So against this backdrop, what does the L.A. Times’ Chris Megerian come up with for a big overview of how California is functioning? A sunny story with this headline: “California’s economic stability leaves Gov. Brown a new challenge.” Its message? This guy is a genius! If only he could get more support in the Legislature!

“Gray Davis, a fellow Democrat, was recalled by voters as state finances imploded following an energy crisis. Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger limped out of office with rock-bottom poll numbers, leaving a pile of debt.

“But on Brown’s watch, deficits have become surpluses, helped along by tax hikes the governor persuaded voters to approve. More money is being pumped into schools.

“University tuition has stabilized.

“Budget standoffs that once dragged through the summer are now wrapped up by the June deadline, lending the Capitol a new sense of orderliness. And on Wednesday, the governor called a special legislative session to prod lawmakers to pass his plan for saving money and paying off debt.

“That record, which will be a major part of Brown’s reelection campaign, is due partly to good fortune. California is benefiting from a nationwide economic recovery that has helped flood the state with revenue. Brown is also blessed with a Capitol dominated by fellow Democrats and a 2010 rule change that lowered the number of votes needed to pass a spending plan.”

A worship of process, an indifference to the real world

So if you read this story in a vacuum, you would believe that California had a healthy economy. That’s just not true.

You would also believe California has budget surpluses. That’s just not true. California has at least $200 billion in unfunded pension and health care oblgations to retired employees. The governor declines to ask the Legislature to provide even close to the actuarial minimum to fund these obligations. How does he finesse official budget documents to sustain the myth that the state has budget surpluses? With Enron-style accounting.

What’s going on here? How can the state with the worst poverty rate in the nation and staggering debt be depicted as nirvana?

Contrary to some libertarians and conservatives in California, I really don’t think it’s the West Coast version of Obamaphilia, where gigantic screw-ups and scandals are ignored because of idolatry and partisanship. (Do you really think the IRS hassling and impeding hundreds of conservative nonprofits during a presidential election year would be covered as it’s been if Bush were sill president and the nonprofits were liberal?)

Mainly, I think it’s a reflection of how stunned the Sacramento press corps was by the post-Pete Wilson dysfunction — the decade preceding Brown’s return to the governor’s office in which the Legislature couldn’t even pass a budget on time year after year after year.

Now that Brown, aided by Proposition 25, is able to get budgets passed, the absence of this chaos seems miraculous to the Sacramento media.

RIP, skeptical journalism. At least in Sacramento.

But instead of just giving the governor credit for restoring order to the budget process, they give him much broader credit for California’s rebound and its “economic stability.”

But what rebound? Nearly one-quarter of the state is in poverty, a much worse rate than West Virginia and Mississippi.

And what “economic stability”? If a household ignored its gigantic credit-card debts, mom and dad could pretend they were thriving. But are they really thriving?

Of course not.

In our idealized “All the President’s Men” conception of journalism, we believe that journalists hunt for discrepancies between what our leaders tell us and what is the truth. But in Sacramento, our journalists do no such thing. Instead, they put on the blinders, and reflect the view expressed in another classic 1970s movie.

Remain calm! All is well!

By Chris Reed

California Attorney General Kamala Harris is among the many Americans of all political persuasions who are outraged that few are taking the fall for the grotesque irresponsibility that led to the housing bubble, its collapse, and the recession of the past six years.

She sued quasi-federal mortgage-issuing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in December over their foreclosures of 12,000 homes in California. Last week, she targeted Standard & Poor’s over the credit-ratings agency’s high marks for many firms involved in the bubble.

But Harris, who is half black and half Indian-American, is doing more than a little grandstanding here. Like most politicians and most of the media, she chooses to ignore the coarse racial politics that led both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton to push policies that inevitably inflated the housing bubble. It’s the uncomfortable back story that is usually ignored in favor of the tidy narrative of evil Wall Street and supine regulators.

On June 17, 2002, Bush announced a drive to get 5.5 million minorities out of apartments and into their own homes. The primary method amounted to affirmative-action lending — eliminating down payments and loosening income requirements. As The New York Times noted in a 2008 analysis, Bush’s primary means of achieving this end was insisting that “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac meet ambitious new goals for low-income lending.”

