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September 07, 2012 | | SLOW AND STEADY The president’s more subdued rhetoric is being derided by pundits—but it was carefully vetted with groups of voters. Howard Kurtz reports exclusively on the Obama team’s decision not to swing for the fences in Charlotte. LETDOWN Analysts’ hopes were high for the Bureau of Labor Statistics August employment report prior to its Friday morning release. The results are in—and it’s a triple-decker Meh sandwich, slathered with Blah. The economy added only 96,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate fell. Daniel Gross crunches the uninspiring numbers. WOWZA Imagine if Bill Clinton hadn’t been up against the Super Bowl champions. The former president’s big speech on Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention not only beat the same night of Republican National Convention, but also had more viewers than the New York Giants–Dallas Cowboys game. An estimated 25.1 million people watched the DNC between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. and just 20 million people watched the second half of the football game. The second night of the GOP convention had 21.9 million viewers. While there aren’t any numbers yet for President Obama’s speech on Thursday, he broke the tweets per minute record for a political event, with Twitter reporting 52,756 tweets in the minute following Obama’s speech. SECRETARY OF STATE The Haqqani network, a brutal Taliban-linked militant group based in Pakistan, was officially designated a terrorist organization by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday. In a detailed report delivered to Congress, Clinton indicated that the Haqqanis, a Pashtun tribe who run an organization “comparable to a mafia group,” meet the criteria to be considered a terrorist organization. A rising terror threat for the past year, the group has been blamed for recent high-profile attacks in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan. A formal designation by Congress will likely happen in the next few days. TRAGEDY French police said on Friday that the grisly deaths of a family and a cyclist in the Alps may have been motivated by a money feud between two brothers. On Wednesday, a passing cyclist found the bodies of another cyclist shot in the head and Iraqi-born Saad al-Hilli, his wife, and his mother-in-law. A 7-year-old was found collapsed near the car and a 4-year-old girl was found alive hours later in the car. Police now say the killings may have been prompted by "a dispute between the two brothers about money," a prosecutor told the AFP, and "the brother will have to be questioned at length." | | 
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