Nation Ready To Be Lied To About Economy Again

That's a headline in The Onion. The story says:

Tired of hearing the grim truth about their economic future, Americans demanded that the bald-faced lies resume immediately, particularly whenever politicians feel the need to divulge another terrifying problem with Wall Street, the housing market, or any one of a hundred other ticking time bombs everyone was better off not knowing about.

In addition, citizens are requesting that the phrase, "It will only get worse before it gets better," be permanently replaced with, "Things are going great. Enjoy yourselves."

With satirical humor, The Onion cuts through all the verbal clutter emitted by cable tv news, talk radio, and blogs. Fortunately, the humor media is about the only source of sane-based news. People who want information delivered in an intelligent perspective depend upon sources like The Onion, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report.

The Onion does not spare the presumptive self-glorification of bloggers from its nonsense-cutting wit:

Mainstream Media At It Again, Bloggers Report

NEW YORK—The mainstream media—a loose consortium of corporate news outlets
known for using professionally trained journalists who adhere to an editorial process—have once again completely missed the boat in their reporting of national events, outraged sources within the blogosphere said Monday. "When will the MSM dinosaurs realize that they're TOTALLY irrelevant?" wrote 39-year-old part-time librarian James Last, commenting on coverage of Obama's first 100 days in a scathing post that appeared on his blog, The LAST Word. "If the idiots at MSNBC, The New York Times, and WaPo could lift their heads from the money trough for a minute, maybe they'd write a story that's not completely driven by the corporate agenda. I'm not holding my breath." Right-wing bloggers were reportedly equally upset, with many singling out MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post as "shills" for the liberal agenda. At press time, an estimated 8.4 million bloggers nationwide were watching CNN.

An example of where The Onion is embarrassingly accurate about the reporting of economic news is the story yesterday about unemployment:

U.S. Jobless Rate Hits 8.9%, but Pace Eases

Buried in one of its online features, The Washington Post carried a story giving the actual figures about the unemployment rate, which it cited at 15.8 percent.

The total number of Americans who are not working full-time but ought to be is actually about 22 million, or 15.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Who are those other 8.3 million Americans? Call them the unofficially unemployed.

It may well be a fact that people do not want to hear. Particularly those who deny global warming, evolutionary change, who put the economy in its current mess, and the folly of the war on Iraq.