Breitbarts heaping elephant dung on themselves.

SO, the latest mini Breitbart outrageous outrage spreading around the wingnutosphere has now been demoted to just another debunked conspiracy theory.  Well knock me over with a feather.  

First the Shtick..  mini Breitbarts: BLS Fail    They have deduced from speculation and hearsay overheard by their unnamed sources precisely how the Bureau of Labor Statistics might have cooked the books in the most recent unemployment data that showed some modest improvement;

Except, um, it turns out that number wasn't right. They forgot to include CALIFORNIA, the most populous and economically depressed state in the country. A source at the Labor Department brushed aside the omission by saying that, sometimes, if a state office is under-manned they don't complete all the jobless claims in time to report them to BLS.

In other words, the dog ate their homework.

I have long marveled at the slow-march disintegration of the once Golden State, but has the state really become so utterly dysfunctional that it can not process jobless claims in a timely fashion?

But the conspiracy theory they are promoting about job statistics is completely unfounded.   California EDD denies it under-reported jobless claims

The California Employment Development Department is denying news reports that it failed to fully report the number of Californians who filed new jobless claims last week.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning reported a bigger-than-expected drop in seasonally adjusted new jobless claims for the week ended Oct. 6.

A number of news sources quoted an unidentified labor department spokesman saying the large drop was caused by the failure of one large state to report all of its claims. They quoted other sources speculating the large state must have been California.

In a statement, EDD Director Pam Harris said, “Reports that California failed to fully report data to the U.S. Department of Labor, as required, are incorrect and irresponsible. The California Employment Development Department, which administers the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program in the state, has reported all UI claims data and submitted the data on time.”

It singled out a report from Business Insider that quoted a DOL spokesman saying, “When a state’s jobless claims bureau is short-staffed, sometimes the state does not process all of the claims that came in during the week in time to get them to the DOL. The source believes that this is what happened this week.”

I doubt they will issue a retraction.  You can't un-feed the hyenas after you've thrown the red meat into their cage.