Quite a few years ago I was sitting at home watching the evening news. When the weather segment started, the weatherman recapped the day's high temperature. The previous day he had forecast a high of 75 degrees, but the temperature only made it up into the 60s that day. He commented that the weather "just didn't do what it was supposed to do". Now this may seem trivial, but I couldn't help but notice that the weatherman was actually blaming the weather for his own sloppy forecasting.

I realize that forecasting the weather is not an exact science. Weathermen look at the data they have available today, and make a best guess estimate about what's going to happen tomorrow. Sometimes they're right, and sometimes they're wrong. (Actually, when forecasting more than 3 days out, they're wrong more often than not.) I know it's just the weather, but blaming mother nature for raining when you predicted it was going to be sunny just doesn't sound too swift.

Now, it's not exactly breaking news that today's society is full of people not wanting to take responsibility for their actions. So when forecasters place blame not on their forecasts, but on what they are forecasting, I'm not really all that surprised. What does surprise me however, is how often people listen to them and give credence to their attempt to shift the blame. Such is the modus operandi of the useful idiots like CNN/Money, who by the way sometimes offers investment advice from stock mogul Billy Joel. CNN looks at the "Economits" forecasts, looks at what actually happens, and then blames the economy for not doing what forecasters had predicted.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation's economy, grew at a 4.2 percent rate in the quarter after growth of 4.1 percent at the end of last year. Economists had forecast growth of 5.0 percent for the first quarter, according to a survey by Briefing.com.

Usually (probably tomorrow) they blame President Bush because the forecasters unsuccessfully predicted what the economy was going to do. Of course, the same morons offer this eloquent piece of grammar.

The report is of closely watched in Washington and Wall Street, as well as by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, whose policy-makers meet next week and are widely expected to start raising interest rates, probably later this year.

They've since corrected the "is of" mistake, but still left the entire paragraph as one big run on sentence.