Jobless Rate, Conspiracy Theories | featured news

Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie brushed past the latest conspiracy theory Sunday, focusing instead on the fact that the unemployment rate remains at a high 7.8%.

When conspiracists suggested Friday that the Obama administration had engineered a sharp drop in unemployment to aid President Barack Obama's re-election, the response was swift. Career government officials, economists and even some Mitt Romney supporters issued a collective sigh. The staffers who compute the U.S. unemployment rate work in an agency of the Labor Department. Officials who have overseen the work say it's prepared under tight security with no White House input or supervision.