[J.P.’s Moment of Common Sense on Broad View, KJFK 1230 AM Reno.  Listen live Saturdays at 3:00 PM Pacific Time.]

Wednesday, the Commerce Department released numbers for the 4th quarter and it turns out the U.S. economy shrank—that’s right, shrank—for the first time since the middle of 2008.  That was smack dab in the middle of the recession which officially began in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009.

Everybody remembers 2008, right?  Bush was president, home prices were plummeting, people were losing their jobs, investment banks were going under, and the stock market was in free fall.  Times were gloomy, really gloomy.  And scary.

Last year when the president was running for re-election he told us over and over again the economy is slowly recovering but this report suggests we headed back down while he was still campaigning.  It’s amazing how much we’ve learned about the desperate state of the economy since the election.  It’s almost like government agencies, the media, and our elected representatives in Washington were making a conscious effort to deceive us.

A week after November’s election I wrote about the various delayed reports that suddenly appeared.  Within three days of Barack Obama’s re-election, the State Department warned about another credit downgrade for U.S. debt, thousands of layoffs from defense contractors delayed by order of the Labor Department and OMB were announced, the White House renewed its support for U.N. gun control, Harry Reid said he was going to end the filibuster, we found out that Iran fired a missile at us (months earlier), the USDA let us know that a record number of people were on food stamps, the Justice Department announced that Jesse Jackson, Jr.—just re-elected himself—was pleading guilty to multiple felonies, the Interior Department let everyone know it was grabbing 1.6 million acres of public land for sage grouse, and the CIA director resigned in a sex scandal.

Whew!  Let me take a breath.

All of that bad news went public in the first three days after the election and all of it was known before the election but the powers-that-be didn’t tell us.  Some of those reports were due and even legally required before the election but the due dates were ignored.  Defense contractors were literally ordered by the government to delay layoff notices, required on November 1st, until after the election.  You can see why.  Jeepers, it would look awfully bad to have thousands of layoffs five days before Election Day while the president was on the campaign trail bragging about the economy.

So to heck with the law.  Who cares about the law?

The bad news kept coming after those first three days.  The very day I published my column, November 15, the Census Bureau announced a spike in poverty numbers and the Washington Post analyzed the economy and decided—surprise, surprise—that this recovery, with Obama as president, is the worst recovery from recession in the nation’s history.  I knew that.  Everyone who knows a lick about economics knew that.  But the Washington Post made sure they waited until it was too late before printing it.

All last year the president traveled the country reading stuff like this off his teleprompter:

“Our economy started growing again six months after I took office and it has continued to grow for the last three years.”

And like this:

“Our businesses have gone back to basics and created over 4 million jobs in the last 27 months; more private sector jobs than were created during the entire seven years before this crisis, in a little over two years.”

It’s utter nonsense.  There were fewer Americans working on the day Obama was re-elected than the day he took office and now we know the economy started recovering before he was sworn in, then stopped recovering and headed back down in the 4th quarter.  That was the truth and that’s what they didn’t want us to know on November 6th.

The bad news continues.  Almost every day there’s something we should have been told before the election.  Housing sales were revised downward right after the election, we found out GM was manufacturing vehicles to look good but nobody was actually buying them, Jeep is cutting production in Ohio (just like Romney said), hospitals are laying off thousands of employees because of Obamacare, jobless claims are surging, labor unions are upset because they suddenly realize Obamacare will make their health insurance premiums skyrocket, and the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs reported that the cost to the economy of regulations created in the first three years of the Obama administration is more than twice the cost of the Clinton and Bush administrations combined.

Combined.

And now he has four more years to meddle and interfere.

Meanwhile, the White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness expired Thursday.  The president could have extended it but he apparently thinks everything is going swimmingly—mission accomplished—so we don’t need a jobs council anymore.  Like voters last November, he’s been hypnotized by his own propaganda.

That’s... today’s dose of common sense.

“Procrastination is opportunity's assassin.” —Victor Kiam

“Some people think that the truth can be hidden with a little cover-up and decoration.  But as time goes by, what is true is revealed, and what is fake fades away.” —Ismail Haniyeh

From Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA        Tweet

February 5, 2013 - It is only February of 2013 and the President (note I did not say my, cuz I sure don't want to claim him) has managed to to overlook the 1st, 2nd, 5th, 6th, 7th & 8th of the constitutional amendments. The ones he swore on a bible to uphold and defend. I really want to know at what point our citizens are gonna "get it!" – Pam T., Virginia

J.P. replies: Meanwhile he missed the deadline on submitting his budget again.  The work a president is required to do?  The dog keeps eating his homework.

February 3, 2013 - Can you say baa, baa, baaaas? We have alot of individuals that will believe anything or be led anywhere without question. There is no such thing as the news. You probably get better actual news from local stations, rather than from any of the national news networks. There are very few investigative reporters out there that will only report who, what, where and when. Instead what we get are personal editorials of what the newscasters or the owners want to put out there with their own spin. We want to believe in freedom of speech, but what we are getting is censored news. – Pam T., Virginia

February 2, 2013 - Good stuff Jim. I just wish there was a way to convince the general public of these manipulations. Keep up the good work. – Charlie H., Michigan

February 2, 2013 - Of course, you're spot on. The media has conspired with this administration to conceal what they could, under-report what they had to, and misrepresent the rest. – Don S., Missouri