FU - FairAndUNbalanced.com

Do you know how many women – what percent of the job losses were women? 92.3 percent of the job losses during the Obama years has been women who’ve lost those jobs. The real war on women has been the job losses as a result of the Obama economy.

 - Mitt Romney, April 10, 2012

They used January 2009. So why didn't they use February?

Mitt Romney accuses the Obama administration of causing job losses that hit women so hard that 92.3 percent of those losses have been women going unemployed. To get that, his people took total number of jobs held on January 1, 2009, about 3 weeks before Barack Obama became President Obama and compared that number to the total number of jobs in March of this year. They broke that down by men and women.

92.3 percent is a very high percent. President Obama took office on January 20, 2009, so why not use figures for January 20, rather than January 1? There is a good reason. There are no figures for January 20, 2009. The numbers are calculated the first of every month. January 20 is closer to the beginning of February than to the beginning of January. Right? So isn't using January 1, almost three weeks before President Obama took office, a little unfair?

Well, no actually. The percent for women would be even higher, if the next available month had been used. Bad as 92.3 percent looks, it would have looked even worse if the Romney folks had started with the February figures.

So why didn't the Romney people use February, 2009, instead January? After all, the figure against women would have been even higher than 92.3 percent if they had. So why not use the number that would make President Obama look worse?

Well, it was because the Romney people wanted to lean over backward to be fair.

Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha

Okay, so maybe there was another reason.

You see, one major, major reason women suffered proportionately more job losses since the beginning of 2009 is that men had already been hit with huge job losses. The earliest part of the recession hit men hardest. Men happened to hold more construction jobs, and construction jobs got hit before much of anything else. Men also held more manufacturing jobs than women did. And manufacturing jobs were the next to go. Most of that happened before President Obama took office.

If Mitt Romney had taken job losses from the beginning of the recession he would have used the figure 36%. As in 36% of job losses happened as employees who were women became ex-employees who were women. 36% doesn't sound as dramatic. And "since the beginning of the recession" definitely doesn't sound as MittRomneyish as "since President Obama made the recession worse."

But February would have looked worse for the President. So why didn't they use February?

Even with January, 2009, instead of the beginning of the recession, the numbers would have looked like maybe the worst was already happening as Obama took the reins. So the Romney people used only percentages, then they subtracted out job gains to get net job losses. They did that for both men and women. If they hadn't done that, Mitt Romney would have been pointing out that much different percentages.

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones Magazine provides the Romney figures in chart form. When President Obama's policies passed Congress and went into effect, job losses stopped and job gains started.

Men started gaining before women did. Kind of like FIFO in reverse. Not First In, First Out. More like First Out, First In.

The Romney figures are bogus because once the Obama policies went into effect, jobs started coming back.

Okay, I know. Bogus or not, The same mystery remains. February would have looked worse. So why didn't they use February? After the job gains, which hadn't quite made up for the losses before Obama policies went into effect, the net number of losses for women would have been more than the net total. That's because men finally started getting more jobs back than they lost. That sounds kind of dry, but it would have produced a truly startling Romney result. Mitt Romney would have stood before the American people saying the following:

Do you know how many women – what percent of the job losses were women? Three hundred percent of the job losses during the Obama years has been women who’ve lost those jobs.

Even Republicans would have gagged on that one. Imagine that. Three hundred percent!! Women took on three hundred percent of job losses.

Better stick with January 1. They'll never swallow 300. But maybe they'll go for 92. Whaddya think, Mitt?