Against this backdrop, Harris’ insinuation that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were racially predatory looks grossly demagogic. This is from a Huffington Post account of her lawsuit:

“Harris also called on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to disclose whether they have complied with civil rights laws protecting minorities and members of the Armed Forces against unlawful convictions and foreclosures.”

So if affirmative action backfires, the quasi-government agency pursuing affirmative action under pressure from the president faces civil liability?

Clinton’s role in inflating the housing bubble was every bit as direct as Bush 43’s. In 1997, he appointed Andrew Cuomo, the current New York governor, to be secretary of housing and urban development. Cuomo had little banking or lending expertise, but he had a broad banking and lending agenda. Veteran journalist Wayne Barrett laid out his folly in a 2008 analysis in Village Voice:

“Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis. He took actions that — in combination with many other factors — helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded ‘kickbacks’ to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. …

“Perhaps the only domestic issue George Bush and Bill Clinton were in complete agreement about was maximizing home ownership, each trying to lay claim to a record percentage of homeowners, and both describing their efforts as a boon to blacks and Hispanics. HUD, Fannie, and Freddie were their instruments, and, as is now apparent, the more unsavory the means, the greater the growth.…

“Cuomo … did more to set these forces of unregulated expansion in motion than any other secretary and then boasted about it, presenting his initiatives as crusades for racial and social justice … .”

Somehow I doubt this coarse and depressing history will be mentioned by Kamala Harris, who is an utterly conventional California Democrat despite her exotic background and moralistic rhetoric. Wall Street did behave with gross irresponsibility, Standard & Poor’s did fail as a credit-ratings analyst, and thousands of other white-collar types did behave unethically. But the ethical failing that started it all was bipartisan racial pandering dressed up as the pursuit of “social justice.”

The result here in the Golden State:

“Latino and African-American homeowners in California have experienced foreclosure rates 2.3 and 1.9 times that of non-Hispanic white borrowers.  Latino borrowers alone make up 48 percent of all foreclosures.”

That is from a 2010 report by the California branch of the Center for Responsible Lending. How perverse that from 1997 to 2006, the Center for Irresponsible Lending was at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

By Chris Reed

When the Bush administration responded to 9-11 by using “advanced interrogation techniques” and detaining hundreds of terror suspects indefinitely, all without offering clarity about exactly what it was doing and the legal rationales it used to justify its actions, the editorial page of The Los Angeles Times was a harsh and persistent critic. Examples:

Jan. 15, 2004

“The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday bought the Bush administration’s leaky logic on terrorism, tacitly endorsing secret detentions of hundreds of suspects after the 9/11 attacks. Moreover, by embracing the ends-justify-means reasoning in this case, the justices set a dangerous precedent as they ponder other key challenges to the administration’s anti-terror policies before them this term.”

Aug. 8, 2004

“In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Bush administration to let the hundreds of detainees it claims are terrorists meet with lawyers and challenge their imprisonment — nearly three years behind bars for some. The high court decisions were a resounding defeat for the president, who has steadfastly asserted his right to round up and put away pretty much anyone he deems a terrorist. …

“The Pentagon has let a few detainees meet with a lawyer as a goodwill gesture, providing the lawyer agrees to let officials listen in and promises not to ask about conditions of the client’s confinement or if he has been abused. However, the government is contesting almost every motion and writ, tying up the cases as it continues to claim, incredibly, that the Guantanamo detainees have no constitutional right of access. …

“Congress could step in, defining the detainees’ rights to counsel, the burden of proof that would apply in court proceedings and the limits on detention. But in a nation where Pentagon and Justice Department officials must, like the rest of us, abide by the rule of law, shouldn’t the Supreme Court’s conclusion — that even detainees are entitled to due process — be the final word?”

Jan. 8, 2006

“Terrorism presents the U.S. with an enemy unlike any we have seen before. Most Americans agree with Bush that intelligence-gathering on Al Qaeda and its spawn may require more extensive investigative authorities. But the more sweeping the powers granted the executive branch, the more vital it is that Congress provide meaningful oversight. …

“The struggle against terrorism will not end soon, and the choices we make in fighting it will help define us as a nation for decades. To allow any president to invent the law as he goes along is to invite contempt for the law for many presidencies to come.”

