Roger Federer's between the legs put-away shot was novel when he tried it in Europe, but in Queens it begins to look like a signature brand or a quirk. Not something you teach. Studying the Federer set-up, the reaction of the crowd (smiles, shrugs, laughter, no amazement this time), I am thinking of how the court media now respond to an Obama trick speech. Smiles, shrugs, laughter, no amazement.  POTUS hit a low point with the Oval Office speech on the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.  POTUS does not have his game back.  The remarks on Iraq this news cycle will not dazzle.  Lots of palaver, generalities, moving in the right direction, support the troops, promises kept, palaver.  The trick shot is that POTUS can stand up and do it at all, since he brings no new thing to the court media.   The Democrats in the stands are exiting early from the center court, back to their campaigns to hold on to 60%-plus districts in Blue states, since everything else looks to be in jeopardy.  Time for a new trick shot, POTUS.   (Mention the whisper that POTUS disdains the job, that POTUS feels trapped by his historical significance, that POTUS limits himself to a handful of aides and no outside counsel, that POTUS is happiest deep inside the bubble with a cigarette and a pout at any 9th tee.)

It is a mystery to many professionals why POTUS continues to talk around the jobs problem no matter the season, no matter the conflict.  The Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana (sister of the New Orleans mayor, Mitch Landrieu) implores POTUS to speak of jobs lost with the moratorium on deepwater drilling (below, Landrieu with Governor Bobby Jindal).  POTUS refuses in his speech at Xavier University on Sunday 29 to mention the issue in his remarks  Instead, POTUS speaks of education, of the 100-year barrier constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers, of the excitement of New Orleans still searching for a return to the status quo.  The White House conducted the speech like a campaign event, with the usual wall of diversity arranged like mannequins behind the lordly POTUS.  The White House is mechanical.  POTUS is mechanical.  This was POTUS's first trip to New Orleans in 20 months in office.  Not much to show for his big talk during the 2008 campaigns.  Has POTUS lost his touch?  John Fund observes that John McCain's clumsiness made Candidate Obama look better than the fact of the matter.  Without an opponent for POTUS to parry and mock, POTUS is not magic.  Or has POTUS made a decision that he does not want to do this job?  There are rules to the White House.  You play the country from the point of view of the polls.

  

The shadow that looms over the economic recovery is made up of many parts of disorder and uncertainty, but certainly the most obvious are Fannie and Freddie and the $12 trillion residential mortgage market, a quarter of which may already be underwater.  The video above by the trenchant Jim Klinge (a/k/a "Jim the Realtor" from the vibrant and transparently rueful http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/Calculated Risk site) illustrates the challenge for San Diego County, and in doing so represents the top of the pile of the challenge.  This Carmel Valley (below) location, location, location is the best of the national mess.  A 2005-built house that goes into foreclosure and goes back to the bank, is then listed by the indifferent and cautious bank with an out-of-town broker (Sacramento?) at $789,900, and is then dumped after 58 days on an FHA loan bid at $650K.  This is a 17% discount for a newer home in an attractive neighborhood of an active and far from abandoned-all-hope city.  Use this formula for all the housing out there.  We are now down 30% from the peak, with another 17% AND HIGHER to go.  Whole neighborhoods must be marked down before we can start repairing the black holes of Fan and Fred.  So far, in the extend and pretend fiasco engineered by the Obama administration and Congress, we see just one-offs, rogue listings, more of the wait-until-prices-recover.  "This was the REO listed by a Sacramento broker," Jim explains on the video.  "... listed this for $789,900, I believe, and just showed up closed, 58 days on the market...get this, $650,000 FHA... ...650 FHA for 3700 square feet... it's a great time to look, good time to be a looker.   It took somebody to have the guts to make an offer to FHA to get this deal....I don't think we're going to see the whole market dump like this...tract homes built in '05. ..we'll see.."

Among the few unbounded joys left me in this century is the plotting for the NEO (Near Earth Objects) or pair of NEOs that will come suddenly (or slowly) and strike the Earth at 14 km/second. The scenarios are rehearsed. There will be surprises. Are we ready? No. Can we prepare? Yes.  Will we?  That is politics.  It is celestial Russian roulette.  One bullet in the chamber of the solar system.  Where does it strike.  Not if.

