MICKEY KAUS: Feeling Guilty?

Am I crazy or is today’s NBC Nightly News broadcast actually almost fair in Obama vs. Romney terms? … The network isn’t exactly harsh on Obama regarding the highly suspicious intelligence-agency blame-taking on Libya misdirection–-but Andrea Mitchell does offer only two alternatives: 1) “a coverup” 2) “trying to avoid acknowledging mistakes this close to an election.” … Is MSM Guilt finally kicking in? (Thanks, Howard Fineman!). Or was whoever’s in charge of skewing the coverage (maybe his name is Brian) just off for the night?

Stay tuned.

ROGER SIMON: Benghazi Coverup Worse Than Watergate.

Watergate caught numerous public officials lying, including the president of the United States, but Benghazigate has all that and more.

It involves the terrorist murder (not an electorally irrelevant burglary) of government officials, their reckless endangerment, the undermining of the Bill of Rights and free speech by our own administration in response to Islamist threats, and, ultimately, the complicity of that same administration, consciously or unconsciously, in the downfall of Western civilization.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media function as their more-than-willing accomplices in this downfall, in essence as Obama’s court eunuchs.

Sound excessive?

Hear me out.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: A “devastating” coverup timeline.

TIMOTHY DALRYMPLE: The Shady Ethics of the “Obama Phone.” “Is the Obama administration effectively paying a company to advertise the free cell phones as Obama Phones? Or was the administration aware of the practice, and have they done anything to stop it? I’m sure the mainstream media are hard on the case, investigating the Obama administration in that relentless way they do.”

CHANGE, BUT NOT HOPE: Libya: “The spokesman for the director of National Intelligence issued a statement Friday that appeared to try and explain why the Obama administration position has shifted on the events of the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.”

OBAMA’S ECONOMIC FATALISM: I’ve seen this among my lefty acquaintances.  They assume decay is inevitable.  I think it comes from economic illiteracy and first-world-guilt (which in turn comes from not knowing that wealth can be created, so more economic illiteracy).  Couple that with Obama’s world-bestriding ego, and you have a recipe for disaster.

UPDATE, FROM READER ERIC SCHUBERT:
In several related ways, I see the liberal pessimism Sarah Hoyt describes
as a classic case of projection:

1. The Blue Social Model is in decline. If you’re heavily invested in it,
then the socioeconomic trends that are moving us away from it are
devastating to your self-worth. Contrast that view with the Whiggish
Optimism (leavened with a heavy dose of the Doctrine of Original Sin) that
we see with Walter Russell Mead’s blog.

2. If her liberal friends are gentry liberals who have career paths that
are in decline, then the rise of successful upstarts in unrelated fields
undermines the status of her liberal friends.

3. Racism, sexism, and homophobia are fading rapidly as roadblocks to
personal happiness and professional success. How does a liberal feel
superior and smug when all but the most narrow-minded accept diversity?

Eric Schubert
Katy, TX

YOU MAY QUOTE WITH ATTRIBUTION

Eric — Most of my friends are novelists, wedded to the old model of doing fiction-business.

SO I’VE SPENT THE PAST WEEK AS A MEDIA FELLOW at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. It was delightful, and I met a lot of interesting people and learned a lot. (I dropped by and talked with the Udacity folks, too, where I learned some stuff I’ll be writing about later.)

I’ve been researching my next Encounter Broadside, a followup to The Higher Education Bubble that is tentatively entitled The K-12 Implosion, and I learned a lot. I’ve also found that this is a topic that people are quite interested in. Everybody knows the current system isn’t working; the question is what to do about it.

Now, alas, it’s time to move on. Ah, well.

POLITICS: The Hill: Obama administration tells contractors again: Don’t issue layoff notices. At least until after the election.

UPDATE: It’s even worse.

And reader Richard Fagin emails:

You might want to point out to your readers that the WARN Act was a Clinton administration creation. Now that the law is in a position to harm a Democrat president running for reelection, isn’t it amazing how the law is ignored?

Laws are for the little people.

MASS TRANSIT YOU CAN BELIEVE IN: How Driverless Cars Would Reshape Automobiles *and* the Transit System.

When I’ve thought about driverless cars, which if you believe Sergey Brin, will be available within “several years,” I’ve tended to think of them as a drop-in replacement for our current automobiles. So, you’d buy a VW Automaton and it would sit in your driveway until you wanted to go somewhere. Then, you’d hop in, say, “Take me to Lake Merritt,” and then just sit back and pop in the latest Animal Collective while the computer drove.

But maybe that’s not what would happen at all. Changes in transportation technology have tended to be accompanied by changes to transportation systems, too. Long-time technologist Brad Templeton argues that this will, in fact, be the case. And he’s even got an idea of what the big shift might be. We could enter the age of the “whistlecar.” If one can hire a cheap specialized ‘robotaxi’ (or whistlecar) on demand when one has a special automotive need,” Templeton writes, “car users can elect to purchase a vehicle only for their most common needs, rather than trying to meet almost all of them — or to not purchase at all.”

This vision is kind of stunning: imagine the Kiva Systems logistics robots that now speed around major warehouses, but for people. Transportation-as-a-service models could really take off in a world of hyperoptimized robotaxis. Not only would the robotaxis be built differently from normal cars, but people’s private vehicles (if they had one) would change as they realized how they could use the new system more effectively.

Indeed.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Campaigning Obama knocks Congress for, uh, campaigning.

MICHAEL BARONE: Faced with Information Age problems, Obama offers … Industrial Age Solutions.

