Brady Dennis, the Washington Post’s all-things-Elizabeth-Warren beat reporter, notices a change in the Harvard Law professor’s class schedule:

When fall classes began Wednesday at Harvard Law School, Elizabeth Warren was scheduled to be teaching contract law to first-year students. But something happened on the way to the chalkboard.

“I’m writing to let you know that Professor Jerry Frug will be teaching your Contracts class this term instead of Professor Elizabeth Warren,” law school dean Martha Minow wrote to students on Tuesday, according to an e-mail obtained by The Washington Post. “Professor Warren regrets that she will not be able to teach you this fall and we regret the last minute change.”

Last-minute change?

Cue up another round of speculation about whether President Obama is about to tap Warren to head the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.

Even more interesting is the fact that Jerry Frug doesn’t appear to specialize in contract law, at least not in the way that Warren does. He’s more of a local government law expert, and while that intersects, it’s not precise. That adds to the last-minute nature of this change.

According to Harvard’s class schedule, Warren is still slated to teach other classes three days a week, something that wouldn’t be possible if she ran the CFPB. But it would be possible if she simply were the nominee of the CFPB, without getting a directorship appointment from either the Treasury Department (which can be done without Senate approval) or the White House (in a recess appointment).

I don’t know that the last-minute pullout means much of anything, actually, but given the dearth of information around this appointment, let’s say it’s more meaningful than anything else.

The best-case scenario for Hurricane Earl was that it would move out to sea and only affect the eastern seaboard with rip currents and maybe a slight sprinkling of rain. But the storm appears to have pushed enough to the west to now threaten parts of the East Coast with much more than that.

As you can see from the NOAA forecast, North Carolina is now under a hurricane warning for the first time since Earl formed. North of that, Virginia and New Jersey’s coast have tropical storm warnings, and the hurricane itself, while expected to be degraded by that point, is expected to slam almost directly into the Massachusetts cape by Friday night.

Some of the Outer Banks in North Carolina have already begun to evacuate:

The storm is forecast to stay at sea, passing about 80 miles east of Cape Hatteras late Thursday or early Friday. Even at that distance, Earl, now a Category 3 storm with sustained winds of about 125 mph, will be powerful enough to cause a 1- to 2-foot storm surge along the oceanfront early Friday, and send 70- to 80-mph winds across the Outer Banks.

If the storm turns slightly west, coming closer to shore, conditions could get markedly worse. The hurricane warning extends from Emerald Isle north to the Virginia border, including all of the Outer Banks. A tropical storm warning was issued for the coast from Emerald Isle south of the mouth of the Cape Fear River [...]

Visitors and some residents are leaving Ocracoke and Hatteras islands today to avoid the possibility of becoming stranded. Dare County emergency officials ordered the evacuation of visitors from both islands this morning.

So far, this has only created world-class surfing on the Atlantic Coast, and the main hazards for the area could be a drop in tourism for the Labor Day Weekend. But any additional move to the west would put more areas along the coast in a stronger danger zone. Puerto Rico didn’t get a direct hit earlier in the week, and 187,000 people still have no electricity.

FEMA, which has response teams throughout the coast, hopefully will do a formidable job during the next couple days.

Some nutcase ran into the Discovery Building, took hostages and got shot. That’s about the extent of what I have to say on that matter. As for the rest…

• Here’s the speech from Christina Romer that I mentioned earlier today. Her calling HAMP “slow, steady progress” (and claiming that $50 billion has been spent on foreclosure mitigation when the figures show $250 million) is a disqualifying remark. The second half, beginning with “the turnaround has been insufficient” and building to a crescendo with “The only surefire way for policymakers to substantially increase aggregate demand in the short run is for the government to spend more
and tax less” is better, but I’d rather hear from Romer tomorrow, when she doesn’t have to carry water for the Administration.

• The Office of Congressional Ethics will further investigate three House members, including two Republicans, for their curious habit of holding fundraisers with the financial services industry right before key votes on the subject. The five others whose cases were dismissed are none too happy about having the speculation out there previously.

• Manufacturing actually showed some growth today, sending stocks up. I wouldn’t give this counter-intuitive a take on the future of the economy (“things are so bad now that they can’t get worse!” is what it amounts to). That said, the only thing stopping us from policies that would provide growth is political will. Some more steps to actually enforce trade laws would help, as evidenced by the success of the Chinese tire import restrictions.

• The embattled Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission started their final public hearings in Washington today (there will be some other field hearings around the country), and got former Lehman chief Dick Fuld to whine about how he wasn’t bailed out like everyone else. Sigh. I used to think this commission offered a real opportunity.

• Drew Westen’s big think on right-wing populism and the Democrats is pretty first-rate.

• Meanwhile, they had an old-fashioned bank run today – in Kabul. Central bankers (Afghanistan has central bankers?) had to take over the nation’s largest bank to avoid a crisis. The CEO of the bank had luxury villas in Dubai. No corruption to see here, move along.

• Ron Wyden wants to accelerate the state opt-out in the Affordable Care Act to benefit his home state of Oregon, and he thinks the state should up out of the individual mandate as well.

• Those Yemenis who got picked up in the Netherlands on a flight, with all the cell phones? Never mind.

• Matt Miller provides a path forward for liberal hawks, and neocons if they so choose, to completely repudiate the Iraq war. Unfortunately, I expect him to get a promotion for his bad judgment any day now.

• Liberal journalists don’t want to stoop to their counterparts’ level, I suppose, but while I haven’t yet read Markos Moulitsas’ book American Taliban it seems he is guilty of nothing but teasing out the logical trajectory of conservative ideology and correctly labeling their relative sympathies from an ideological perspective. I don’t know what’s wrong with that.

• Chris Christie looks caught dead to rights in the New Jersey education funding scandal. It’s a petty thing, but shows Christie’s character.

• Cash for Coal Clunkers? Anything to create incentives to shut down old, dirty coal plants sounds good to me.

• In Delaware, teabagger Christine O’Donnell sounds like a piece of work, and her supporters are casually throwing out homophobic whisper campaigns. Tell me again about how conservatives are poised to win back the LGBT vote.

• If you have several spare hours, read this report on core partisans and their beliefs. Short version: core Republicans care much more about race and morality (as they see it), Democrats much more about social welfare.

• Committed conservative Ron Johnson really likes planned-economy socialism as it’s practiced in Communist China.

• Very effective ad from Kendrick Meek. Their strategy seems to be: 1) go nuclear on Charlie Crist; 2) come back to Marco Rubio afterwards. The question is whether Rubio will benefit from the lack of attention and sprint out to an insurmountable lead in the meantime.

• Sarah Palin stories make my head hurt, but she does seem like a holy terror. I suspect she’s all too happy to have a profile this out there to resent. At least she’s not likely to sue the media for losing a political campaign, like uber-whiner Jeff Greene.

• Fidel Castro takes the blame for persecution of gays and lesbians after the Cuban revolution.

• Just mild-mannered people who aren’t being listened to.

• Political gerrymandering has nothing on the new Big Ten.