Authorities have arrested a teenager they say fired a shotgun into the ground outside a mosque in western New York state.

This originally appeared at Jonathan Bernstein's blog

Yesterday, former Air America editor in chief Beau Friedlander had a silly little blog at the Huffington Post in which he promised a $100,000 bounty for a Glenn Beck sex tape. The post was actually a barely coherent, largely inaccurate history of neoconservatism, plus complaining about Glenn Beck, that ended with a paragraph offering "a $100,000 payday to the person who will come forward with a sex tape or phone records or anything else that succeeds in removing Glenn Beck from the public eye forever." (Friedlander does not actually have this money, which made the whole thing even sillier.)*

(updated below - Update II - Update III [Wed.] - Update IV [Wed.] - Update V [Wed.] - Update VI [Wed.])

Tonight at 8 p.m. President Obama will deliver a speech from the Oval Office on the end of "combat operations" in Iraq.

The economy is weakening, home sales are plunging and stocks are on a long slide. Now comes something even scarier for investors -- the beginning of what is traditionally the worst month in the market.

Weeks after a 29-year-old former WWE wrestler died, 48-year-old former professional wrestler Gertrude "Luna" Vachon was found dead at her home Friday morning. Sheriff's deputies report finding oxycodone at the scene and "several prescription bottles" in the bedroom. Which is probably not great news for former WWE CEO and Senate candidate Linda McMahon.

A Pennsylvania coroner says a woman suffered 45 knife wounds in an attack that also killed her father, grandfather and a neighbor who ran to their home after hearing screams.

It shouldn't be surprising that Orrin Hatch would defend the right of the Park51 organizers to build a mosque (or "mosque") on private property. The guy is one of the most prominent Mormons in the nation, and after their history of religious persecution, they ought to be finely attuned to scare mongering about religious minorities. But he's also a conservative Republican, and his fellow Latter Day Saints Harry Reid and Mitt Romney both punted on the issue. So this is nice to hear, from Sen. Hatch.

Yesterday we told you about the launch this Sunday of the $8 million "9-11 Christian Center at Ground Zero," created by a pastor who assails Muslims as pedophiles and gay people as perverts and who has a history of trying to profit from political controversies. The pastor, internet evangelist Bill Keller, is starting services this Sunday at a site just two blocks away from the former World Trade Center site.

Two years ago this week, John McCain woke up in a particular mood and changed American politics and culture. You remember how it happened: As Barack Obama prepared to deliver his acceptance speech at Denver's Mile High Stadium On Aug. 28, 2008, word leaked that McCain, whose own convention would begin a few days later, had finally decided on a running mate. But who?

The following excerpt is from the virtual book Republic to Principate: The Decline and Fall of Representative Democracy in America, published in the year 2052 A.D.

Bill Kristol's new group the Emergency Committee for Israel is out with another TV ad attacking another Democrat, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), for supposedly being unfriendly to the Jewish state. But it turns out a key fact in the ad -- that a purportedly Hamas-linked Muslim advocacy group gave Holt a 100% approval rating -- is, if you scratch just a little below the surface, so misleading as to be essentially a lie.

On Oct. 17, 2009, there was a black-tie gala dinner at a luxury hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, where guests dined on balsamic-laced flank steak and mango coulis. After dessert was served, the mostly men in black ties and dinner jackets, and a few women in their Saturday-night best, in the ballroom leaned back in their seats to hear the night's main event -- a speech by a member of the United States Congress. Nothing remarkable about that ... in theory.

This originally appeared at Robert Reich's blog

Google Inc. has retained the right to publish content from The Associated Press under a new licensing deal that thaws the sometimes-frosty relationship between the two companies.

Tom Coburn has hated Newt Gingrich for years and he is not going to stop now. So it is not that surprising that the ultra-conservative obstetrician Senator told a town hall that he'd rather die than vote for Gingrich for president.

Manny Ramirez has officially joined the Chicago White Sox. As expected, the club claimed the 12-time All-Star slugger on waivers from the Los Angeles Dodgers on Monday, hoping his bat can help them make a playoff push.

I have underestimated President Obama more than once, starting when he was candidate Obama. At a few points when his campaign seemed shaky -- the Jeremiah Wright fiasco, the serial defeats in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and more at the end of the primary season; the post-Palin surge after the GOP convention -- he turned things around, becoming a tougher candidate better able to reassure voters he understood their anxieties about the country, and that he would fight for their future.

If Glenn Beck's Washington extravaganza seemed strangely empty of political content, filled with vacuous pieties and fetishes rather than protest, then perhaps it should be seen as the opening act in a renewed campaign to assert the power of the religious right. A series of four mass prayer events, featuring many of the most prominent figures in the Republican Party's theocratic wing, will occur between Labor Day and Election Day, starting with an arena rally in Sacramento, Calif., and ending with perfect symmetry on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.