The news report is that the Pakistan-rooted genius above, who performed in a self-loathing fashion for world-weary youthful celebrities on "Canadian Idol," is part of the trio of jihadi plotters arrested in Canada. Bomb parts, plans and jihad lit in their possession.  It takes a strong man not to break down laughing at the fact that these bozos are likely not all that different from the characters who conducted 9-11.  The routine lesson that a mind is a terrible thing to waste has not reached the jihad websites.  These sad sacks are said to be seeking an act of violence to redeem the marginal folly of their privileged and pointless lives.   Reminds me of the Marine guideline, be nice to all you meet (in Iraq, Afghanistan and so forth Ummah wilderness), and have a plan to kill them.  The Canadians are baby chumps to tolerate this cretinous crowd of wannabees.  Shrug.  I suppose I am jumping to conclusions. A puzzle is, Was their trash talk about building a bomb for the US or Canada or the "Idol" Green Room?  The facts supprt that they were part of a gang.  Three of the gang are now fled overseas to Dubai and so forth.  The three nabbed geniuses, appearing in court, are part of a well-financed delusional plot.  One of them traveled to Iran in order to slip into Afghanistan for bomb training.  Again, we are not seeing much about the root causes here of poverty and alienation.  These are manicured, spoiled, relentless punks who are web-savvy and self-indulgent.  Jihad this, guys.

Spoke Mary Kissel, AWSJ, and Gordon Chang, Forbes, re the surprise and illogical visit of President Jimmy Carter to North Korea in the midst of US State and the White House pushing for more and tougher sanctions on North Korea for the March 26 ship-sinking.  Mr. Carter is pictured smiling and buoyant.  He is said to be on a mission of mercy to rescue a troubled American who decided foolishly to travel to North Korea without invitation, and who may have been tortured, or who may have tried to destroy himself.  It does not appear that the excuse is adequate to the sudden trip.  Mr. Carter asserts that he is traveling as a private citizen.  At the same time, a news report from South Korea states that the tyrant Kim, who is long reported suffering severe illness, is now visiting China for the second time this year.  Odd timing.  Mention that if Kim is too reduced to be photographed with Carter, a useful fiction would be to say that Kim is away.  In any event, Mr. Carter's trip is peculiar, unexplained, open to many interpretations and plainly off-message from the presumed sanctions regime against a rogue regime and a failed state of thugs and slaves.  Beijing continues to sponsor and endorse the Kim crimes; the Korean peoples are correct to hold China responsible for the Kim depravity.   Mr. Carter's responsibility remains a mystery.  I jested to Mary Kissel and Gordon Chang that, if Mr. Carter received an invitation to Hades, he would check with the State Department for transportation.

Paul Vigna, DowJones, joined Joe Brusuelas, Bloomberg, and me this evening to lay down the facts about the surprising update to the downside housing cliff-diving of the last month -- down 27% in an unprecedented way.  Paul Vigna calls it "the worst possible news," and adds that everyone expected it down 14% and not market-moving.  This was a blow.  The housing inventory supply now skyrockets to 12 months, which is a disaster. I was told months ago that a 10-month supply was a disaster. Jeremy Siegel of the Wharton School joined to say that the tax policy must be clarified, that POTUS must lead, that there is no glass half full if the uncertanty continues about taxes. Larry Kotlikoff of Boston University joined to say that the uncertainty was across the board -- taxes, healthcare, stimulus. There were several voices looking to Quantitative Easing Lite being replaced by QE 2. All eyes on the revision of the 2nd-quarter number on Friday morning and then Ben Bernake's remarks to Jackson Hole.

Spoke Mary Kissel, WSJ at Sydney on Sunday 22, and speaking Peter Coleman, Liberals, and Andrew Shearer, former National Security Adviser, Libaerals, Monday 23 on the thrilling indecision in Oz -- with Labour's Julia Gillard and Liberals' Tony Abbott both making claims on a Minority Government. The winner needs 76 seats. Many ballots remain to be counted. But the projections remain the same, 73 for Abbott, 72 for Gillard. Splinter parties such as Greens and the Sex Party and a trio of Crocodile Dundee/Mad Max lads from "the country" (Outback) all have a say in the final coalition. Too much fun. The Oz dollar is down; the mining companies (who revile Labour) are up; and we all await more zoology from Oz. The video above is courtesy the clever Japanese: great fun, most popular in Oz. You can see that the Sex Party exists, though it is hard to believe. More from Mary Kissel on Tuesday 25 after she gets back to HK.

