"It shouldn't surprise us that the role of American business is increasingly vilified or viewed with skepticism."

Writes the much-vilified businessman Charles Koch (in a WSJ op-ed):

Far too many businesses have been all too eager to lobby for maintaining and increasing subsidies and mandates paid by taxpayers and consumers. This growing partnership between business and government is a destructive force, undermining not just our economy and our political system, but the very foundations of our culture....

To end cronyism we must end government's ability to dole out favors and rig the market. Far too many well-connected businesses are feeding at the federal trough. By addressing corporate welfare as well as other forms of welfare, we would add a whole new level of understanding to the notion of entitlement reform.

At the Wingra Café...

... it's a calm, mellow place.

Biking down by Lake Wingra, we encounter some kind of political polka...

Romney on "Meet the Press."

Video here. Transcript here. Romney's performance, responding to tough (but nice) questioning by David Gregory, made me think Romney would appeal to moderate voters when he goes up against Obama in the debates. There are a lot of similarities between the 2 men, in that both seem rather low-key and temperate.

I wanted to highlight the discussion of Mormons:

GREGORY:  I want to ask you something a little bit more personal.  You-- you both are guarded about in your faith.  You talked more about it in the course of the convention.  We came across a-- a quote from a biography written about your father in 1968 and he said about being a Mormon, "I’m a member of a religion that is among the most persecuted minority groups in our history."  And here you are, the First Mormon to be the nominee of the Republican Party, you could be the first Mormon president.  I wonder how much pride that gives you, how much pride you think it gives others in the church?  Is it similar to what many Catholics felt with President Kennedy?

"Rosary rallies" at the Wisconsin Capital are partisan politics....

... according to some partisans of the side that is not the one the reciters of Catholic prayers are supposedly partisan for.

Dr. Helen wonders "if men are going Galt, staying home and collecting unemployment or no longer need jobs because they don’t get married as often?"

"Or is it that they just can’t get a job because the industries they work in are no longer hiring? Could the Obama administration also be part of the problem, focusing only on women’s jobs and not on those of men? Or a combination of these. What do you think?"

On that point about the Obama administration's focus on women's jobs, remember that Obama's original idea was to have a stimulus that would produce jobs for men — who "need to do something that fits with how they define themselves as men":

As the room chewed over the non-PC phrase “women’s work,” trying to square the senator’s point with their analytical models, [Alan] Krueger—who was chief economist at the Department of Labor in the mid-1990s at the tender age of thirty-four—sat there silently, thinking that in all his years of studying men and muscle, he had never used that term. But Obama was right. Krueger wondered how his latest research on happiness and well-being might take into account what Obama had put his finger on: that work is identity, that men like to build, to have something to show for their sweat and toil.

“Infrastructure,” he blurted out. “Rebuilding infrastructure.”

And then what happened? How was Obama — with his concern about manhood — swallowed up and enfolded within the Party of Women?

Interesting to see his desire to build masculine pride by giving men things to build, because men like to build... and now, in 2012, to find him bumbling and mumbling things like "You didn't build that."

Well, we — or they, the men — didn't build that if that is the infrastructure, the roads and bridges you were talking about. (Remember the big roads-and-bridges theme of September 2011?) And — I wish I had a searchable text of everything said from the stage last week — did anyone even mention roads and bridges at the Democratic Convention?

"It was kind of like a waterslide... But like the waterslide was like very, very steep and went about 20 miles an hour."

14-year-old boy sucked into a storm sewer pipe.

Jeffrey said he held his breath for what felt like two minutes, as his body flipped around in the pipe. "I was face first, then I was feet first, and then I was side first".... The water eventually became waist-deep. And Jeffrey said he grabbed a handle along the wall in the sewer.

"I just grabbed it and I heard people: 'Jeff, Jefff, Jefffffffff," and I saw a light and I'm like 'Oh my God. Thank you, Jesus," he said.

He was in there, traveling a quarter mile, through multiple pipes, for about 40 minutes, half of that time before knowing the rescuers had located him.

"In 1966, a ragtag rock band in Wisconsin called The Benders recorded an original song, 'Can't Tame Me,' at a tiny studio."

"... Long story short, single copies of the record in the original picture sleeve have sold for as much as $2,000 on the online market. That's more than it cost to press all the records back in the day."

