The business press and the financial analysts and economists they consult continue to mostly blindly rely on the seasonally adjusted figures the government and other economic report generators hand them on a silver platter.

If these de facto stenographers had dug just a little deeper a month ago, they might have avoided the serious embarassment of predicting a level of seasonally adjusted March job growth that was only half of the quarter-million they confidently predicted.

In Chicago, incumbent Mayor and longtime Democrat fixture Rahm Emanuel floated the idea of renaming one of its airports after President Obama. After all, according to Emanuel, both of Chicago's major airports, O'Hare and Midway, are "named after battleships." No they're not, as will be seen after the jump.

The Chicago Tribune's Bill Ruthhart failed to recognize Emanuel's startling gaffe until the fifth paragraph of his story. Even then, he treated his breathtaking ignorance as some kind of routine, unimportant mistake. If you have a hard time imagining the Trib giving a Republican or conservative committing a similar whopper such an easy time of it, join the club.

Although the Associated Press recently claimed the jobs situation in the U.S was looking “robust” and “healthy,” one South Carolina woman called that a “slap in the face.”

The woman, Alice Lang from Spartanburg County, South Carolina, wrote to Forbes contributor John Zogby to share her story. She also condemned the practice of not counting long-term unemployed as unemployed.

The business press's ability to keep up the appearances of "recovery is just around the corner" for over 5-1/2 years has been simultaneously amazing and disgusting. One of their strategies has been to define a "new normal" which is only presented that way because everyone knows deep-down that as long as the left controls economic policy, the nation's economy won't ever really get any better than it currently is. Another involves lowering the bar. An example of that would be the ridiculous new definition of full employment as representing an unemployment rate of 5.5 percent.

A third tactic, demonstrated in a Thursday Bloomberg report, is to feign ignorance.

Stocks took a beating yesterday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 279 points. The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ each declined by over one percent.

The subject line of a USA Today email I received shortly after the closing bell crystallized the establishment press "wisdom": "Dow plunges nearly 280 points as strong jobs data raises Fed rate hike fears." The problem is that even though the government's reported seasonally adjusted payroll job additions of 295,000 were indeed strong and beat expectations, the underlying raw data doesn't support the excitement.