TIM CAVANAUGH: If Romney’s Losing, Why Do The Media Act Like He’s Already The President? Well, only for the purpose of being blamed. It’s like he’s already been elected “scape-President” or something.

And this seems right: “Romney is also the incumbent in a cultural sense–he is the old, rich, white guy that 45 years of higher education and Hollywood have inveighed against. He has a stake in the system and values that two successive generations of elites have been taught to hate.”

Obama, of course, is just the reverse. How’s that working out? Bad enough that the media have had to create the new office of “scape-President” to distract from it. . . .

FAST AND FURIOUS: Univision Breaks New Details of Obama Admin’s Fast and Furious Cover-Up.

And a question from Bob Owens: Will Romney mention Fast and Furious during the debates, to help force an issue to the surface that the palace guard MSM are “unexpectedly” reticent to discuss?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Harsh Reality Hits California’s Community Colleges.

THE SILENCE OF THE NINETY ONE PERCENT: WE ARE THE 91%: Only 9% of Americans Cooperate with Pollsters  and most of my family and friends aren’t among them.  Why not?   They don’t trust the person on the other side of the phone NOT to be from the government and taking down numbers for nefarious purposes.  After Joe the Plumber, after Fast and Furious and Benghazi-gate, after the media that won’t report this administration’s malfeasance, do you blame them?

JOE SCARBOROUGH Doubles Down. This won’t help his 2016 campaign.

CLASS: Obama Camp to Deploy Fake GST Steel Employee to Bash Mitt Romney Before Debate.

TOO BAD THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN: Gallup surveyed Libyan public opinion a few months ago and found that 95 percent of respondents wanted the country’s militias disarmed at once.

FAKE? Bots Make Up Ten Percent of Online Traffic, Study Says. “Automated traffic-generating robots have always been a problem on the web, but the problem may be worsening as advertisers sink more dollars into spreading their message in creative ways, though contests, polls, and social promotions. Non-consumer traffic in actions like registration and voting increased from 6 percent in 2011 to 26 percent today, Solve Media says.”

ANOTHER STATE DEPARTMENT SCANDAL: An American lawyer named Warren Rothman was tortured and nearly killed in China. State Department officials inadvertently collaborated with Rothman’s would-be killers and didn’t exactly handle that mistake in a confidence-inspiring manner. Joel Brinkley has the story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

[Rothman] contacted officials at the State Department Office of the Inspector General and told them of the distressing role the acting consul and other consulate officers had played in his own drama.

Well, late last month, the inspector general’s office wrote back and told Rothman, “We have determined that the appropriate office to address your concerns is the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs” – the very State Department office where the diplomats in question worked.

There’s an ineffectual response, if ever I have heard one.

I wrote to the agency and asked why on earth it had referred Rothman back to the office where the accused bad actors worked. Brian D. Rubendall, special agent in charge of the office, told me simply: “Our office made the decision that” the State Department bureau was “best suited to handle the complaint.”

I hope I never have to count on these people.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Build A Black Hole Laser.

ON THE EVE OF PERESTROIKA: “Something has gone awry in the U.S. economy over the past decade,” Fred Bauer writes at the Daily Caller. “The Cold War provides a troubling parallel here:”

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet growth began to slow considerably. By how much it slowed remains a point of contention (the notorious secrecy of Kremlin bureaucrats makes exact economic numbers hard to pin down), but official C.I.A. numbers estimated that average annual economic growth for the Soviet Union was about 1.9% between 1975 and 1980 and 1.8% between 1980 and 1985. These estimates would give the Soviet Union a faster average growth rate between 1975 and 1985 than the United States has seen in the past decade. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many charged the C.I.A. with overestimating Soviet growth, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. An alternative measure, established by economist G.I. Khanin, finds that the U.S.S.R. grew at an annual rate of 1% between 1975 and 1980 and at an annual rate of 0.6% between 1980 and 1985. This statistic puts U.S. growth in a slightly better light, but one can only take so much solace from the fact that the United States has still had almost five years of average annual growth at or below the most pessimistic estimates of Soviet growth rates in the early 1980s. Even by the standards of a Soviet five-year plan, the last five years of the American economy’s growth have been disappointing.

“FAILED LEADERSHIP STARTS AT THE TOP:” On Libya, Team Obama Is Now a House Divided Against Itself.

FROM THE IT-WOULD-BE-NEWS-IF-A-REPUBLICAN-WERE-PRESIDENT DEPARTMENT: Bomb Blasts Kill At Least 32 In Iraq.

CAN THERE BE THAT MANY? 10 TV Shows You Need To Watch This Fall.

MORE WORRIES ABOUT Super Gonorrhea.

THE MOBS ARE BACK: This sort of thing is not going to stop any time soon.

A mob torched and vandalised a village of Buddhists in Cox’s Bazaar’s Ramu Upazila early on Sunday in one of the worst religious attacks in Bangladesh apparently triggered by a Facebook posting allegedly defaming the Quran.

Eyewitnesses and police said the assailants set fire to at least six Buddhist temples and nearly 20 homes and looted and damaged more than a hundred others until 3am in the hate attack.

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KEITH HENNESSEY: The Washington Post’s Hatchet Job On Paul Ryan. “I would expect a story like this on the Newsweek or Huffington Post sites, but the Post purports to be nonpartisan and balanced.”

UPDATE: Hmm. Paul Ryan: Eric Holder must go over Fast and Furious.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Duke Launches $3.25 Billion Fundraising Campaign. “The campaign, called Duke Forward: Partnering for the Future, already has taken in about $1.325 billion during its planning, or silent, phase over the last two years.”

Be careful, Duke. There are already calls to spread the endowment wealth around.

UPDATE: Reader Jason Hudson writes:

If Harvard has a $30B endowment, why isn’t it ‘taxed’ to support the Mountain Empire Community Colleges of the world? This should be a Democratic position.

I think everybody does better if you just spread the nonprofit wealth around. #Reynolds2016.