ED DRISCOLL: NPR’s Cokie Roberts Leads the Schorr Patrol for Obama. “If Romney’s staff sounds appropriately testy with old media — wait, is their boss a wimp or a bully this week? — it’s having to put up with smears from the Palace Guard that elected and protect Obama, such as Roberts’ pathetic attempt at blowing the raaaaacist dog whistle.”

UPDATE: Reader Robert Crawford emails: “After the MSM’s treatment of Romney’s European tour, especially the shrieking reporters in Poland, Romney is a fool if he allows for any ‘moderator’ in the ‘debates.'”

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Nanofabrication Engineers Unveil First Casimir Chip That Exploits Vacuum Energy. “So instead of being hindered by uncontrollable Casimir forces, the next generation of microelectromechanical devices should be able to exploit them, perhaps to make stictionless bearings, springs and even actuators. Exciting times for micro and nano machines.”

HMM: Views On Gun Laws Unchanged After Aurora Shooting. #Narrativefail.

MICHAEL GREVE: Freedom, Politics, And The Courts.

THE GREAT THING ABOUT OBAMACARE IS THAT YOU WON’T HAVE TO GO TO THE DOCTOR MUCH: Another routine test they’ve decided you don’t really need after all: “On Monday an expert government panel, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, joined the call by recommending against routine testing with electrocardiograms, or EKGs, in people who have no known risk factors or symptoms of heart disease, like shortness of breath or chest pains. The recommendations, published online in Annals of Internal Medicine, made the test the latest addition to an expanding list of once routine screening tools that have fallen out of favor. Earlier this year, the task force advised against regular screening with the prostate specific antigen, or P.S.A., blood test, long considered the gold standard for early detection of prostate cancer. The panel has also come out against measures like annual Pap smears for many women and regular mammograms for women in their 40s.”

ERIKA JOHNSEN: Wait, so… why exactly was Romney’s overseas trip such a “public relations disaster”?

Because it was racist! Duh.

BUSTING ANOTHER MEDIA MYTH.

YEAH, OBAMA’S RELATED TO A BLACK SLAVE . . . on his white mother’s side. “I’m just waiting for someone to link Obama’s first black slave ancestor to Elizabeth Warren’s Cherokee ancestor, you know, the one with the high cheekbones.”

I’ve never been that interested in genealogy — it reminds me of Robert Heinlein’s story about the lizard who said he was a dinosaur on his maternal grandmother’s side — and this kind of twaddle explains why. On this sort of evidence, probably a majority of Americans have some black ancestry.

And it’s much, much more likely that Obama is more closely related to a slave owner on his father’s side. . . .

SCIENCE: 600-year-old linen bras found in Austrian castle. They’ve since been returned to their original owner, Helen Thomas.

I’M NOT CONVINCED: The Internet should be adapted to allow for oversight by the National Security Agency, the organization’s boss says.

AGING: Immune Dendritic Cells Accumulate Harmful Proteins. “Our immune cells accumulate damaged proteins that impair their function. We need to replace these cells every few decades and keep our immune systems rocking. . . . What I want: cell therapies that will replace senescent immune cells with youthful and highly functioning immune cells. Such therapies will not only reduce sickness and death from infection. The immune system also manages to kill some cancer cells. So one of the reasons that cancer incidence rises with age is immune system aging that undermines the ability of immune cells to identify and attack cancer cells. In fact, some cancers get held in a dormant state by the immune system. Plus, a healthy youthful immune system probably removes toxic beta amyloid protein from the brain and thereby prevents Alzheimer’s disease. So your immune system’s vigor matters even more than most people imagine.”

Faster, please.

UH OH: Second Indian Blackout Cuts Power to 670 Million. “Even before we could figure out the reason for yesterday’s failure, we had more grid failures today.” At least that could never happen here. Related thoughts in this post and in this one.

HOW IT WORKS: Laser Beam Recharges UAV In Flight.

JOAN HEMINWAY: The Last Male Bastion. Of course, as Scott Adams reminded his readers once, when they point to CEOs as proof that men run the world, you have to remember that those are other men.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Posner Gets It Wrong. “Are there really too many patents in America?”

Rob Merges and I had some thoughts on this very topic in the Harvard Journal on Legislation a while back.

REMEMBER WHEN OBAMA CRITICIZED WASTEFUL CORPORATE JUNKETS? Watchdog: Junkets held by Education Department cost taxpayers $1.5m a year. “Last year’s four-day conference, which opened in late November, was hosted by the U.S. Department of Education at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The year before that, the event was at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando. . . .Sole-source contracts were used to select sites for the events, according to internal Education Department documents obtained by The Washington Examiner. The MGM event cost taxpayers about $1.6 million, according to the agency, including $790,000 paid to an outside consultant to help plan and present the conference.”

Best bit: “The keynote speaker was the department’s secretary, Arne Duncan. His topic: controlling college costs.” Heh.

LOOKS LIKE WE’VE GOT THE INSTAPUNDIT TWITTER FEED UP AND WORKING. Alas, we lost all the followers in the process. So if you’re on Twitter, follow me!

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Pension Tsunami Now Rolling over Police, Firefighters.

Once considered sacrosanct, the pensions of cops and firefighters are increasingly coming under the budget knife, says Reuters.

Even in the recent showdown in Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker was careful not to extend the curbing of collective bargaining rights to police and firefighters. But now dire fiscal straits across the country are threatening even the pensions of public servants who put themselves in harm’s way.

From San Diego, San Jose, and Stockton to St. Louis, Detroit, and Suffolk County, the story sounds much the same.

I’ve been blogging about the underfunded/overgenerous public-pension problem for a while. But a great resource is PensionTsunami.com, which has been on the story even longer.

ON CAMPUS, THE PERSISTENT PROBLEM OF “HATE CRIME HOAXES.” You get more of the behavior you reward.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: “Is it even legal to use the the official White House website this way?” But it probably is legal. Just pathetically embarrassing. And Politico isn’t looking too good, either.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:

Since 2009, the UC Board of Regents and President Mark Yudof have responded to state retrenchment by taking the axe to their campuses—cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from UC’s budget, raising tuition 32% and more recently proposing another tuition hike of 81% over the next four years. The response has been rallies, direct actions, and widespread protest among faculty, staff and students.

While many of these actions have called for an end to Operational Excellence, movements for greater democracy in university governance face a variety of obstacles. At UC, knowledge workers are divided among an alphabet soup of bargaining units, each covering campuses across the state: the UAW (grad teachers), CUE (clerical workers), UPTE (technical workers), AFSCME (service and maintenance), the AFT (lecturers and other staff), and then undergrads and tenure-track faculty, who don’t have formal bargaining power. As Smith puts it, “There are coalitions that have been built that are working, it’s just that there’s a lot coming at us. We have to be continually regrouping, moving forward.”

Meanwhile, dissident university staff face threats to their already insecure jobs. “I have spoken to next to no individual staff who welcome the idea of shared services, but nobody will speak out,” says one employee, who has worked in managerial and sub-managerial capacities and wished to be kept anonymous. “People are mostly doing like I am doing, counting the years to retirement and hoping to stick it out.” . . .

The fate of Gender and Women’s Studies at Berkeley rests on the availability of its single full-time staffer. “Visitors come, foreign visitors, global feminist people,” she says. “Part of our mission is to welcome people and have a space for intellectual discussions. Are we going to reach a point where there’s no there there?”

Yes.

NERVOUS: The Hill: Anxious Obama campaign plans high-dollar fall fundraising spree.

AT AMAZON, the End-Of-Summer Levi’s Sale. For men, women, and children.