But anyone paying attention knew why public employment had risen — and it had nothing to do with Big Government. It was, instead, the fact that the federal government had to hire a lot of temporary workers to carry out the 2010 Census — workers who have almost all left the payroll now that the Census is done.

Um, no.

These numbers from economist de Rugy, looking at the job market since the start of the recession, are also revealing:

Private sector: -7.2 million jobs (6 percent of the January 2008 workforce)

Total government: -118,000 jobs (0.5 percent of its January 2008 workforce)

Federal government: +98,000 jobs (a 3.5 percent growth since January 2008)

State government: +42,000 jobs (less than 1 percent growth since January 2008)

Local government: -258,000 jobs (1.7 percent of its January 2008 workforce)

So, even after all those Census workers were let go, the federal government workforce GREW by 3.5% since the start of the recession. And while the overall government workforce shrank by 0.5% (a reduction totally attributable to local government cuts), the private workforce has shrunk by a breathtaking 6%.

Of course, it isn’t only Krugman pushing the Census hiring as some kind of smoke-screen to obscure the federal hiring binge. The ‘nonpartisan’ PolitiFact, i.e. nonpartisan because they only attack Republicans, used this ruse in a recent attack on Gov. Pawlenty. (In fairness to PolitiFact, it does seem that Pawlenty’s people misread some of de Rugy’s data for an op-ed in the WSJ.) Which, of course, was then dutifully picked up by the AP. You catching how this all works?

Bonus: If it looks like the spike in this year’s Census hiring is bigger than the previous two counts, you’re correct. This year, the federal government hired about 34,000 more Census workers than in the past.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Suddenly, everything changed.

For days, as an oil spill spread in the Gulf of Mexico, BP assured the government the plume was manageable, not catastrophic. Federal authorities were content to let the company handle the mess while keeping an eye on the operation.

But then government scientists realized the leak was five times larger than they had been led to believe, and days of lulling statistics and reassuring words gave way Thursday to an all-hands-on-deck emergency response. Now questions are sure to be raised about a self-policing system that trusted a commercial operator to take care of its own mishap even as it grew into a menace imperiling Gulf Coast nature and livelihoods from Florida to Texas.

The pivot point had come Wednesday night, at a news conference at an oil research center in the tiny community of Robert, La. That’s when the nation learned the earlier estimates were way off, and an additional leak had been found.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama set in motion a larger federal mobilization, pledging to deploy “every single available resource” to the area and ordering his disaster and environmental leaders to get down there in person. Only a few days after the Coast Guard assured the country there was “ample time” to protect the coast if oil came ashore, warnings from the government were newly alarming.

“I am frightened for the country, for the environment,” David Kennedy, assistant chief of the National Ocean Service at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press. “This is a very, very big thing, and the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling.”

The political subtext of the crisis was clear and increasingly on people’s minds, whether from a federal office deploying oil-containment booms or from a Louisiana parish awaiting yet another sucker punch from the sea.

Read the full article here.

Do you want a good laugh?  Check out this press release from January 18, 2006:

Democrats from across the country today unveiled their Honest Leadership and Open Government Act. In the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, were joined by Senator Barack Obama and Congresswoman Louise Slaughter and their Senate and House colleagues to shine a spotlight on the Republican “pay for play” politics that put special interests first at the expense of the priorities of the American people and signed a pledge to restore honest leadership and open government.

The below headlines sound like “pay to play” politics:

• Ben Nelson sells his health care vote to Harry Reid - Examiner
• Louisiana Purchase, Part Deux - Statesman Journal
• Health bill money for hospital sought by Dodd - AP
• Deep in Health Bill, Very Specific Beneficiaries - New York Times
• The Wages of Sin (Or, What the 60 Got) – National Review Online
• The Demcare Bribe List – Michelle Malkin
• Cash for Cloture: Demcare bribe list, Pt. II - Michelle Malkin

Founding Bloggers’ very own, Allan Sluis, is calling attention to an image that just might be the latest example of what has come to be know as “Fauxtography” – or – passing doctored images off as good faith representations of reality.

