Administration's figures don't add up

Here's an excerpt from a Chicago Tribune article:

For three straight days, the Homeland Security Department also gave separate tallies of the number of people evacuated from flood- and hurricane-ravaged locales.

The agency said it was in the midst Saturday of "the largest emergency domestic airlift of people in U.S. history," an effort that would yield 10,000 evacuees per day.

By Sunday, the total number of those evacuated was listed by DHS as 35,000.

On Monday, however, the agency abruptly stopped listing those figures in its daily updates.

Knocke offered two explanations. First, he said the number of evacuees had likely declined since Sunday because many people had already been sent to safer ground.

But he also said the agency stopped issuing the number of those evacuated because "it's extraordinarily difficult to provide a precise number." And he said the agency only wanted to issue numbers that it could "back up" with certainty.

That didn't stop Myers, the chairman of joint chiefs, from saying at his news conference Tuesday that the military had evacuated "more than 75,000 people" so far - a huge increase from the last homeland security update of 35,000 on Sunday.

The only reason I find this especially noteworthy is that it reminds me exactly of the constantly-shifting numbers of Iraqi soldiers we have trained. This administration can't even count. But if you point that out to one of their lobotomized followers, you get told not to play the "blame-game." Is math too much to ask for these days?