to bolster savings as a salve for the stomach-churning decline in their net worth, 75% of which has come from the fall in the value of their home equity.
The baby-boomer population postponing its exit from the workforce in a recession creates a huge bottleneck that blocks youth employment. Displaced young workers now face double-digit unemployment and more life at home with their parents.
Many young couples decide that they can’t afford to start a family, and as a consequence the birthrate has just hit a 25-year low of 1.87%. Nor are young workers’ prospects very good. Layoff announcements have risen from year-ago levels and hiring plans have dropped sharply. People are not going to swallow talk of recovery until hiring is occurring at a pace to bring at least 300,000 more hires per month than the economy has been averaging for the past two years.
Furthermore, the jobs that are available are mostly not good ones. More than 40% of the new private-sector jobs are in low-paying categories such as health care, leisure activities, bars and restaurants.
We are experiencing, in effect, a modern-day depression. Consider two indicators: First, food stamps: More than 45 million Americans are in the program! An almost incredible record. It’s 15% of the population compared with the 7.9% participation from 1970-2000. Food-stamp enrollment has been rising at a rate of 400,000 per month over the past four years.
Second, Social Security disability—another record. More than 11 million Americans are collecting federal disability checks. Half of these beneficiaries have signed on since President Obama took office more than three years ago.
These dependent millions are the invisible counterparts of the soup kitchens and bread lines of the 1930s, invisible because they get their checks in the mail. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that millions of people who had good private-sector jobs now have to rely on welfare for life support.
This shameful situation, intolerable for a nation as wealthy as the United States, is not going to go away on Nov. 7. No matter who wins, the next president will betray the country if he doesn’t swiftly fashion policies to address the specific needs of the unemployed, especially the long-term unemployed.
Five actions are critical:
1. Find the money to spur an expansion of public and private training programs with proven track records.
2. Increase access to financing for small businesses and thus expand entrepreneurial opportunities.
3. Lower government hurdles to the formation of new businesses.
4. Explore special subsidies for private employers who hire the long-term unemployed.
5. Get serious about the long decay in public works and infrastructure, which poses a dramatic national threat. Infrastructure projects should be tolled so that the users ultimately pay for them.
It’s zero hour. Policy makers need to understand that the most important family program, the most important social program and the most important economic program in America all go by the same name: jobs.
Mr. Zuckerman is chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report.
The Diary of Daedalus
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