I swung by my favorite south Everett watering hole, for the first time in a while. The regulars were quick to abuse me, saying that just because I work down in the city and have a girlfriend now, that's no excuse for not showing up to karaoke night.

Then the conversation moved on, as it often does in Everett, to Boeing.

Everybody has been keeping an eye on Boeing's stock price, which has been beaten down from about $83 to $77 a share this week. This is not good news for most of the folks at the bar - as we discussed a couple weeks ago, Boeing is set to pay out a stock-based bonus to its workers at the end of June, and the higher share prices are above the $54-a-share target price, the bigger the bonus. But the losses since Monday have probably cost Boeing employees about $1,000 apiece. 

So what's pushing share prices down? My theory is that Wall Street panicked a bit this week, on news that JetBlue has pushed back deliveries of its Airbus A320s, and AirTran is pushing back deliveries of its 737s. Both airlines are saying that high fuel prices have cut profits to the point they can't afford to continue buying planes and expanding their route networks.

That's the kind of news that hits close to home on Wall Street - JetBlue being a New York-based airline and all. So if their hometown airline can't afford to buy new planes, then all airlines must be cutting orders, so that's gotta be bad for Boeing - let's sell.

And if we look at shares of EADS over on the Paris exchange, we also see that it got beat down a bit on Monday and Tuesday too, falling from 15.10 euros to about about 14.40, before it started to rally.

But the gang at the bar had another view. We're less than two weeks away from the General Accounting Office announcing whether it thinks the Pentagon should throw out its decision to award the KC-45 tanker contract to EADS and Northrop Grumman, and the consensus around the table was that somebody's gotten advance word of what the decision will be - they think the GAO will uphold the Pentagon decision to buy Airbus tankers - and that's what's led to the sell-off. 

Of course, that kind of insider trading would be illegal and immoral and downright un-American - and after watching the subprime mortgage debacle, the guys at the bar are pretty sure anyone on Wall Street who might have that information would certainly act on it.

I can't say I'd argue that point, but if somebody knew that the GAO had decided to uphold the EADS/Northrop contract, you'd think they'd be buying up Northrop shares this week -and they're not. NOC shares are down more than $2.

And that leads us back to my theory, that the stock decline is the result of worrisome signals from the airline industry. I've got one thing to say about that - it's too early to panic. Yes, the U.S. airline market is in serious disarray, what with UAL grounding planes and all this on-again-off-again merger talk. But the fact remains that Boeing still has an all-time record backlog on its books, and 75 percent of those orders are going to airlines outside the United States - airlines that are still in the market and still buying planes.

I ordered another beer and got caught up on the gossip, including this juicy bit, which could never be confirmed.

But scuttlebutt inside Boeing's Everett factory has it that CEO Jim McNerney recently paid a visit to some of the more-outspoken members of the Alabama Congressional delegation, who have been eager supporters of the EADS/Northrop tanker bid. (Those planes, you will recall, are set to be built in a new factory in Mobile, Ala.)

Word is that McNerney told the Alabama delegation that if they didn't pipe down and back off, Boeing would start pulling work out of its rocket factories, which contribute some $700 million to the Alabama economy. The Airbus tanker factory might one day employ 1,500 to 1,800 people in Mobile, but Boeing already has an $80 million payroll in the state.

Like I say, we'll never be able to confirm this, but I do think it's interesting that Sen. Richard Shelby - the Alabama Republican who has taken Boeing to the woodshed over this tanker deal, and most-recently accused the company of using "mendacity, rather than logic and reason" to protest the Pentagon decision - agreed two weeks ago to be quoted in the Boeing press release extolling the importance of the company to his state's economy.