Speaking Mary Kissel, WSJ, on Sunday 22 (Monday 23 in Sydney) re the hung parliament from the Australian general election just concluded. Mary Kissel reported Friday 20 (Saturday 21 in Sydney) that it was considered the most exciting election in fifty years, and this was before the results that leave Tony Abbott and the Liberals with an inchworm lead over PM Julia Gillard.  The projections just now are for Liberals 73 and Labour 72, with a handful of independents to determine the flimsy 76 needed for majority choice of a PM.  Mary Kissel posts on Twitter that the negotiations are under way and remain at odds.   Recommend watching on Twitter, most lively and playful.  #ausvotes.   In sum, it looks like the same sort of inconclusive result as what recently settled London with David Cameron and Nick Clegg as the coalition.   The new normal for Old Blighty and Oz is no normal.  Oz will now enter the Talking Cure of Politics.  Is this a trend?  A product of parliamentary system muddiness?  On the other hand, it looks as though the Liberals surged into authority after two years of living in the shadows.  What did Labour do wrong?  Spending and taxes, taxes and spending.  And there was that creative nuttiness launched by the disgraced and discarded Kevin Rudd that Global Warming was the end of Mankind and elephants, too.

Madeleine Lim, DowJones, tells colleague Simon Constable that the corporations will not hire until there is a solution to Regime Uncertainty -- chiefly taxes to pay for the deficits as well as the healthcare and the FinReg geniuses. This is an official observation by a professional who is paid to describe certainty to the markets, and to identify uncertainty where it exists.  The Obama administration has been weakened by its stubbornness to spend (stimulus and bailouts) and pretend (mortgage adjustments, mortgage purchases, Fannie/Freddie zombiehood), a simple political calculation aimed to get to the election with the jobs-created number improving month to month.  Spoke Joseph Brusuelas, Bloomberg, who says the GDP downgrade by JP Morgan Chase to 1.5% or so for the remainder of the year means that we are looking at the risk of a decline in jobs again in 2011.  Instead of adding the needed 150-200K jobs per month in the fourth quarter, we will add 50-100K, and this means that we are shrinking the employed because it does not account for population growth -- all the demand for jobs from the young joining the workforce.  Next year, the jobless rate, measured by household survey, will likely climb above 10%.  Expect noisy, paradoxical, venomous revolution by August 2011, cheered by a GOP Congress.  

The Lockerbie bomber Al-Magrahi fraud is deepening the problems of the Obama administration to escape the inevitable "What did you know and when did you know it?" inquiries that will begin anew after the midterm. The Gordon Brown government cravenly signed off on this scam, and the Scottish government is not an adult enterprise, entirely dependent upon London and so forth. Still, gentlemen are hard-pressed to listen to the details of how the Scots went along with the fake medical reports, and how the Brits connived with BP for Libyan oil rights in exchange for al-Magrahi's sorry soul, and how the White House signed off on the scam -- gentlemen are hard-pressed to listen and not to break down laughing in public. Straight face now.  The mass-murdering al-Magrahi has only three months to live, and it is a miracle that he has now been dead for nine months and still insists upon saying he is alive.

My producer/engineer David Goodman secured the Howard Dean interview this afternoon for the "Goodman to Go" feature on WABCRadio.com, and within an hour of his sending it out, the story had raced through the partisan sites and was national news. Congratulations to David, and I spoke to him in the first hour re his worthy achievement. Meanwhile, the Howard Dean remark, calling the mosque at Ground Zero an "affront," has damaged if not derailed the Democratic momentum to condemn all opponents as Gingrichian hate clowns. More soon. What tidy and gentle theater that the great and powerful White House message unit was undone for an evening by an earnest, hardworking 24-year-old tyro with a splendid weekly few minutes of his own on a podcast on the WABC website -- what was David's earnest, thoughtful, passionate genius is now the national hot story for mid-August.

