There were two estate sales in my neighborhood this weekend

Out of 109 homes.  Middle aged families.  They tried to hang on until the recovery.  But there is no recovery.  Walked by my friend Skip's old house.  Still has the Sheriff's foreclosure paper on the front door.  This is an affluent neighborhood.   Pulled my kids out of private schools this week.  Can't make even the discounted fees.  Vice Principal said 'kids are pouring in at the last minute'.

You can hear the families strangling to death all over town.  In a city that wasn't hit by the mortgage crisis.  The foreign press is taking note.  From the Guardian

“The headline jobless figure of 9.5% is bad enough but does not begin to convey the problem as it fails to measure those who have stopped looking for work. Over the past three months alone more than a million Americans have fallen into that category: effectively giving up hope of finding a job and dropping out of the official statistics. Such cases now number some 5.9 million and their ranks are likely to grow as millions more find their jobless status becoming a permanent state of hopelessness. . . . America appears to be a society splitting down the centre, shattering the middle class that long formed the cultural bedrock of the country and dividing it into a country of haves and have-nots.”

And all we have is "The Leader" or as Linkin Park would put it:

"For a leader so nervous in an obvious way,

Stutterin' and mumblin for the nightly news to replay.

And the rest of the world watching at the end of the day

In their living room laughing, like, what did he say?"

I hear he's taking his 5th vacation of the summer.  He's played golf more than once a week since he took office hasn't he?

What does he care?  He's got his.