† The Summer Of Our Discontent: The Christian Science Monitor warns that we shouldn’t get “too excited about the modest uptick in net job creation” because “there is far more than meets the eye to the Labor Department’s report that the economy added 117,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate fell to 9.1 percent”:

According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics breakdown, there were 139,296,000 people working in July, compared to 139,334,000 the month before, or a drop of 38,000. …

It’s a product of something the government calls “discouraged workers,” or those who were unemployed but not out looking for work during the reporting period.

This is where the numbers showed a really big spike - up from 982,000 to 1.119 million, a difference of 137,000 or a 14 percent increase. These folks are generally not included in the government’s various job measures.

So the drop in the unemployment rate is fairly illusory - stick all those people back in the workforce and you wipe out the job creation and the drop in unemployment. …

And the so-called “real” unemployment rate, which adds in discouraged workers and others not counted as part of the headline unemployment rate, actually pulled back one notch to 16.1 percent.

† Have You Seen The Price Of Arugula Lately?: Something’s rotten at NYC’s community gardens, and it’s not over-ripe tomatoes. Fruit and vegetable thieves are pulling strawberries off vines and plucking herbs off bushes to stretch their grocery dollars. The New York Times reports:

[T]o hear urban farmers speak, no borough, and no garden devoted to edibles, whether sprawling or thimble-size, is immune to theft. “Food is more attractive than flowers, especially in this economy,” said Marjorie J. Clarke, a caretaker at the flowers-only Riverside-Inwood Neighborhood Garden, known as RING.

On the Upper West Side, cucumbers are tops for filching; in Harlem, the main draws are chilies and herbs; on the Lower East Side, green and red peppers; in Brooklyn and Queens, tomatoes and squash.

Editorial Note: Thanks to an $800K federal grant, the NYC Parks Department’s GreenThumb program “offers stewardship and supplies for some 600 community gardens.” Community gardens are not communal, so gardeners resent thefts of their bounty. However, financial support of these gardens is communal, so the “thieves” have, to some extent, paid for the produce they’re “pilfering.”

† Bank Behaving Badly: A class action suit has been filed against Wells Fargo & Co in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco for allegedly flouting the law that created federally insured reverse mortgages, and for foreclosing on homes instead of giving heirs a chance to buy them at 95 percent of appraised value after the death of the borrower, Bloomberg News reports:

Wells Fargo hasn't been notifying heirs of this right and has been starting foreclosures if demands aren't met for repayment of the full mortgage balance, according to the complaint filed by the son of a California homeowner. The plaintiff, Robert Chandler, also sued the Federal National Mortgage Association, or Fannie Mae.

"Wells Fargo's actions are not just wrong, they are economically irrational," Michael Ng, Chandler's attorney, said yesterday in a statement. "Even though elderly borrowers paid for insurance that protects the bank against the downturn in the housing market, Wells Fargo insists on evicting family members from homes that will go unsold and unoccupied."

The lawsuit, brought as a class action by Chandler on behalf of himself and other heirs, seeks a court order stopping foreclosures and evictions in affected homes and damages for breach of contract. …

"Wells Fargo maintained that Mr. Chandler would have to pay off the full mortgage balance, not the appraised value, if he wished to keep the house," according to the complaint. The bank foreclosed and tried to sell the property. Fannie Mae took possession of the home and began the eviction process in May, Chandler's lawyers said.

† Obama Is Just About Every U.S. President All Rolled Into One!: But he's no Calvin Coolidge, argues Charles Johnson in this Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Eighty-eight years ago this week, Calvin Coolidge took office upon the sudden death of President Warren Harding. Like the current administration, the Harding-Coolidge administration faced a tough recession from 1919-1921. But unlike the current administration, the Harding-Coolidge and Coolidge-Dawes administrations cut taxes, balanced budgets and slashed government spending, reducing federal debt by over a third in a decade.

The economy grew, averaging just over 7% from 1924 to 1929, the years of his presidency. So did Coolidge's popularity. He was so popular that even during the Great Depression's height song-writer Cole Porter compared his lover to the "Coolidge dollar." …

The "Coolidge prosperity," denounced as ephemeral after the 1929 crash, was real for those who experienced it. Coolidge knew this well, telling reporters that "If you can base the economic conditions of the people on their appearance, the way they are dressed, [and] the general appearance of prosperity, I should say it was very good. … I noticed most of the ladies had on silk dresses and I thought I saw a rather general display of silk stockings."

Unlike President Obama, President Coolidge didn't want to "spread the wealth around," but to grow it.

As Coolidge saw things in 1924, "A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude." Coolidge helped Americans prosper by letting them be free.

And apparently, Obama can no longer be thought of as another FDR - and he never was a Teddy Roosevelt to begin with - according to Emory University psych prof  Drew Westen:

Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. … He promised to do something no president had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden, he thundered, “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me - and I welcome their hatred.”

When Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office, he stepped into a cycle of American history, best exemplified by F.D.R. and his distant cousin, Teddy. After a great technological revolution or a major economic transition, as when America changed from a nation of farmers to an urban industrial one, there is often a period of great concentration of wealth, and with it, a concentration of power in the wealthy. That’s what we saw in 1928, and that’s what we see today. At some point that power is exercised so injudiciously, and the lives of so many become so unbearable, that a period of reform ensues - and a charismatic reformer emerges to lead that renewal. In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt started the cycle of reform his cousin picked up 30 years later, as he began efforts to bust the trusts and regulate the railroads, exercise federal power over the banks and the nation’s food supply, and protect America’s land and wildlife, creating the modern environmental movement.