Feb. 7, 2006

“The administration continues to confuse Article II of the Constitution — which enumerates the president’s duties as commander in chief — with justification for disregarding the other two branches of government. Article II does give the president power, but the Constitution also has a couple of other articles — the first and third, if anyone from the administration feels like looking them up — outlining the powers of Congress and the judiciary, respectively.

“It’s hard to say what’s more disturbing: the attorney general’s unsound legal reasoning or his transparent efforts to avoid a legal conversation altogether in favor of emotional appeals aimed squarely at the court of public opinion. Practically the first words of his opening statement were: ‘Al Qaeda and its affiliates remain deadly dangerous.’

“As several senators reminded him, the hearings are not a contest to see who hates Al Qaeda more. They’re to find out about the NSA’s secret program and to see whether the White House accepts any restraints on its power.”

Feb. 14, 2006

“Gitmo … is a global embarrassment that does the U.S. more harm than good in the fight against terrorism.”

April 16, 2006

“From the beginning, President Bush essentially has argued that the post-9/11 war on terrorism authorized him to act as judge, jury and executioner of enemy combatants, including U.S. citizens. In 2004, the Supreme Court pointedly rejected this assertion of power, ruling that both U.S. citizens and foreigners detained at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba could challenge their confinement.

“‘A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens,’ Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in holding that Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Louisiana native, was entitled to a hearing before a neutral decision-maker. …

“[The U.S. should] try suspected terrorists in federal court … or in military tribunals authorized by Congress and conducted in accordance with international law.”

May 22, 2006

“Saying goodbye to Guantanamo would be more than a symbolic change of policy. Confining detainees in a geographically isolated location encourages abuses by authorities and despair and disruption among inmates; witness last week’s detainee suicide attempts and subsequent attack on guards. But appearances are important too. As British Atty. Gen. Lord Goldsmith said in calling for the closing of Guantanamo: ‘The historic tradition of the United States as a beacon of freedom, of liberty and of justice deserves the removal of this symbol.'”

Jan. 4, 2007

“However else it might modify its behavior in dealing with a new, Democratic-controlled Congress, the Bush administration is still stonewalling when it comes to sharing information about its tactics in the ‘war on terror.’ That’s a mistake.”

Dec. 13, 2007

“Congress is appropriately indignant about the revelation that the CIA destroyed videotapes of interrogation sessions at which suspected terrorists were subjected to ‘enhanced’ techniques that may have included the simulated drowning known as waterboarding. That outrage needs to be channeled into legislation that would prevent the agency from engaging in the sort of behavior captured on those tapes.”

After President Obama was elected, the Times editorialized that it was crucial he shut down Guantanamo, abandon torture, embrace due process and be open about U.S. policies.

Four years later, Guantanamo remains open, the Obama administration is so secretive that a federal judge complains she is barely able to issue a coherent decision on administration terrorism policies, and the president asserts he can kill any American suspected of working for or with al-Qaeda, and without an indictment. Drones have been used to kill several thousand people around the world, including two Americans.

If George W. Bush had done this, just imagine what the Times would have written. But he wasn’t their guy. So here’s the Times’ mild verdict on the actions of the Obama administration.

“In the coming weeks, the Senate Intelligence Committee will have an opportunity to demand answers about targeted killings when it holds hearings on [John Brennan’s] nomination to head the CIA. He should be prepared to share the contents of the proposed ‘playbook’ and the legal authorities on which it rests. Decisions about targeted killings may rely on classified information, but the process by which such fateful decisions are made should not be a secret.”

That’s from a Jan. 28 editorial.

The outrage that vanished

Concerns about the Second Amendment to the Constitution? About a presidency without any limits on his power? About a commander-in-chief acting as judge, jury and executioner? About negative international reactions to U.S. policies?  About years of administration stonewalling?

They’ve all disappeared. The fundamental view that no president is above the law, you see, only applies to presidents that The Los Angeles Times doesn’t like.

I’m a libertarian who is unhappy with the defense policies of both Bush 43 and Obama. Due process for American citizens, at the least, has to be sacrosanct.

That said, it should be mind-boggling to any honest person, not just libertarians, to witness so much of the mainstream media tolerating presidential assassinations, including of U.S. citizens, after rebuking Bush for torture.