Below is a detailed examination of the image, beginning with the shot as it was displayed Monday, December 7th, on Foxnews.com (Fox link via SPQA.org):

And here is the image as seen without the cropping Fox News applied. It is from the Baltimore Sun, dated July 2009:

Oh those poor geese flying right through those rust colored smoke plumes! They might start dropping out of the sky at any moment!

But what if the truth is not as apocalyptic as the AP image appears to depict?

A number of things about this image look unusual to Allan, who is a professional photo retoucher and graphic illustrator with nearly 20 years experience pushing pixels.

Below is the image with arrows highlighting specific features which upon close examination look very suspect, calling into question the honesty of the presentation of this picture.

Allan’s observations:

There is ample reason to believe that this photograph supplied to news organizations by the Associated Press has been substantially color-enhanced, perhaps to convey a false impression of pollution coming from a smoke stack from a purported coal-fueled power plant in Kansas. Here is a detailed description of the evidence that the original photo was either a black-and-white image, or a color image which was converted to black-and-white, and then colorized for dramatic effect. (See Update Below)

A1: Note this area of smoke rising directly from the smokestack is mysteriously missing any orange tone.

A2: Notice the unusual falloff of orange color in the background clouds (yes, those are clouds) just to the right of the smoke rising directly from the smokestack.

A3: A close examination reveals an unnaturally saturated hard color edge on that particular smoke lump.

B: Another unnatural saturation intensity increase to the left of the arrow. Note how rapid the orange tint fades in intensity on the left and the right of the arrow point.

C1, C2 & C3: These three arrows surround an area of sloppy retouching where the color tint was painted in too intense and abrupt to be convincing. Note how this color area pops substantially and quite suspiciously. This is also direct evidence that the retoucher is likely deliberately trying to blur the distinction between the actual smoke rising from the smokestack and the BACKGROUND CLOUDS deceptively conveying the impression that the entire area is choked with nasty orange pollution. This deceptive color continues right across the top of the smokestack and to the right going right over the background clouds.

D: Another area marked by the arrow point where the background clouds were not completely color tinted by the retoucher and the background gray is visibly missing orange tone.

Next, Allan began to reconstruct what he felt the original image might have looked like before it was allegedly enhanced, and in doing so, made a surprising discovery:

The evidence that this photo was originally a grayscale or black-and-white image was arrived at with a simple Photoshop process. We encourage other Photoshop enthusiasts and experts to recreate our work. (Here is the largest version of the image we could find)

1) Add a “Hue/Sat” adjustment layer directly above the original jpeg.

2) Drop the saturation percentage for both the Yellows and Reds Edit category down to zero.

Note how the image is now a perfectly even balance of the Red Green and Blue. This is easily viewable in the Info palette as you move the cursor over the image.

This is only possible if the original image is black-and-white or grayscale.

In a normal full-color image, there WILL be variances in the tone of the blues and greens. The desaturating of the Yellows and Reds would not touch the cooler colors. The other colors are not there.

This leads me to believe that this is a black and white image that has been colorized!

It is not possible to know if the camera original photograph is a black-and-white, but the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the jpeg being distributed was colorized from a black-and-white image. (See update below)

Here is what the image likely looked like before it was colorized after the above test was implemented (See update below):

We also in Hue/Sat discovered that the tone of the smokestack itself has been darkened substantially. A simple “Lightness” move in the same adjustment layer to the Master category readily shows this.

