The headline Jack Welch Is Wrong! ‘It’s Outrageous’ to Say the Jobs Number is Manipulated: EPI’s Mishel comes from the interview on Yahoo!’s Daily Ticker pod cast.

“It’s a shock to hear that anybody can think that these numbers were manipulated,” say Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, in the accompanying interview with The Daily Ticker. “Having followed these numbers for 25 years and knowing the people who put them out it’s absolutely bizarre…It’s outrageous. The data is based on surveys of tens of thousands of employers and households every month.”

In the interview, Lawrence Mishel called the people who claim the number to be manipulated “despicable”.

Even before you hear what Lawrence Mishel says about the numbers’ non-political import, you can tell by Jack Welch’s response how bad they seem for Republicans’ political ambitions and therefore how good they must be for the economy.

After all, if the numbers could be forced to be manipulated by President Obama, he certainly would not have them manipulated to make himself look bad.

This follows along with the logic of President Obama’s remarks in the debate that Mitt Romney would not keep the details of his economic plans secret because they were too good to tell to the public.

I think that a con-man like Mitt Romney would of course keep his plans secret because the pigeons wouldn’t fall for the plan if they knew the details or knew that the plan did not actually exist. I wonder if the President was being too subtle by not stating the case against Romney the way I just did.

Perhaps the President understands psychology better than I do. People being conned tend to stick up for the con man even more strongly when their judgment is put in doubt by being told by someone else that they are being conned.