I won’t hold my breath waiting for an explanation from the Times’ editorial board, however.

As a libertarian who still seethes over Newt Gingrich’s and George W. Bush’s betrayal of small-government conservatism, I have tons of issues with the modern Republican Party. But I have to say the GOP has my sympathy most national elections because of my incensed reaction to the heavy-handed bias of the national media.

Here we go again.

Who could have imagined that 2012’s October surprise would be the mainstream media simply choosing to ignore a huge geopolitical scandal on the president’s watch? It is now a matter of public record that within a day of the Sept. 11 murders of four Americans in Benghazi, the administration had vast signs it was an organized act of terror. Yet two weeks later, in a speech to the U.N., Barack Obama repeatedly suggested it was a spontaneous assault triggered by a YouTube video.

This is cut and dried — an administration caught peddling lies to cover up incompetence and worse. This isn’t complex. It’s Scandal 101.

But not according to ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Occasionally, when I kid a liberal member of the media about how in the tank the national media are, I get an honest acknowledgement that this is undeniable.

But sometimes I get pushback. The last few weeks, whenever that has happened, I’ve sent along a transcript of ABC News’ coverage of the aftermath of the first debate. Why? To highlight George Stephanopolous’ “analysis”:

STEPHANOPOLOUS:  Does a tie go to the challenger?

Wow. The pivotal event that revived Mitt Romney and made this a very, very close election, and within minutes of its conclusion, ABC News is spinning it as a tie. Is Stephanopolous the Greek word for Maviglio?

But that’s just one journalist. The media’s de facto/tacit cover-up of the administration’s Benghazi cover-up involves literally dozens of journalists at many different institutions suddenly deciding to go soft on a debacle at the upper reaches of the U.S. government so as to protect the guilty. It’s a sad comment on American journalism.

And maybe I’m naive, but I still have been surprised by this. Benghazi, I thought, was too big a screw-up to be ignored. Even when they were inclined to be in the tank, there were standards, I thought, for the well-educated, highly paid, prideful Washington media.

Boy, was I wrong.

We have a lot or super-rich candidates and office-holders now: Schwarzenegger, Whitman, Poizner, Fiorina, that wrestling lady in Connecticut, John Kerry (got his money the old way: married into the Heinz catsup fortune), the Bushes, etc.

They run for office, have a jolly old time, yet face no consequences if they wreck the country or state.

Here’s a better idea: If they win, they sign a document stipulating that if, during their time in office, the state, country, city, etc. gets worse, all their fortune is taxed at 100%. It’s gone.

So, given that Arnold has been a total disaster, all his hundreds of millions would go to the state treasury. If Whitman fails, same thing. John Kerry’s money would have been forfeited to the U.S. Treasury because his time in office has seen the worst Depression since the Great Depression. And so on.

On the other hand, if the economy grew during a politician’s term in office, he could keep his money. So, Reagan, JFK and other successful politicians could have kept their money.

If this policy were adopted, you can bet these super-rich politicos would be more careful with their policies. As things now stand, it’s only the “little people” — you and I — who get hammered whenever their crackpot schemes end in inevitable disaster.

Let them put their money where their ambitions are.

Meg’s campaign boasts of her management prowess. But compare this.

Here’s how Meg ran eBay: She didn’t go out and hire retired GM, Ford or GE managers. Instead, she hired young hotshots hungry to create the Internet future.

And here’s how she’s run her gubernatorial campaign: She’s hired old Arnold, Pete Wilson, McCain and Bush hacks. Wilson last won in 1994 by being against immigration, an issue Meg has flipped Left on. That year, the Internet hardly existed.

Arnold won only because of the 2003 recall fluke; then, in 2006, he campaigned against tax-increasing Angelides on a no-new-taxes pledge — a lie, because he broke the pledge in 2009. Bush actually lost the national popular vote in 2000; then barely won in 2004 against the pathetic Kerry. And in 2008, McCain lost California by 3 million votes.

These people she hired for tens of millions of simoleons aren’t winners, they’re burnouts. That’s why, this far into the campaign, she’s still losing in the polls against an opponent who has spent hardly any money.

She should have hired some pimply, 17-year-old hackers who would have learned the political language as fast as they pick up HTML or C++.