Below is how the image is displayed on the AP website where they are selling it to news organizations. Note the creation date. This dud has been out there for a while:

FILE – The Jan. 10, 2009 file photo shows a flock of geese flying past a smokestack at the Jeffery Energy Center coal power plant near Emmitt, Kan.. Sweeping legislation to curb the pollution linked to global warming and create a new energy-efficient economy is headed to an uncertain future in the Senate after squeaking through the House. The vote was a big win for President Barack Obama, who hailed House passage as a “historic action.” “It’s a bold and necessary step that holds the promise of creating new industries and millions of new jobs, decreasing our dangerous dependence on foreign oil and strictly limiting the release of pollutants that threaten the health of families and communities and the planet itself,” Obama said in a statement on Friday, June 26, 2009. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

---

Location	Emmitt, KANSAS, United States
Event	US Climate Bill
Creation Date	Saturday, January 10, 2009 4:10 PM
Submit Date	Saturday, June 27, 2009 8:19 AM
Special Instructions	JAN. 10, 2009 FILE PHOTO
Transmission Reference	FRA104
Image ID	090110050409
Image Resolution‡	3356 x 2465 – 786.68 KB
Byline Title	STF
Credit	ASSOCIATED PRESS
Person	Barack Obama
Photographer	Charlie Riedel
Category	International News
Source	AP

The AP image looks much more red than the images media outlets have published, leading us to wonder if even media outlets felt that the image was over the top in it’s “original” form, and dialed it back a bit.

Well AP….are we wrong???

UPDATE:

Allan Sluis has written to update us, based on feedback he received from readers at BigGovernment. He no longer believes that the manipulation began with a black-and-white image, rather that the manipulation began with the stripping out of all colors other than Yellow and Red. That would explain why the image was rendered greyscale after the Yellow and Red were removed in the test outlined above.

Below is what he wrote, and I have made visible changes in the post above to reflect this information.

We’ve been getting some superb and valuable feedback and a Big Government commenter, AnonymousToo, points out correctly that the doctoring of the color in this photo does not necessarily mean it started as a completely black-and-white image as I originally asserted.

My original assessment that the source for this image was a grayscale photograph was based on the total lack of any color remaining once I desaturated the Reds and Yellows only via Hue/Sat in Photoshop. AnonymousToo rightly points out that the AP retoucher/photographer who processed the image may have done precisely the same thing but with a removal of any of the cooler hues containing cyans or blues using the exact same process.  By deliberately removing any colors other than reds and yellows to further saturate the oranges, this would indeed give the exact same effect as a grayscale original if the reds and yellows are desaturated (thus leaving no color data behind but grayscale values). I also agree with AnonymousToo that this would be a much quicker way to achieve a similar effect than colorizing a grayscale original.

This deliberate removal of the blues from the photograph may also explain why there are so many jarring instances of saturation zones in the orange with rapid falloffs in inconsistent intensity. While the probability of additional orange being painted in selective areas is still strong when viewing the labeled areas, desaturating of the blues will also accent and slightly lighten areas of the sky visible in the photo that without doubt originally had some blue present. Again, this is damning evidence of  unethical color manipulation for a news photograph by AP.

Another mysterious and blatant area of the AP photo emerged after the initial post. I noticed that the body of the smokestack has no color information in the areas not lit by the orange highlight and are exact RGB grayscale. This is visible without any need to apply adjustment layers and is readily visible with the eyedropper and info palette in Photoshop.

This computer-balanced gray does not happen in real-world outdoor lighting conditions and is a result of color manipulation of the original image. RGB gray is how photo-editing software like Photoshop displays a pure grayscale range with identical numeric values for red, green and blue. This results in pixels with only values of light and dark and absolutely no color information.

Note also that this smokestack has plenty of orange (painted or enhanced) in the highlight but this color is completely absent from the rest of the smokestack. If an object’s specular highlight (such as the orange highlight on the smokestack) is tinted, the rest of the object will have darker and less intense, but present, values of this same color. This is not the case with this image. Note also there would be some ambient color tinting the gray of this smokestack from the sky color and the dingy shade of gray that the smokestack is painted. This also is direct evidence of the image manipulator desaturating everything but the orange tones.

The grayscale smokestack is the most powerful and blatant detail of this photograph revealing the extent of the manipulation in this AP International News photograph. As has been previously stated, as an editorial illustration, we would have no problem with this level of deceptive manipulation. By categorizing this as an International News photograph though, all the misleading elements are an ethical disgrace for intentional hyping of a political movement.

Thank you to AnonymousToo, and all of our readers/commenters, who have helped us better understand how this image was manipulated.