"How it ever got to that status is beyond me. There's guys out there collecting all this old obscure rock 'n' roll," said Paul Barry, who co-wrote the song and was lead vocalist and drummer.

"Biking with kids is all the rage in Portland these days, but biking with six kids between the ages of 2 and 11?"

"That's something I never would have thought possible before I met southeast Portland resident Emily Finch." "My kids have forgotten what it's like to even be in a car."

She's also the stay at home wife of a neurologist, so she can afford the time (and perhaps more importantly, neighborhood) to make this work.

Well, yeah. It does strike me as something, perhaps counter intuitively, that she can indulge as a result of privilege. In this day and age, just intentionally having six children may be a way of utilizing one's surplus prosperity. People without often go through great lengths to avoid such a burden.

"Your whole world is just going to be a mystery instead of an exciting place," if you don't believe in evolution.

Says Bill Nye ("the science guy"), arguing that children must be taught evolution as a fundamental truth.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. It's like, it's very much analogous to trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates. You're just not going to get the right answer....

Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you don't believe in evolution. I mean, here are these ancient dinosaur bones or fossils, here is radioactivity, here are distant stars that are just like our star but they're at a different point in their lifecycle. The idea of deep time, of this billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy, just untenable, itself inconsistent.

Video at link, via Metafilter, which links to this response from the Creation Museum. The world becomes fantastically complicated if you do believe in evolution....

Nye is good on the subject of understanding science and the importance of science, but he dips into the stuff of religion when promotes science for the purpose of exciting us, dispelling mystery, and avoiding feeling crazy. These are the very psychological needs that religion serves quite well for great numbers of human individuals. When Nye proffers science for these purposes, he is promoting it as a religion substitute. Did he even notice he was doing that?!

"Jeff Bezos And The End of PowerPoint As We Know It."

"Bezos told the story behind the new products in images and text. I’ve discussed this technique before in more detail but in short, it’s called Picture Superiority."

It simply means that the brain processes information more effectively when the information is presented in pictures and words instead of words alone. Neuroscientists have also found that when a slide (or advertisement) contains pictures and words, it’s best to have the picture on the left side of the page or slide and words on the right. This is exactly what Bezos did for a majority of his slides....

"Having made the greatest legal blunder of the 20th century, he’s trying to blame it on a dead man."

A pithy pushback, from Alan Dershowitz to Christopher Darden, the erstwhile prosecutor who thought it was a good idea to ask O.J. Simpson to put on that glove.

The dead man is Johnnie Cochran:

Obama 49%, Romney 45%/Obama 46%, Romney 45%.

The first set of numbers is the general presidential tracking poll. The second is restricted to 11 swing states (with 146 electoral votes).

Romney's number is the same in both places, and Obama snags an extra 3% when you look at the whole country. In the general group, there are 6% that go to neither candidate, and that's evenly divided between undecideds and people who are voting for some other candidate. In the swing states, you've got 9% who aren't (yet) going for Obama or Romney, and within this group 4% go to some other candidate and 5% are undecided.

The Romney/Ryan decision to fight hard in Wisconsin.

A Republican presidential candidate hasn't won here since Reagan beat Mondale (in 1984), but Republicans have won the governorship twice in the last 2 years — there was a recall election — and they won the last Senate race and are on track to pick up the other Senate seat. And so we are about to get all the TV ads and so forth that recognize our status as a true battleground state.

Mary Spicuzza has some good detail here:

"There’s something going on in Wisconsin. The grass-roots army that we have built in Wisconsin, they’re crushing it out there," said Rick Wiley, political director of the Republican National Committee and former executive director of the state GOP. "It’s a state that has truly turned a corner. It’s ripe."

The work Gov. Scott Walker and his supporters did during the recall could benefit the GOP ground game — political shorthand for the volunteers who help turn out voters and promote a candidacy — during the next two months.

It was a terribly foolish decision for the Walker haters to go for the recall, but I doubt if these people dare to look straight at the reality that they may be the reason why the GOP is able to get over the top in the presidential election.

"Walker showed that the GOP can come with a ground game, it’s going to help Romney," said Joe Heim, UW-La Crosse political science professor. "It has added to the enthusiasm among Republican voters."

And it has tired out the Democrats. But Spicuzza found an Obama spokesman — Ben LaBolt —  to say "The truth is the recall has had a motivating effect on our side as well." Okay, let's see how that "motivating effect" works against a "grass-roots army" that is "crushing it out there."

