Greetings good citizen,

Today I have ‘good news’ and bad news, since I’m always giving you the bad news, we’ll lead off with the ‘good news’!

Effective July 1, Joe is back! I’d like to get you all pumped up with some enticing insider information but that’s all I know.

However there is a ‘flipside’ to this exciting news…effective July 1st you will no longer find my posts on this site. This is not being done ‘to me’ and I fully support Joe’s decision to have the site sending a clear, strong message.

Joe’s battle is centered on (but not limited to) conservatism while mine is somewhat more complicated.

That said, those interested in continuing to follow my often ‘madcap’ observations can find me here I will endeavor to include this link in all of my final posts but once they go, the link goes with them! [Make it a point to bookmark BEFORE July 1st, please!]

I was a bit surprised to note that the ‘mirror site’ had its first birthday in April! Which is to point out that this pending move isn’t by any means ‘abrupt’. It’s been ‘in the works’ for quite some time now.

Well, that does it on the ‘local’ front. On the larger screen it tickles me considerably to learn that yesterday’s two percent ‘rally’ of the stock market has been attributed to the subject of yesterday’s post, the ‘improvement’ in the employment picture…

Like ‘temp jobs with no benies’ is going to save our collective asses!

Is the nation being run by morons or is it simply populated with them? Let’s move on with tonight’s offering to see if we can spot the difference!

Obama Gives Us a Hint: Look for a Hot Jobs Number on Friday - Mission Accomplished

Since he is the commander-in-chief of the Washington bureaucracy that churns out government statistics, it is a good bet that the boss' expectations will be met by those who serve him. So watch those short positions into this Friday's Non-Farm Payrolls report. The President has declared that an economic recovery is at hand. [What’s that old saying, ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same?’ Which is to ask whether or not the more we see of Obama, the more he looks/acts like Bush! (In ways most of us wouldn’t have thought possible!)]

Obama gave a longish speech at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh today blaming most of the problems in the US on the Republicans and a few greedy Banks, extolling the reforms in healthcare and the financial system that he has been able to push through despite the minority opposition, and recalcitrant leftish supporters, after he saved the country by the unfortunate but unavoidably necessary bank bailouts. [I know I’m not alone when I say ‘the country’ is far from being ‘saved’. What has been done so far is both illogical and impractical; none of it will produce results!]

His speech sounded good. And if you do not look too closely at what is going on, and how things are being run, and the lack of actual reform, you might have had a feel good moment. It was about as effectively staged as the case that George W made to the American people for the invasion of Iraq. And it was probably just as phony and self-serving.

I come away feeling that Lincoln had it exactly right. There will be a die-hard group who will never lose faith in their party, or any of their chosen leaders, and will find desperate comfort in partisan blindness. [There exists a disturbing tendency to ignore the deluded until they seize something vital, and by then it is too late!]

"If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Abraham Lincoln

But the great majority of the American people are waking up, and that spells trouble in the November elections for most incumbent politicians. So the pace and velocity of the spin will have to be adjusted. Hence the speech today. And the outlook for the tortured American economic system, and the official descriptions of it. [Um, I tend to think we already had a serious level of ‘political engagement’ during the last election. The ‘crisis’ facing the electorate this time around is the ‘shattered illusion’, that the vote, due to the heavily gamed system, alters nothing…and there’s no time to overhaul the process!]

For a refresher, here is Matt Taibbi's caustic expose of the financial reform process. Wall Street's War

Dow Jones Newswire
Obama Says He Expects Strong US Jobs Report Friday
By Jared A. Favole

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- President Barack Obama, speaking Wednesday at Carnegie Mellon University on the economy, said he expects strong job growth to be reported Friday.

The Labor Department is scheduled to report May's employment statistics Friday. Economists expect the unemployment rate to slide to 9.7% from 9.9% in April and for the report to show the U.S. added as many as 515,000 jobs last month after non farm payrolls rose by 290,000 in April. [This is pretty ‘miraculous’ considering there are still NO ‘help wanted’ ads in the damn papers! Like the rest of the nation, we have to ‘assume’ that these jobs are somewhere else…like HP’s announcement yesterday! They may not even be in the US! It is not a dumb question to ask how many of those half million jobs are the hiring activity of US based companies outside the US?]

Obama said an economy that was "once shrinking at an alarming rate" has now grown for three consecutive quarters and is moving in the right direction. [Too bad most of this is ‘creative accounting’! What little ‘growth’ there is could just as easily be attributed to inflation/deflation! Shrinkage in purchasing power is not an ‘economic positive! (although it is often ‘spun’ as such!)]

I watched this speech live on Bloomberg television. It is no exaggeration. Obama was declaring mission accomplished, for the record. So if something beyond his control should happen to derail the recovery, well, that could not be his fault.

You’d think even He knows he’s not going to get re-elected in 2012, so I wouldn’t be putting too much emphasis on the fulfillment of campaign promises that do him zero good. In the end even Bush didn’t give a crap about his so-called ‘legacy’.

Like Bush, Mr. Obama has been promised some kind of a ‘sweetheart deal’ for playing ball with the ‘big boys’…he’s even been promised ‘protection’…although it is tough to tell how ‘reliable’ that protection may be. They could kill him to keep up their end of the bargain.

It’s not up to us to ponder if shooting is ‘preferable’ to being hung or burned. Given the alternatives, the bullet looks mighty attractive! (If we had to/got to choose. Most times you don’t.)

At last look the markets were off a little but that was early in the trading day and lately the markets have been like basketball, you only need to watch the last two minutes to see who is going to win.

Like the electoral process, the markets are so ‘gamed’ you are a fool to play them much less pay attention/draw meaning from their performance.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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