1.  Fox News is not really a legitimate news source because it has a ‘point of view’ and

2.  We encourage all legitimate news networks to stop treating them as if they are legitimate.

The mainstream media were complicit in their coverage of the ACORN scandal. Their behavior was and continues to be an insult to democracy and journalistic responsibility as the Fourth Estate has ignored facts, engaged in one-sided sourcing, and avoided basic and inherently important journalistic questioning.

First, there was avoidance. Some media outlets simply ignored the story. On Sept. 15, five days after the Maryland tape was released, ABC’s Charlie Gibson said, “I don’t even know about it… so you’ve got me at a loss” and said that the story might be “just one you leave to the cables.” But, Gibson was not alone in his lack of knowledge. The New York Times did not cover the story for nearly a week. On Sept. 26, Clark Hoyt, The Times’ Public Editor, acknowledged the paper’s tardiness, but insinuated that the story was lacking in facts:

But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still.  Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire…But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.

Then, there were cases of gratuitously sloppy journalism.  Some of the outlets that did cover the story simply skipped over basic interview questions. In several instances, Bertha Lewis made the false claim that the filmmakers were turned away in “dozens of cities.” In a CNN interview with Rick Sanchez, Lewis said, “…the filmmakers went to dozens of offices. They were turned away.” In a more flagrant example of corroborating untruths, Lewis reiterated her “dozens” on MSNBC, stating, “…They were thrown out of dozens of offices. And, in fact, in Philadelphia, we called the police, filed a police report.”

Similarly, Wolf Blitzer, failed to adequately question Lewis. While on his show, Lewis made the following statement: “This sort of notorious crew went around to dozens of our offices. What you don’t see are the offices that threw them out… offices that filed police complaints.”

The lack of depth of these interviews with Lewis has been egregious. Upon hearing of the “dozens,” even the most unseasoned journalist would know to ask, “What were the cities where filmmakers were thrown out?” And, what about the police reports (plural) that were filed by multiple “offices”? Like Sanchez’s treatment of the “dozens,” Blitzer failed to ask for a list of cities that took such action. Lewis was granted a free pass, as no probing questions were asked about the issues in question.

On Sept. 12, just two days after the Maryland tape was made public, Lewis released a statement on ACORN’s Web site, writing, “This recent scam, which was attempted in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia to name a few places, had failed for months before the results we’ve all recently seen.”

Following subsequent video releases, New York and San Diego were dropped from ACORN’s list of cities where the filmmakers were allegedly “turned away” and the aforementioned statement was removed from ACORN’s Web site, thus erasing evidence of inconsistency.  Big Government copied her statement and posted it in it’s entirety at the time of it’s release (notice the broken link to the ACORN website in the Big Government post). This change can also be viewed in a story published on Sept. 17 by The Washington Post. According to the Post, “An ACORN spokesman said they were turned away in Miami, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, where workers called police and filed a report.”  Notice the missing cities.

Where were the media to catch this glaring glitch in ACORN’s own reporting? The answer: Nowhere to be found. And, it was on the same day (Sept. 17), that Lewis appeared on MSNBC to discuss the fact that “dozens” of cities turned the filmmakers away.

And who could forget the glaring corrections that were issued by The Associated Press and The Washington Post. Both the AP and the Post published stories that attributed an incorrect, racially-driven motive for O’Keefe’s decision to conduct the ACORN investigation . Fortunately, the outlets were forced to correct their journalistic faux pas. Here is the Post’s correction:

A Sept. 18 Page One article about the community organizing group ACORN incorrectly said that a conservative journalist targeted the organization for hidden-camera videos partly because its voter-registration drives bring Latinos and African Americans to the polls. Although ACORN registers people mostly from those groups, the maker of the videos, James E. O’Keefe, did not specifically mention them.