[T]he Obama campaign is planning frequent visits in the coming two months. Obama has made several stops in Wisconsin in recent years, during his campaign and after taking office: in Green Bay, Madison, Racine, Milwaukee and Manitowoc. His last visit was in February in Milwaukee....

[Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll] said the Green Bay and Fox Valley areas will be key. Obama did well there in 2008, but Bush won there in 2000 and 2004. He said Wausau and the area north of it, and the southwest corner of the state, also will be important.

"A Democrat cannot win the state by winning Madison and Milwaukee, and losing Milwaukee suburbs and Green Bay, Wausau, Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls," Franklin said. "When Wisconsin Democrats have won statewide, they’ve won those areas."

Again, the Republicans have that grass-roots army they built during the recall and they’re crushing it out there. And let's remember that Obama failed to stop by the state to help out the Democrats in that recall. He might have stirred his Wisconsin people up last spring, when they really needed him and he could have made a big impact, but, instead, he conspicuously disappointed them — seemingly taunting them by doing fundraisers just across the border. He only tweeted his support for the Democrat. Presumably, he kept his distance because he knew Tom Barrett would lose, and he didn't want to look ineffectual.

And speaking of taunting us, Obama keeps taking shots at the Green Bay Packers — e.g., “I generally don’t interact with Packers — except when I’m in Wisconsin.”

"Working to Romney’s advantage is the Obama team’s bubble of arrogance."

Says Jennifer Rubin, who speculates about the reason for the arrogance she perceives. Maybe the Obama staffers are simply "comforting" themselves so they can continue the difficult slog to the end.

But the public chest-beating is also the telltale sign of a candidate and his flacks who think that normal rules don’t apply to them, that Obama is so special they can defy gravity. The distortion is magnified greatly by the Beltway media whom the Obama team courts incessantly. The Romney senior adviser calls it a “202 area code”campaign, referring to the phone prefix for Washington, D.C. For whatever reason (a desire for praise, the delusion that media hold sway), the Obama team seeks refuge in easily spun media reports that will dutifully regurgitate its theory of the race. (And when not spun by the Obama team, editors eager for “clicks” online dream up storylines and send their reporters to piece together bits and pieces to fit the preordained narrative, regardless of whether it is an accurate representation of the race.) Of course, the Beltway media fixation ignores the hard truth that liberal Beltway press and pundits have never been less in touch and less influential. The quintessential example is Clint Eastwood.

Only 4% think the Supreme Court is doing an "excellent" job.

25% say "good," 39% say "fair," 28% say "poor," and the "not sure" crowd matches the excellent group at 4%.

The "good" + "excellent" total — with only 13% of that total being excellent — is almost exactly the same as the "poor" number standing alone. (29%/28%.) The "good" + "excellent" is less than half the size — 43% — of the "fair" + "poor" group.

If people are unhappy with the Court, which way are they unhappy? To satisfy people — and this was a poll of likely voters — should the re-balancing be done by Obama or Romney?

Democrats give the high court more positive ratings than Republicans and unaffiliated voters do. Most Republicans (61%) view the Supreme Court as being too politically liberal, while a plurality of Democrats (44%) says it’s too conservative. Unaffiliated voters are more evenly divided.

Men rate the court more negatively than women do.

A majority of Americans believe there are too many unnecessary laws in the United States, and there are too many people in jail for violating them.

Fifty percent (50%) of voters continue to favor repeal of the president’s health care law.

That makes it sound as though adding conservatives is what would make people — I mean, likely voters — happier. But I don't assume that. Maybe people would think better of the Court if it could avoid splitting down the middle and issuing opinions that make different decisions seem equally plausible and thus create the impression that a bunch of presidential appointees just voted for what they like.

Beyond that, the Court's work may produce happiness that doesn't register when the poll asks people to "rate the way that the Supreme Court is doing its job." That wording — the actual wording of the question — directs you to focus on the Court and think of craftsmanship. That won't measure the extent to which we enjoy the benefit of having a particular issue taken out of the realm of political decisionmaking or having it left in. To take the most obvious example, you might think the Court's privacy rights decision aren't well grounded in the text of the Constitution, but you're experiencing whatever benefits exist in a society where women get to choose when their bodies go through the process of reproduction.