Liz Cheney is attached to the heartbreaking ad above, and it is a stunner.  Try this with the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" being hummed instead of the piano and orchestra background.  POTUS in Ohio takes a tossed question about his confusing remarks on the mosque and says, in rehearsed casualness, that he has "No regrets." Meanwhile, there is evidence from the across the Senate races and from the Rust Belt CDs that the Independents are stepping away from the Democrats. The White House is at the center of this tempest now, and the story has moved 'way past the POTUS palaver. No time even to stop to laugh about Nancy Pelosi calling this a "zoning" dispute.  New polling shows that 2 out of 3 New Yorkers, and 2 out of 3 Americans, oppose the mosque at the present site. The op-ed gang, led by Maureen Dowd, NYT, and Richard Cohen, WaPo, are struggling to frame this as First Amendment stuff. This does not hold up, because of the detail that the request by opponents such as two-thirds of New York is that the mosque be built, as Harry Reid obligingly says, "someplace else." The Democrats who argue First Amendment and the partisans who attack the GOP as intolerant are making the Error of the Third Kind: answering the wrong question precisely. It is not if http://www.nationalreview.com/node/244104 the mosque is to be built; it is where the mosque is to be built.

The hard-pressed Rick Scott, running for Republican nomination for governor in Florida, gets to the Ground Zero mosque story swiftly and plainly.  Harry Reid does the Democrats a service late in the news cycle by declaring, through a spokesman, that he thinks the mosque should be built "someplace else."   Miami Beach?  Searchlight?  Spoke Victor Hanson, Hoover, re the Harry Reid remark, asking him if the Majority Leader has thrown POTUS under the bus.  Victor tells the anecdote of lunching with a Democratic congressman of his acquaintance in the San Joaquin Valey, who, when asked about POTUS, says that he doesn't want POTUS anywhere near his district.  Victor remarks that POTUS is a narcissist who feels no responsibility to his own party or to the country.  I asked Michael McMahon, NY-13 (D) on the show this evening for a comment on the Ground Zero mosque and the White House response.  Perhaps Mr. McMahon is traveling, perhaps he is overseas (why?), but his office just declined without explanation or circumstance.  Salena Zito, PTR, remarks that new polling from the Rust Belt points to surprising leads for three healthcare "Yes" vote incumbents (and Mark Critz of PA-1 [D] - who says he would have voted against healthcare - running against modestly financed Republican challengers):

There will be blood. 

Spoke Arif Rafiq, Pakistan Policy Blog, re the monsoons in Pakistan that have swept down from the Northwest Provinces, from the Khyber Pass region, into the breadbasket of the Punjab and now into the populous region of the Sindh province before they reache the megacity of Karachi and the Arabian Sea.  The numbers of the afflicted are now at 20 millions and climbing.   UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon declares it the worst catastrophe he has ever seen.  Only a portion of the $496 million pledged has been paid.  The monsoons will continue through the month and perhaps into September.  The Zardari government is unstable and now desperate.  The Pakistani Army is diverted to relief and rescue operations, and the US is sending helicopters and troops to assist.  The AFPak conflicts must await the crisis.  General Petraeus remarks in Kabul that the ISAF strategy is "fundamentally sound."  However, the monsoon this year is unprecedented, what Arif Rafiq tells me is a "game-changer."  The Obama administration's reliance upon Pakistan as the surrogate that would absorb the detritus of the Afghanistan fiasco in 2011 and impose a rude authority on the Taliban is now drowning in the floods. 

  

On Friday night at the White House, POTUS Obama at a gathering of significant Moslems for the Ramadan meal, proposed that religious freedom is crucial to the American way of life. Shrug. POTUS also made remarks about the Imam Feisal scheme to build a plush mosque and social center on Park Place, a step from Ground Zero.  POTUS's remarks were windy, lawyerly, dull and self-congratulatory. 

The first reaction was that POTUS had suddenly and puzzlingly injected himself in to the flap after weeks of ducking the controversy. This measure was premature. POTUS was in fact doing the usual maneuver of the double-talking academic that he manages when in trouble. The White House spin team aimed all evening to refashion the POTUS clumsiness. Democrats of note, ducking the story for weeks, now sank in their seats, knowing the tale was coming their way in the campaign. And then on Saturday, POTUS managed to make the whole fiasco much worse when he tried the double-talking routine again and demonstrated how to make a bad situation into a farce of presidential palaver.

