It's been a month since the 2012 campaign ended, but President Barack Obama hasn't let up on all his campaign rhetoric.
"American manufacturing is growing at the fastest pace since the 1990's," he declared in a speech Monday in Detroit.
It's a statistic he's presented before - during the campaign - and it's an overly rosy picture of U.S. employment in the manufacturing sector.
Obama is drawing his stats from a Bureau of Labor Statistics report that said 500,000 manufacturing jobs have been created since January 2010. A White House report called it "the strongest two-year period of manufacturing job growth since the late 1990's."
The problem is his figure doesn't take into account what has been lost on his watch. Manufacturing jobs are still down by roughly 600,000 since Obama's first full month in office in February 2009. The Bureau of Labor Statistics information also shows that manufacturing jobs are down by almost 6 million since the 1990's - so there's a lot of ground that can be made up.
And now there's troubling signs that manufacturing growth may be slowing. Statistics show that employment in the sector has actually started to decline the past few months, although it is sometimes difficult to get an exact count as the most recent data continues to come in.
The Washington Post reports that the total number of manufacturing jobs - 11.95 million - is the lowest in the U.S. since May 1941. The population back then, the Post points out, was less than half what it is today.
For presenting sugar-coated stats without the broader context, President Obama wins the Whopper of the Week, a distinction given by the Washington Guardian to the most glaring examples of false or misleading statements by politicians, policy makers and leaders.
