If you can’t create the factory jobs, manufacture the statistics:

Is cooking a hamburger patty and inserting the meat, lettuce and ketchup inside a bun a manufacturing job, like assembling automobiles?
That question is posed in the new Economic Report of the President, a thick annual compendium of observations and statistics on the health of the United States economy.
The latest edition, sent to Congress last week, questions whether fast-food restaurants should continue to be counted as part of the service sector or should be reclassified as manufacturers. No answers were offered.
. . .
Counting jobs at McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food enterprises alongside those at industrial companies like General Motors and Eastman Kodak might seem like a stretch, akin to classifying ketchup in school lunches as a vegetable, as was briefly the case in a 1981 federal regulatory proposal.
But the presidential report points out that the current system for classifying jobs “is not straightforward.” The White House drew a box around the section so it would stand out among the 417 pages of statistics.
“When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a ‘service’ or is it combining inputs to ‘manufacture’ a product?” the report asks.

This would obviously be a easy way for the administration to manipulate the statistics and hide 2 million lost factory jobs.
Will any gimmickry be off limits as November draws closer?

Washington knows best:

The nation’s major drug policy reform groups today filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority for censoring the speech of those critical of the government’s “War on Drugs.”
. . .
The lawsuit responds to an amendment buried in the 2004 federal spending bill that cuts off more than $3 billion in federal funding from local transit authorities that accept advertisements critical of current marijuana laws and other drug laws. With at least $85 million at stake, the Washington Metro last week rejected an advertisement submitted by a coalition of drug policy reform groups that criticizes marijuana laws for wasting billions of taxpayer dollars and imprisoning non-violent offenders.
The rejected advertisement sponsored by the ACLU, Change the Climate, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the Marijuana Policy Project shows a group of ordinary people standing behind prison bars under the headline, “Marijuana Laws Waste Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Lock Up Non-Violent Americans.” The same groups that sought to run the advertisement filed today’s lawsuit.

It’s one thing for the federal government to use its spending power to “bribe” state and local governments to adopt federal guidelines (e.g., speed limits). It’s quite another for it to use public money to shield itself from criticism by imposing content-based speech restrictions.
The First Amendment says that’s no good.
Via Volokh Conspiracy.

Interesting AP piece on the growth of Iranian blogging. Unfortunately, if hard-line conservatives assume power following today’s election, they may try to censor the Internet and crack down on blogging.

CNN has a “conspiracy” story on how Senator Edwards is courting Howard Dean. At the bottom of the piece is a interesting factoid. Earlier, I noted how much more per vote Dean’s campaign had spent than front runners Kerry and Edwards had. It turns out that in terms of bang for the buck, Dean is far from the worst:

Dean raised and spent about $50.3 million in his presidential run, and he won 201 delegates. That means he spent about $250,000 to win each delegate, including superdelegates. Without superdelegates included, he spent some $500,000 per delegate. That’s nothing compared to Steve Forbes, who won two delegates in ’00 and quit the race in early February after he spent about $34 million — $17 million per delegate.

Ouch.

I would think this was obvious enough that it wouldn’t need to be reiterated. But apparently not.
If your a highly-paid public ambassador at a major state institution, it’s a bad idea to say the following about anyone, much less a young woman alleging sexual assault:

“It was obvious Katie was not very good. She was awful. You know what guys do? They respect your ability. You can be 90 years old, but if you can go out and play, they’ll respect you. Katie was not only a girl, she was terrible. O.K.? There’s no other way to say it.”

Barnett has since come out with the old “taken out of context” defense. But the damage has already been done. And now he looks like the awful one.