Despite the fact that Bertha Lewis’ credibility had been completely compromised on September 14th with with the release of the New York ACORN investigation (not to mention the San Diego videos released on Sept. 17), she was granted a forum with The National Press Club on Oct. 6; the conference was broadcast on C-SPAN. In that presser, Lewis used the debunked information from the Associated Press and Washington Post articles that had since been corrected. Yes, the NPC gave her a platform to continue touting untruths that were previously purveyed by the supine media. She said, “O’Keefe, himself, told The Washington Post, ‘They’re registering too many minorities. They usually vote Democratic. Somebody’s got to stop them’…”

Perhaps the most perplexing media coverage – or lack thereof – surrounds a video that ACORN Housing’s Philadelphia office released back in September. On Sept. 16, a YouTube account was created and on Sept. 17, a video featuring Philadelphia Office Director Katherine Conway Russell was released. The video, which is intended to respond to O’Keefe and Giles while defending the Philadelphia office’s handling of the filmmakers went largely unnoticed by the mainstream media.

In the video, Russell describes a July meeting with O’Keefe and Giles and uses a police report filed after the filmmakers left the office as evidence that the Philadelphia office was taken aback by the prostitution story line. Aside from the fact that the series of events that lead up to the police filing described in the video lead to more questions, the police report itself does not mention anything about discussion content; the report merely claims that O’Keefe was responsible for a verbal “disturbance.”

While the media vastly ignored this important video, many outlets did delve into the police report. According to The Washington Post, “ACORN emailed a copy of a Philadelphia police report dated July 24 to The Post to verify its account that police were called and the couple was shown the door.” And concerning the Philadelphia office’s involvement, WPVI Philadelphia wrote, “…by every account, the Philadelphia office is not part of the problem.” And, WBUR-FM wrote, “…in ACORN Housing’s North Philadelphia office, the scene is far from the one seen in the videos, which were made by a conservative activist”

Here, the media takes sides without interviewing or speaking with O’Keefe and Giles. Aside from the issue of ignoring ACORN’s own video, such selective sourcing is disturbing. Nowhere in the police report is ACORN’s rejection of any subject matter mentioned, therefore the report, in itself, does not prove wholeheartedly what ACORN’s officials in that city have said.

And finally: The insinuation that the videos were creatively edited was repeated in a plethora of mainstream news media. In an opinion piece for True/Slant, Allison Kilkenny wrote,

The videos are edited very creatively — if I’m being generous — to show only the ACORN employees who engaged in shady behavior, and not the dozens of other ACORN offices from which O’Keefe and Company were ejected, and in a few cases, ACORN employees called the police on the duo.

Aside from the fact that the videos weren’t edited in any way to deceive the viewers, that dozens of offices did not dispel O’Keefe and Giles, and only one office has come forward with a report, entire audio and transcript versions of the investigations are available on BigGovernment.com, right at the top of the homepage. This falsehood (that full versions are not available) has been repeated by Lewis herself on CNN and in other mainstream outlets (and, surprise, virtually no journalist has corrected her).

The ACORN story has, once again, shown the media’s inability to fulfill its duties. The media should adequately inform the public while asking the questions needed to provide a full and robust picture of what is occurring. ACORN coverage has been biased, incomplete, and sloppily mishandled. Let’s hope the aforementioned examples help to set the record straight.

Here’s the Saturday morning round-up on the Census Bureau story for the formerly mainstream media, checking out their home Web pages:

Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, CBS News, CNN Sucks — story isn’t there. WashPost did run a piece about the Big Government expose’ in DC.

MSNBC, to its credit, posted a link to an AP version of the story near the top of their homepage. Some of the others above have the AP story too, but they don’t headline it on their homepages. This is significant because all the major news organizations have an auto-feed of wire service stories to their sites — MSNBC just took the trouble to link it from their homepage.

Fox News of course has followed the story all along, and the Washington Times ran the AP version.

And kudos to ABC News (top of their homepage) and reporter Jake Tapper. Unlike the other lazy and indifferent bureaus listed above, Tapper stayed on the story doing original reporting, crediting Fox News and Big Government for their scoops, embedded one of James O’Keefe’s YouTube videos in his story, and got a response that no one else did:

Read the full article here.