POTUS found the way to vote "Present," once more. Now the windstorm, as the Sunday shows rebuild their formats to accommodate the Republican smirking and the Democratic sighing -- especially the New York Democrats:

The presser at the Waters office was not cleared with Pelosi. The presser was a one-direction script. The presser did not permit inquiry of other witnesses, such as Treasury officials and Hank Paulson and Barney Frank, all of whom were involved in the Ethics inquiry.  The presser did make a point that Waters demands a hearing asap, and that there is no date certain for the hearing.  In sum, the presser confirmed that the nightmare scenario continues.  Waters is now a cable TV loop item for a non-news day in mid-August, just as the Democrats begin again to make their case that the reason to vote for Democrats in November is because they are not the mean, ugly, futile, sinister Republicans.   The White House releases remarks from the POTUS pollster to say that the public disdains the GOP more than it disdains the Democrats, and therefore the GOP will not greatly challenge the House Democrats in the midterm.  This sort of sophistry is genius sophistry.  On the Waters presser Friday, Fox News offers live coverage.  More popcorn!

 

The nightmare scenario of Charlie Rangel's "I'm not going away" is now joined by the deeply strange opera of Maxine Waters conducting a press conference and briefing before cameras and a feverish media wall along with her chief of staff, Mikael Moore, who is also her grandson.  The rules established by Waters promise high spirits.  Waters will read a statement to the cameras.  Then her grandson will conduct a briefing to the cameras.  Then the cameras must leave the room.  Then Waters and Grandson Moore will field questions from the media wall about why she made phone calls on behalf of a bank where she risked losing hundred of thousands during the financial crisis.  The most ready defense line is that Maxine Waters will assert that her grandson did it -- made all those phone call without telling her -- and he will agree.   There will be blood.  Likely Nancy Pelosi's as she jams her fist through a mirror in deep distress.  Are the Democrats insane?  As insane as the GOP?  Spoke Jordan Fabian, The Hill, who explains that the two-year investigation of Rangel and Waters just dragged out to this ragged conclusion.  The latest whisper number of how many House seats the GOP can win is 65.

  

Spoke Tim Homan, Bloomberg, to learn that the trade gap today is much worse than expected and points to a lower annual growth rate. The Great Stall started not in the third quarter of this year, but in the second quarter. Worse, the scenario includes a much lower GDP in the third quarter. Good for you, if you have a job. The annual 2010 GDP growth rate is now lowered into the 1.8 range, and 2011 no longer looks like an oasis.  At home, this means that we are spending much less, and that our annualized spending increase is at half of what it averaged over the last three years despite the larger population.  We are not only suddenly a poorer nation, we are also a meaner nation, penny-pinchers.  Good for us.  However, the government spending that was supposed to move us back into a consuming society is now a burden that will pinch our pennies for decades.  David Wessl, WSJ, argues that we are going to grow our way out of this with a gradually increasing population.  Not a politically useful stat to have to wait till 2050 to balance the budget.  The Federal and State governments are going to shrink.  How fast, how dramatically, is the political question.  Landon Thomas, NYT, tells me from London that the long-mocked Permabears are now hosting feverishly well-attended conferences and attracting the richest of clients.  No one is laughing at the prospect of a "bloody, deep recession" starting from here and 15% official unemployment by 2011.  The Street now develops a bear gap between the Euro Permabears and the ordinary modest recovery Bears of the US cables.

Spoke Sam Youngman, The Hill, who chatted with Robert Gibbs of the White House last Friday afternoon and now publishes the story that creates a tempest in the Progressive team. Mr. Gibbs cleverly suggested that the Progressives who compare Mr. Obama to Mr. Bush need to get drug-tested. Gibbs also indicated that the Progressives won't be happy until we have a Canadian healthcare and the Pentagon is ashes. "That's not reality!" he exclaims.  Later, Mr. Gibbs suggested that he had been "inartful" in his remarks.   No one is apologizing, and the Progressive Caucus member Congressman Keith Ellison is calling for Gibbs's resignation.  Is this the pressure of the midterm tsunami that is reported coming the White House way?  Yes.  Hey, Robert, it's just cheap talk and wine.  Take a vacay, pal.

    

Jet Blue flight attendant Steve Slater, 39, is a folk hero after exploding in a tantrum onboard a just-arrived-from-Pittsburgh Jet Blue aircraft at JFK. The story so far is that a female passenger, unnamed, broke rules and reached for her overhead luggage while the plane was still taxiing to a gate. Slater asked her to return to her seat. She refused. A piece of luggage from overhead fell and struck Slater on the head. Slater melted down and started cursing the whole aircraft (AP presents another version), with and without the intercom. In his rage, he then initiated the emergency exit chute, slid down, went to his car and drove home to Queens. Later arrested, he is pictured smiling in handcuffs. "I've been in this business for 28 years. That's it, I've had it." An anti-hero for our times.  Slater the Newly Jobless.   Perhaps these thoughts go through your mind when you meet the usual frustrations of doing commerce these days.  I am guilty every day.  Is this what we've always worked for?  A boiling mob of worried and dutiful folk who, when confronted with rule-breakers and rudeness and indifference, just lose it?  Anger management is a survival tactic these days.  And this jobless drift is promised for years and years.

