Pack journalism found the easy story in Friday's Labor Department announcement -- that U.S. job growth was gangbusters in April. Since good news is bad news these days, this was as about as bad as it gets. As everyone knows, evidence of such robust payroll growth will all but clinch another interest rate hike in June. In case there were any doubts about this, figures for February and March were revised upward to reflect purportedly significant gains in those months as well. Here's the way the Wall Street Journal wrote it up: 'The American job market may finally be catching up with the economy's growth. The evidence early Friday sparked hopes among investors that recent signs of a 'soft patch' were overblown, before fears of more aggressive interest-rate increase kicked in by day's end.' We've come to expect better from the Journal, which may be the only big-circulation daily in America that has deigned to tune out Paris Hilton, celebritydom's reigning Antichrist. Be that as it may, we searched the paper's online round-up in vain for Friday's real story -- that Uncle Sam's spinmeisters have resorted to a statistical full-court press to condition the American public for more credit tightening. As evidence, consider the following. Non-farm payrolls were said to have grown by 274,000 jobs in April, nearly 100,000 more than 'expected.' But according to a source I deem more trustworthy than Labor's public relations department, 250,000 of the supposed jobs came from a statistical sleight of hand called the Birth/Death Adjustment. Here's how it works: As companies are born and others die, jobs are created and lost. But because not all such activity is measured by surveys, the government's statisticians simply try to guess how many jobs they should add or subtract in a given month to account for
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