JACK WELCH: Obama Is Manipulating The Jobs Numbers Because His Debate Performance Was Awful

◼ Former G.E. CHAIRMAN Jack Welch and many others, say the Obama White House "cooked the books" on the latest unemployment numbers to make the President look....successful? In today's BUSINESS INSIDER.JACK WELCH: Obama Is Manipulating The Jobs Numbers Because His Debate Performance Was Awful - Kate Linebaugh/Wall St. Journal

◼ Jack Welch: ‘I Wasn’t Kidding’

After setting off a minor social media firestorm with a tweet suggesting the Obama administration had manipulated the September jobs report, Jack Welch wants to get one thing straight: He meant it.

“I wasn’t kidding,” the pugnacious former CEO of General Electric said in an interview.

The 76-year-old retiree riled up the Twitterverse this morning with a tweet that said, “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.”

◼ EDITORIAL: Obama’s fudged unemployment numbers - Washington Times.

It says a lot when a government jobs report is so out of line with reality that no thoughtful person can take it seriously. At best the new unemployment number is a fluke; at worst it is the product of partisan hacks.

The Department of Labor reported Friday that total nonfarm payroll employment increased by a net 114,000 in September. This poor showing — it reflects a 28,000 drop from the previous month — should have resulted in unemployment increasing by a tenth of a percent. Instead, it dropped by 0.3 percent to 7.8 percent. Call that Chicago-style math.

The official jobless rate is now down to around where it was when Mr. Obama took office, though still higher than what the White House promised it would be after blowing more than a trillion on stimulus programs. Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch was among the first to call shenanigans on the dramatically favorable unemployment figure, echoing a general skepticism from all but the most credulous of Mr. Obama’s defenders.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said she was “insulted” by charges that there was something fishy going on. She then betrayed her own ignorance of the facts by saying the 86,000 jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) discovered in the last two months were private-sector jobs. They were actually government hires. Private-sector employment fell last month by a net of 5,000. Manufacturing jobs were down 16,000. Mrs. Solis threw her underlings under the bus, saying “the information that I received is given to me by our professional, civil service staff in the BLS.” Perhaps these are the same BLS economists whom the Washington Free Beacon reports have contributed thousands to the Obama campaign.... ◼ MORE at the link.

◼ UPDATE: Jack Welch: I Was Right About That Strange Jobs Report - The economy would need to be growing at breakneck speed for unemployment to drop to 7.8% from 8.3% in the course of two months. - Jack Welch/Wall St. Journal