The NYT publishes revelations about the background of WikiLeaks suspect PFC Bradley Manning that turns this into a surprise version of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."  Along the way, Manning associated with a self-described drag queen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and through him Manning is believed to have met politically motivated computer hackers. The story becomes obvious after all. Manning seeks attention. Manning self-medicates. Manning self-destructs.  WikiLeaks is the weapon of choice. Manning vanishes into military prison for a few decades. The story is less about security and more about negation. Sad and disturbing. The don't ask, don't tell policy has just become dangerous. And the FBI investigation is turning up a completely tragic narrative.  Manning told and told and told, and now the Army must investigate another rogue solider.

The narrative continues to shift in Afghanistan in a fashion that does not support the Obama administration's ambitions to negotiate with the Taliban and hand over the battlefield to the Pakistan army. The Time Magazine cover of the mutilated face of the 18-year-old Aisha, a victim of Taliban sadism, was a blow to the peace-at-all-costs crowd of the Democratic Left. The massacre of Christian missionaries by the usual gangster crew of the Taliban-for-hire crowd is certain to gain the attention of the pulpits, especially the evangelical and Baptist pulpits across the Red states. The Obama team now must explain how it can provide safety for the Afghans left behind while at the same time it explains what it can possibly say to a savage warlord such as Hekmatyar or Haqqani or Omar.  "Please, don't massacre the Christians"?

There is a debate if the Taliban's claim of responsibility is credible.  There is the suggestion that the killers were highwaymen. I don't seek to settle the debate.  I mention that the pushback by the Left must include the routine sophistry that there is a distinction between a fanatically stupid killer and a fiercely greedy killer.  Guys with guns who kill Americans, Brits and Germans in that part of Afghanistan, lorded over by Hekmatyar's devils, those guys are just bad road -- more of the same bad road that the Obama team believes it can leave behind.  I ask myself, how does POTUS give the order to Lt. Gen James Mattis to retreat from guys who rob and murder doctors and brag about it?   Dr. Janet Roos, 36, KIA, is now on the front page of the Times of London.  There will be blood.

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The late-breaking news of Mark Hurd's sudden departure as boss of HP is a worthy distraction to all the predictably unhappy news in the marketplace. One big guy loses his job, and we get to flap about it with a dose of cautious Schadenfreude. Spoke Ashlee Vance, NYT, in SIlicon Valley, with Jeff Bliss of this show, and we went over the few facts with much puzzlement. Out of nowhere, resigned suddenly, not for sexual harassment but for irregular expense account entries that were related to Hurd's contact with an unnamed female contractor. The critical detail is that Gloria Allred has been retained as the woman's attorney, though she is releasing statements that are consisten with defending "Mark."  Can't make this stuff up.  Popcorn!  Mention that Jeff Bliss reports that there are deeply cynical heroes in Silicon Valley who report that Carly Fiorina is enjoying the farce.

The rumored spike in wheat prices started well before the Russian decision to end exports. The immediate assumption is that food supplies will come under pressure, as Russia was expected to export 11 million tons of wheat and may very well need to import now. The disruption of the day that was more peculiar was the rumor that flew through the markets that POTUS was going to rescue his party by ordering the Treasury to use TARP and stimulus money to purchase billions of dollars of troubled mortgages. It hasn't happened yet. But the rumor was much credited just because of all the bad news in housing and jobs. Late in the day came the genuine trouble for the Obama team that the bad jobs number in the morning will be accompanied by the news that Christina Romer, chief of economic advisers at the White House, will quit Washington for more time with her family. Christina Romer is the voice that has counseled patience and determination these last 18 months of bad jobs reports. Rumors of the news spin artist for the Council point to either the famous Austan Goolsbee or the lugubrious Jared Bernstein. Perhaps the day was all about Christina. Bad news comes in threes. Wheat. Mortgages. Christina.

