Nat Hentoff has a blistering column about Bush's new attempt to codify his unconstitutional power grab and preserve it for the next president.

In his last months, the president is working to ensure that his successor, whomever that may be, will have the greatly expanded power of the executive branch (unprecedented in American history) that Bush instituted after 9/11. Bush's current chief enabler in this ever-increasing surveillance of American citizens in our daily lives is Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

Aware of Mukasey's plan for new FBI guidelines that could begin national security and criminal investigations of racial and ethnic groups without any evidence of wrongdoing, the heads of the Senate Judiciary Committee - Chairman Patrick Leahy and ranking member Arlen Specter - have asked the attorney general to delay the implementation of these echoes of the regime of J. Edgar Hoover until Congress is able to review these changes. Mukasey agreed but wants the expanded surveillance of us to begin Oct. 1.

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I'm sure most of my readers are familiar with the Alan Sokal hoax. Sokal, a physicist from NYU, pulled a classic hoax on an academic journal called Social Text by writing a paper that was, quite literally, gibberish but that flattered the ideological preconceptions of the journal's editors. Needless to say, the editors were so excited to have a genuine physicist confirm to them that there is no real world and that the laws of nature are merely a "social and linguistic construct," a "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook" that they printed that gibberish. They were quite embarrassed to see an article in another journal come out the same day to reveal the hoax to the world. A similar hoax has now been perpetrated on the magazine Wine Spectator, the editors of which have now granted a prestigious award to a non-existent restaurant.

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Jim Babka points to a recent Zogby poll of ten key swing states shows some very surprising numbers for Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr. I'm not surprised that he's polling at 11% in New Hampshire or 10% in Nevada, those are traditionally heavy with libertarians. But he's polling at 8% in Ohio, 8% in Colorado and 5% in Michigan, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida. Those are staggering numbers for a 3rd party candidate not named Perot. If those numbers hold up, we could be seeing a significant shift in things. Chart below the fold:

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Then again, it may not be a slip. Maybe the guy is just ignorant.

In an alley behind a non-descript row of brick buildings on North Speer Boulevard, and on the other side of a large metal gate with armed guards standing in front, Republicans have set up a "war room" in Denver...

Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan said the team of nearly two dozen staffers at the opposition headquarters will be "fact-checking" statements made by the Obama campaign and by speakers during the convention.

"Just consider this the Ministry of Truth," quipped Dick Wadhams, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party.

A) That may be the funniest name I've seen in months. B) Someone needs to tell him that the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's book was the place where they crafted lies.

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A school in New Hampshire that has been sued by the Alliance Defense Fund for distributing flyers from community non-profit groups but refusing to do so for religious groups has changed their policy to end all flyer distribution not specifically school-related:

The new policy limits access to students' homebound backpacks to the school itself; school-associated volunteer groups that have been sanctioned by the school board, such as Friends of Music and Alvirne High School boosters; government agencies; and the local parent-teacher organization.

The old policy allowed information from those groups, plus "nonprofit community organizations operating in the town of Hudson."

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A Time blog digs up an interesting quote from John McCain in 1999:

"I'd love to see a point where it is irrelevant, and could be repealed because abortion is no longer necessary," McCain told the Chronicle in 1999. "But certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations."

I've said all along that the religious right is correct not to trust McCain. He isn't one of them and he never has been. He's been frantically pandering to them for the last few years because he knows he has to do so to have any chance of winning the presidency, but that isn't what he really believes. His real beliefs were stated when he called Falwell and Robertson "agents of intolerance." He's not really anti-abortion, nor is he a particularly religious man at all.

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She just wrote a beautiful piece about a wedding in her family and how, in contrast to all that nonsense we hear about the "radical homosexual agenda," it was really just a routine event - and that's exactly how it should be treated:

I understand why people who don't have any close gay friends or relatives think single-sex marriage is strange and disruptive. But it isn't. It's merely a way of turning de facto relationships into de jure ones. And the relationships that distinguish de jure marriage aren't so much those between spouses but those between the married couple and other people, perhaps most importantly their extended families. As of July 27, this happy woman went from my sister-not-exactly-in-law, her status for the past two decades, to my actual legal sister-in-law. And the woman she's hugging became her legal mother-in-law, instead of the unofficial relative who comes to visit for a month every year, whose medical care she frets over, and whose new living arrangements she researched. (Did I mention that Mindy, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, is now a stay-at-home mom? How traditional can you get? Steve and I are the radical ones.) Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

The execrable Glenn Beck, who is actually calling on his listeners to waste as much energy as they can in order to make up for the positive steps the Democratic National Convention is taking to reduce the environmental impact of the event. No, I'm not making this up:

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You have to see this thread at Free Republic about a school in Malta called the Accelerated Christian Academy that teaches young earth creationism. Accelerated, you say? Well of course. Just look at what their director says is taught:

But the curriculum of the Accelerated Christian Academy in Mosta is not exactly free of such fanciful reinventions of history. Fenech reiterates the basic Evangelist tenet that the entire universe was created in 4004 BC... and this time, he also supplies "proof". "When man landed on the moon (in 1969), they expected the landing module to sink in a deep layer of dust. But the layer was only a few inches deep. This proves that the universe is still young!" Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Here is a compelling argument about the one aspect of Michelle Obama's speech that really did stand out. It's from one of Andrew Sullivan's readers:

I am a 36 year old African American woman. I have two girls ages 10 and 8. The country does not get the full import of this moment. My daughters and I sat together along with my husband to watch Michelle Obama tonight. Mr. Sullivan, we were all in tears. This is a day that cannot be fully described. This country has systematically oppressed Black women for centuries. My ancestors were slaves and my great, great, great, grandmothers raped and treated as property. My daughters have very few Black women to look up to in popular culture as role models. They do not feel seen, they are not held up as the standards of American beauty. We shed tears tonight as a family because Michelle (with her elegance and grace) is holding all of us up with her. You don't understand the burden that she bears. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...