Those were the shoes - that was the historic role - that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill.

 ... [W]hen faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it.

As his first and only term wears on, Obama's incredible shrinking presidency is increasingly being compared to that of just one president - Jimmy Carter's. Georgetown University poli sci prof and Bush 41 aide Bradley Blakeman lists the parallels:

Ineffective Management Style: Carter … a micro-manager who even had to decide who was allowed to play on the White House Tennis Court. Obama … the ultimate delegator who likes being president but doesn't like the work.

Iranian Hostages: Carter … was consumed by the crisis and in the end was powerless to end it. Obama … pledged to usher in a new approach toward Iran that would bring better relations between the U.S. and Iran.

Energy Crisis: In 1979 America faced an oil crisis in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. … [I]nstead of taking on OPEC and demanding increased production, [Carter] imposed rationing on gasoline, and home heating oil and placed tariffs on imported oil. Obama … ceased drilling in the Gulf and set in place a moratorium on new offshore drilling.

Economic Crises: Because of failure to lead and his failed economic policies of government spending and indecision … [t]he result was high prices, high unemployment, low confidence, and low growth. Obama, like Carter, went on a government-spending spree in response to the recession with little to show for it.

Public Opinion: At the time of his re-election campaign [Carter’s] approval ratings was below 30% and a majority of Americans felt that America was on the wrong track. [Obama's] approval rating averages 42% and a majority of Americans believe we are on the wrong track.

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, The Day Newt Gingrich’s Candidacy Died): Newt Gingrich is ensnared in yet another mini-controversy that is preventing his struggling campaign from taking flight, this time over whether his campaign t-shirts were being made by foreign companies, Mediaite’s Frances Martel reports: “That’s bologna!” he told host Greta van Susteren, arguing that most of his t-shirts were made in America and that even bringing up the topic was “junk reporting.” [Note to Frances Martel and her editor if she has one: "Bologna" is an Italian cold cut; something that's BS is spelled "baloney."

Meanwhile, Gingrich tells MSNBC, “The only thing the news media’s really affected is my fundraising.” Yes, Newt, it's the MSM that’s dissuading donors from throwing gobs of cash at your campaign and not the fact that you've lost control of your own narrative.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Those Who Can’t Teach, Cheat): In this Washington Post op-ed, Ross Wiener, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Program on Education and Society, is looking for the “teachable moment” in the “systemic and pervasive” Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal because “[i]f this can happen in Atlanta, it can happen anywhere”:  

Abandoning reliance on testing is neither feasible nor advisable. Important considerations of equity, quality and scale make it essential to use tests in strategic, consequential ways. But we need to be honest about unintended consequences and more attuned to the line between healthy and unhealthy pressure. …

Rooting out bad actors is necessary but not sufficient. Education systems need to focus on understanding how to increase effectiveness of schools and teachers, including the conditions necessary to help students achieve. This means finding a healthier balance between accountability at the level of individual teachers and focusing on building organizational capacity to develop teachers and support their continuous improvement. School systems that don’t have a coherent vision for how they expect schools to meet test-score targets have little basis for challenging whether good scores are coming from bad practice.

Ironically, the recent focus on more rigorous teacher evaluation should help on this issue. While there is some danger that increased pressure to improve test scores will push more teachers to cheat, the new policies are pushing school systems to build essential capacity. For the first time in most places, districts and states are explicitly describing the practices in which they expect teachers to engage. To support evaluations, states and districts are developing detailed rubrics that articulate how teachers should plan, engage with students and parents, instruct, and assess student learning. Observations against these rubrics create higher-quality, more actionable information about what’s going on in classrooms. Teachers finally can get meaningful feedback and guidance, and alarms can be raised when results are strong but instruction is weak.

So what’s the Obama administration doing to hold teachers accountable to parents and taxpayers? Nothing. No, worse than nothing. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is caving in to the “universal clamoring” from state complaining that the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law are “unrealistic” and is granting waivers to exempt them from the nine-year-old federal law, The Washington Post reports:

Most states are concerned about the law’s sharply escalating demands, culminating in the goal that 100 percent of students must be proficient in reading and math by 2014 or their schools will face serious sanctions, including the loss of federal aid.

In the past six months, a handful of states have asked for waivers and a few have simply declared that they will not meet their annual targets under the law.

Educators say that the pressure of trying to reach 100 percent proficiency has created an unhealthy focus on standardized tests, with continual drilling in the classroom and a narrowing of curriculum that excludes anything beyond math and reading. Some also blame the law for creating a warped atmosphere that led educators to allegedly rig test results in Atlanta, Baltimore and the District of Columbia. …

Chester E. Finn, president of the Fordham Institute, an education research group, said the administration’s actions also raise legal questions.

“Even if one agrees with [Duncan] on the merits, as I do, the law doesn’t say he can unilaterally impose new conditions that aren’t in the law,” said Finn, a Republican. “There’s a separation of powers issue involved here. To what extent does the executive branch get to decide what’s in the law?”

The Stiletto has lost count of all the actions taken by President Barack Hussein Obama – reputedly a Constitutional law professor - and his administration that could be challenged on Constitutional grounds.