Genial and slippery Jared Bernstein is the economic adviser to VPOTUS Biden, and in this stunning four-minute performance of misdirection and distraction, Mr. Bernstein communicates why the Obama administration is deeply, deeply lost inside its own defensiveness. Never answer the question. Never admit error. Never sound convincing. Never stop hoping. Eight million jobs gone. Adding 100K a month. Check back in seven years? I am told we need 250K jobs per month just to stay even with the population growth. The Obama team maintains a rearview mirror vision of the future. Wherever it believes we are, it believes it is better than what it can see in the rearview mirror of the stimulus package of 2009 (signing below). Shrug. Does Jared Bernstein understand private enterprise? The Federal government cannot pick winners. Does he know this? He speaks as if he is working for Louis XVI. Bernstein loses me when he says, "Give you an example, I told you about advanced batteries..."  What do I like more?  That Jared Bernstein thinks he is fooling us?  Or that Jared Bernstein knows that we aren't fooled and hates his life?

John McCain fires a torpedo that strikes below the waterline in the Good Ship POTUS when he declares to Don Imus that POTUS left out granting George Bush credit for the Iraqi surge because POTUS is "small-minded." No argument. POTUS is bootless with regard his friends and his foes. POTUS appears to have no friends or comrades or allies or even genuine adversaries. POTUS lives in a bubble of permanent petulance and vainglory. Does POTUS overstate on purpose? Does POTUS listen to his own overstatements?  This once passed for confidence. Now it sounds mechanical and frail and, yes, small.

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Aaron Klein reports that HizbAllah staged the provocation on the Israeli-Lebanon border this news cycle at Tehran's direction. The aim is to create trouble in order to get past the impending UN report that will name the HizbAllah as the masterminds of the Hairiri assassination in February 2005. Riyadh is aiming to purchase (lease) the Assads of Damascus. The Assads are aiming to blame Nasrallah for the Hairiri killing.  Nasrallah looks to his patron Tehran for help as he is made a fall guy.  Tehran orders the provocation to light up the landscape and make Riyadh blink.  Everyone is worried about Tehran's sinister temper.   Follow? This is the Middle East shuffle. It still comes down to Tehran versus American firepower and Israeli vigilance. Am told that Netanyahu has ordered the IDF to stand down from confrontation. Bibi wants all quiet on the northern front. The bricks are about to fall on Nasrallah. Civil war is imminent in Lebanon. There will be blood.

The Congressional Black Caucus pushes back at the Democrats on the Hill, and at Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, by sending out agents with the tale of woe that there is a double standard in the Ethics Committee when it moves against the senior CBC lawmakers, Rangel and Waters. John Fund, WSJ, observes that there is a double standard with regard the CBC -- the double standard entirely favors the CBC. I puzzle why POTUS spoke against Rangel, remarking that it was time to go after forty years. Did POTUS think this would move Charlie Rangel? Not this week.  My observation is that the CBC, in breaking with the Pelosi leadership and in defying the White House, is making it clear that it will not be part of the approaching fiasco of the midterm:  Blame Pelosi, not us.  Blame POTUS, not us.

Walsingham on the Hunt.  

Fresh report from the Boston Globe points to a wider net of hackers and cronies who were in contact with the suspect Pfc Manning.  SecDef Gates and Admiral Mullen both pointed to a harsher pursuit last week.  Manning is said to have a familiar and trite antiwar agenda about Iraq and Afghanistan.  The FBI joins the search for accomplices -- and for other documents than the ones said to be in the WikiLeaks files. Also, the question begins as to what part WikiLeaks played in encouraging Manning -- and in directing other ops to Manning to assist his subterfuge and theft.  The original clear story that WikiLeaks was a conduit only is getting foggy.  Manning is now said to be in solitary confinement.  Manning is under Army justice and Army rules.  Manning's fate is bleak.  Whatever he says can and will be used to make him an elderly inmate.  Will WikiLeaks survive?  Will Assange flee?  The prisoner's dilemma pertains.  Walsingham on the hunt and no end in sight.  Prepare the Tower.   The early response from the White House, that there was no news here, is an older narrative now.  The news is that it is possible that a conspiracy of antiwar hackers and accomplices penetrated national security files with the motive of sabotage.  There will be blood.  Prepare the Tower.  Mention that Eric Schmitt, NYT, pointed to this widening net when we spoke of rumors of "other documents" not in NYT hands, perhaps not in WikiLeaks hands, perhaps with unnamed others, on Thursday 29.

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