ROMNEY VEEP ANNOUNCEMENT SET FOR TOMORROW MORNING.

DO NOT TRUST CONTENT FROM D.C. POLICE: Former D.C. cop admits falsifying radar-camera testing records.

HARRY REID PEDERASTY UPDATE: Harry Reid must come clean if that’s possible. “Is Harry Reid a pederast? Does he support pederasty? Is he a corrupt politician with ties to organized crime? Has he ever paid income taxes? Is he a tax cheat?”

I think he should be asked these questions every time he appears in public. The people have a right to know!

HIGHER EDUCATION’S DIVERSITY PROBLEM: Survey Finds Social Psychologists Admit To Anti-Conservative Bias.

Just over 37 percent of those surveyed said that, given equally qualified candidates for a job, they would support the hiring of a liberal candidate over a conservative candidate. Smaller percentages agreed that a “conservative perspective” would negatively influence their odds of supporting a paper for inclusion in a journal or a proposal for a grant. (The final version of the paper is not yet available, but an early version may be found on the website of the Social Science Research Network.)

To some on the right, such findings are hardly surprising. But to the authors, who expected to find lopsided political leanings, but not bias, the results were not what they expected.

“The questions were pretty blatant. We didn’t expect people would give those answers,” said Yoel Inbar, a co-author, who is a visiting assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and an assistant professor of social psychology at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands.

He said that the findings should concern academics. Of the bias he and a co-author found, he said, “I don’t think it’s O.K.”

They’re not ashamed of it. They’ll learn to lie about their views soon enough, though.

IF THE PENISES ARE FAKE, Is it still art?

AT AMAZON, end-of-summer markdowns on Gardening Supplies & Tools.

RICH KARLGAARD: Welcome to the “Age of Cheats.”

Cheating in sports is but a single facet of the cheating that’s rampant today in everything from education to finance to government. The financial meltdown of 2008 was a bonfire of bad behavior on all sides. Fannie Mae is built on the lie that every American is capable of paying a mortgage. Mortgage lenders steered victims into loans they could never pay. But the victims were not all innocent. Many lied on loan applications, claiming incomes they never had.

President Obama wrote a biography based on fabrications, which he admitted to this year. The oddest of those lies concern the “girlfriend” he now says was a “compression” of real people. Even small lies reveal character.

A new and growing form of cheating is taking place in our high schools. During tests, particularly SATs, kids are popping speed and prescription drugs meant to treat attention-deficit disorder. Anything for an edge.

Make no mistake, our Age of Cheats is a sign of rot. The U.S. government fudges its numbers (by way of the monetary printing press). Our politicians call reduced growth rates “cuts in spending.” Our biggest banks take obscene risks and cry poor when they don’t work out. But we’ve risen above moral rot before. The U.S. has transcended slavery and civil war, as well as periods of rampant corruption and paralyzing resentment.

Let’s hope the Age of Cheats is drawing to a close, because a full recovery won’t be possible until it’s over.

And trust, once lost, is hard to regain.

SCIENCE: 32-Year Study Shows How Geeky Kids Become Happy Adults.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Are You Ready To Be A Friend With Benefits?

IDEA FOR THE ROMNEY CAMPAIGN: Hire Jon Lovitz to do his “pathological liar” schtick while reading from Obama campaign ads.

UPDATE: Frank J. had this idea before me.

VIDEO: The Trucker Who Reverse-Engineered an Atomic Bomb in His Spare Time.

AT AMAZON, 25% or more off on select kitchen items.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How Worried Should You Be About Cracks In Your Foundation?

MICKEY KAUS: “I had some serious doubts about Mitt Romney’s ad attacking Obama’s welfare ‘waivers’ — until I read the New York Times editorial denouncing it. Now I know Romney’s ad isn’t as accurate as I’d thought. It’s much more accurate.”

KRAUTHAMMER ON OBAMA: The Case Against Re-Election.

There are two ways to run against Barack Obama: stewardship or ideology. You can run against his record or you can run against his ideas.

The stewardship case is pretty straightforward: the worst recovery in U.S. history, 42 consecutive months of 8-plus percent unemployment, declining economic growth — all achieved at a price of an additional $5 trillion of accumulated debt.

The ideological case is also simple. Just play in toto (and therefore in context) Obama’s Roanoke riff telling small-business owners: “You didn’t build that.” Real credit for your success belongs not to you — you think you did well because of your smarts and sweat? he asked mockingly — but to government that built the infrastructure without which you would have nothing.

Play it. Then ask: Is that the governing philosophy you want for this nation? . . . The ideological case, on the other hand, is not just appealing to a center-right country with twice as many conservatives as liberals, it is also explanatory. It underpins the stewardship argument. Obama’s ideology — and the program that followed — explains the failure of these four years. . . . If Republicans want to win, Obama’s deeply revealing, teleprompter-free you-didn’t-build-that confession of faith needs to be hung around his neck until Election Day. The third consecutive summer-of-recovery-that-never-came is attributable not just to Obama being in over his head but, even more important, to what’s in his head: a government-centered vision of the economy and society, and the policies that flow from it.

Four years of that and this is what you get.

Make the case and you win the White House.

Read the whole thing.

#NARRATIVEFAIL: How Mitt Romney Helped A Poor Couple Buy A House. “He really helped us when we needed it.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Coursera Tops 1 Million Students. “Coursera, the company that provides support and Web hosting for massive open online courses at top universities, announced Thursday that more than 1 million students have registered for its courses.”

TEN OF THE WORLD’S coolest elevators.

SO IF ROMNEY’S HAD SUCH A BAD COUPLE OF WEEKS, how come he’s tied in the Gallup tracking poll and four points ahead of Obama on Rasmussen?

#NARRATIVEFAIL: Hero of Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun Accused of Plotting Ex-Wife’s Murder. “Abdulrahman Zeitoun, 54, was charged Wednesday with soliciting the murders. He was already in jail for assault at the time of the alleged solicitation. According to police, Zeitoun offered a fellow inmate $20,000 to carry out the crimes while Zeitoun was still behind bars, thereby providing himself with an alibi. The inmate instead alerted authorities. While his loving relationship with then-wife Kathy featured prominently in Eggers’ 2009 book, the couple divorced last year after Zeitoun was convicted of assaulting her. With the latest charges, police suggest that things only got worse from there.”

TODD ZYWICKI: The Revenge of Richard Nixon: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Spreads Its Tentacles.

READER BOOK PLUG: Another reader writes to ask that I plug his wife’s book: Titanic: Legacy of Betrayal. Done!

FIVE THINGS YOUR BRAIN does better than a computer.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Research finds women feel happy when their husband or partner is upset.

REALLY, DUDE? WILL PEOPLE NEVER LEARN? Former L.A. Times Reporter Chuck Philips Threatens a Baseless Copyright Lawsuit Against Patterico In Attempt to Get Embarrassing Letters Removed from the Internet. I mean, how dumb do you have to be these days to think Hey, threatening Patterico is a good way to make this thing go quiet?