  We discuss how an extended foreground of the cosmic microwave background
(CMB) can account for the anomalies in the low multipoles of the CMB
anisotropies. The distortion needed to account for the anomalies is consistent
with a cold spot with the spatial geometry of the Local Supercluster (LSC) and
a temperature quadrupole of order DeltaT_2^2 ~ 50 microK^2. If this hypothetic
foreground is subtracted from the CMB data, the amplitude of the quadrupole
(l=2) is substantially increased, and the statistically improbable alignment of
the quadrupole with the octopole (l=3) is substantially weakened, increasing
dramatically the likelihood of the "cleaned" maps. By placing the foreground on
random locations and then computing the likelihood of the cleaned maps we can
estimate the most likely place for this foreground. Although the 1-year WMAP
data clearly points the location of this hypothetical foreground to the LSC or
its specular image (i.e., the vicinity of the poles of the cosmic dipole axis),
the three-year data seems to point to these locations as well as the north
ecliptic pole. We show that this is consistent with the symmetries of the
cosmic quadrupole. We also discuss a possible mechanism that could have
generated this foreground: the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect caused by hot
electrons in the LSC. We argue that the temperature and density of the hot gas
which are necessary to generate such an effect, though in the upper end of the
expected range of values, are marginally consistent with present observations
of the X-ray background of spectral distortions of the CMB.
