Gordon Brown Falling?

This appears to be serious: Is Gordon Brown about to fall as Prime Minister of Britain? It very well could happen, literally overnight.

After being snubbed for a promotion, Caroline Flint, the Europe Minister, delivered the most personal attack yet on the beleaguered Prime Minister, accusing him of using her as “female window dressing” and of operating a “two-tier Government”.

In a move designed to maximise the damage to Mr Brown, she announced she was quitting his Government just as he faced the cameras to insist he would not walk away from Downing Street following Labour’s worst performance at the polls in 30 years.

Less than 24 hours earlier, she had taken to the airwaves to support his leadership in the wake of the shock resignation of James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary, and his demand that the Prime Minister go for the good of the party.

But her departure was just one of a series of ministerial walk-outs which undermined Mr Brown’s hurried attempt to reshape his Government and relaunch his premiership.

Geoff Hoon, John Hutton, Paul Murphy, Margaret Beckett and Tony McNulty have all quit the Government.

They followed Jacqui Smith, Hazel Blears, Mr Purnell and Beverley Hughes out of the exit door.

Sinking ship and all that? An awful lot of career politicians have rather suddenly disassociated themselves from Brown just when he is reeling from other political problems. This looks – a lot – like a government about to auger in at full speed.

Fidel’s Friends At State

Okay, this is bad. It seems that Cuba has had a very, very high-level spy in the US State Department for many years now.

A married couple was accused Friday of spying for Fidel Castro’s Cuba for 30 years while the husband was a top intelligence analyst at the State Department.

Walter Kendall Myers, known as “Agent 202″ to the Cubans, and his wife Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, “Agent 123″ and “E-634,” were nabbed at their home off Embassy Row following an undercover FBI sting.

They allegedly admitted their treachery spanned decades, U.S. officials said.

“It’s a serious compromise,” said one U.S. official, who compared it to the breaches by Pentagon spy-for-Cuba Ana Montes and FBI agent-turned-Russian spy Robert Hanssen.

Kendall Myers was recruited by Cuban spies in the Communist regime’s New York City mission in 1978 while he worked at State’s Arlington, Va., language school. The Ph.D. expert on Europe also taught at Johns Hopkins, Georgetown and George Washington Universities.

Myers is alleged to have basically sent everything – or darn near everything – State had to Cuba. He had total access to the State Department computer records on Fidel’s “worker’s paradise”.

One cheerful bit of sheer spin from the article:

Unlike CIA traitor Aldrich Ames, whose betrayal cost the lives of many U.S. “assets” in Russia, the Myerses are not believed to have gotten anyone killed.

Care to place a wager on that one?

Frankly, the details that Fox News is reporting show these two to be – well – dumb as a box of rocks. Yet they appear to have successfully spied for Fidel for three decades.  

Really builds up that confidence about how good our government is at this stuff, doesn’t it?

Spin, Spin, Spin

Most of the media is spinning – mightily – trying to paint the latest jobs figures as the light at the end of the tunnel. Only Reuters – in one of their blogs – is pointing out that the light is the headlamp of the oncoming locomotive.

Remember the stress tests? The baseline scenario had unemployment in 2009 at 8.4%, rising to 8.9% under the more adverse scenario. Well, we’re only up to May, and already it’s at 9.4%.

In other words, things are already worse – by rather a lot – than the “worst case” scenario the much-vaunted “stress tests” tested for. The numbers are – to say the least – bleak.  

 I predicted that the media would spin abysmal unemployment numbers under Obama as being better than the “horrible”, “awful” and “dismal” figures under Bush – which averaged around 5%. I had no idea they’d try to spin an outright disastrous set of numbers as a bright spot.

I thought they actually had some small amount of shame. Silly me.

This news, coupled with the item I posted yesterday about super genius Little Timmy Geithner’s complete failure to clear toxic assets from bank’s books, I suspect that things are bad and getting worse at the moment. The fact that the situation is already a lot worse than the “stress tests” projected should worry you.

A lot.

Via Memeorandum