In 2008, voters under 30 preferred Barack Obama over John McCain by a 66 to 32 percent margin. Among older voters, Obama led McCain by 50 to 49 percent.

How has Obama paid back the Millennial generation, which provided almost all his margin of victory? With what American Interest superblogger Walter Russell Mead calls “Obama’s war on the young.” . . .

Nineteenth century fixed rails take you where the railroad, or its government subsidizer, wants you to go. Self-driving cars will take you where you want to go, with as many stops as you like along the way.

That’s in line with the way Millennials lead their lives. The iPod/Facebook generation fashions its own playlists and friends lists, rather than let central decisionmakers choose for them.

Obama’s policies, from Obamacare to high-speed rail, treat people as identical cogs in a very large machine, part of a mindless mass that would not be able to get along without government guidance.

In the information age, these industrial age policies have prevented the vibrant economic growth which gives young people the opportunity to find work and community service that maximizes their own special talents and interests — to shape their own world and choose their own future.

Read the whole thing.

BARACK OBAMA’S PROBLEM WITH BLACK VOTERS: “The economic downturn has hit black Americans particularly hard. A Pew Research Centre study found that in 2009 the median wealth of a white household was 20 times higher than that of a black one: the largest gap since the federal government began tracking wealth data by race in 1984. The median wealth of black households had fallen by 53% over the preceding four years, compared with just 16% for white households. In August 2012 the unemployment rate for blacks was 14.1%. That was down from a high of 16.7% in August 2011, but it still far exceeded the national average of 8.1%. . . . Both the current and a former head of the CBC have mused that stubborn unemployment, combined with Mr Obama’s perceived aloofness to the high rates of black unemployment, may cause some black voters to stay at home on November 6th.”

AT AMAZON, Warehouse Deals on Children’s Books.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): How Many Anarchists and “Animal Conservationists” Are the Feds Spying On? “The documents show that the use of this sort of surveillance by federal law enforcement agencies, which does not require a search warrant, has rapidly increased in recent years. Between 2009 and 2011 alone, the number of orders for pen and trap authorizations increased by 60 percent—from 23,535 in 2009 to 37,616 in 2011. The increase is even more striking when compared with older figures. Between 2001 and 2011, for instance, there was a sixfold increase—from 5,683 original orders recorded in 2001 to the 37,616 in 2011. What that means is that more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade, as ACLU’s Naomi Gilens has pointed out.”

They told me if I voted for John McCain. . . oh, hell, you know the rest.

LOOKS LIKE WE’RE IN FOR NASTY WEATHER: CNBC reports “‘Zombie Economy’ May Give Markets a Scare in October.” 

Or as Mike Flynn writes at Big Government, “Storm Clouds: The Looming Obama Recession:”

Make no mistake, the deteriorating economic situation is the result of Obama’s policies. Since the end of the recession we’ve had massive stimulus, auto bailouts, cash for clunkers, ObamaCare, Dodd Frank and a host of new regulations. We have also been promised a huge tax increase should Obama win reelection. If you were intentionally trying to trigger a recession, you’d be hard pressed to come up with more effective policies.

Obama’s reelection campaign is predicated on the myth that the economy, while weak, is steadily improving. It isn’t–at all. Come November, Obama ought to take his rightful place in the unemployment line.

Or else a lot more of the rest of us will.

“I’M SORRY, ARE YOU BUYING A CAR TO BRING IT ALL HOME IN, TOO?” Barack Obama wants you to ask your mom for an $18,000 birth control loan. Here’s what she’d write back.

WELL, JOHNNY, WHEN A MALE BRAIN AND A FEMALE BRAIN LOVE EACH OTHER VERY MUCH. . . How Does Male DNA Get Into A Female Brain?

HOW CALIFORNIA is committing suicide.

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Freedom of Expression Without The Expression.

IT’S A GOOD NAME: Reese Witherspoon Gives Birth To A Boy Named Tennessee.

LOOK BACK IN ANGER — Look Forward in Catatonia.

GINI, GINI, WHO CAN I TURN TO? Mickey Kaus:

Shorter NYT: The debate over income inequality, the defining issue of our time, the touchstone that lets liberals know they’re liberals, takes up vast amounts of media space and earns big advances for my friends, is really about whether government will reduce the Gini coefficient of income inequality by 23% (Bush) or 25% (Obama). … A generation of respectable leftish intellectuals, at the Times and elsewhere, have succeeded in making presidential politics seem like faculty politics. …

P.S.: Look at the graph accompanying Eduardo Porter’s article. Even after the most ambitious redistribution scheme Obama might implement, is there any chance of restoring the relative after-tax “equality” of, say, the early Reagan years? Weren’t Democrats complaining about income inequality back then, too? … The alternative: Stop obsessing about Gini indexes of money equality! Start worrying about the traditional American ideal of social equality (which income inequality affects, as only one of many factors). You knew I’d say that–but Tim Noah and William Voegeli are saying it too.

The problem is, an emphasis on social equality would conflict with oikophobia-driven class distinctions.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? “California often prides itself on doing things first. Well world, here’s another first. Today, Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that would create pensions for 6.3 million pensionless private sector employees.”

D.C. HOUSING MARKET looking a bit bubbly?

DECLINE IS A CHOICE: “Broadway star Patti LuPone gave an interview to the DC gay mag Metro Weekly, in which she unloaded several strange bursts of liberal celebrity-speak. The most notable one was resenting Rudy Giuliani for cleaning up Times Square into an ‘arcade’ and wishing Times Square was ‘tawdry and dangerous again.'”

She’s far from the only New York celebrity who longs for the urban hell of the Taxi Driver/Death Wish era.