AN UPDATE ON GUSTAV AND A LOOK AT HANNA, from Brendan Loy.

OBAMA’S SUPPORT is at 48.8 percent on the RCP average. According to Jim Lindgren it’s the highest Obama’s achieved, though not the biggest lead over McCain.

GATEWAY PUNDIT: Welcome to Minnesota! I have to say that although I saw demonstrators and riot police, I didn’t see much happen. But I heard reports of violence from some of the guards at the Excel Center.

WELL, PJTV IS DONE FOR THE DAY, and I enjoyed it. If you watched, drop me an email and let me know what you think.

WELL, 1984 WAS SET IN BRITAIN, AFTER ALL:

Councils are recruiting ‘citizen snoopers’ to report litter louts, dog foulers and even people who fail to sort out their rubbish properly. The ‘environment volunteers’ will also be responsible for encouraging neighbours to cut down on waste. The move comes as local authorities dish out £100 fines to householders who leave out too much rubbish or fail to follow recycling rules.

It will fuel fears that Britain is lurching towards a Big Brother society, following the revelation this week that the Home Office is extending some police powers to council staff and private security guards. Critics said the latest scheme could easily be abused and encourage a culture of bin spies and curtain twitchers.

Matthew Elliott, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: ‘Snooping on your neighbours to report recycling infringements sounds like something straight out of the East German Stasi’s copybook.

Indeed.

CANCER FIGHTING AGENTS IN black raspberries. Healthful and yummy!

ROGER SIMON: My First Hour As An Anchorman.

A FAIR HIT: Noting that Sarah Palin supports abstinence education in place of traditional sex-ed. I’m not a fan of abstinence education, and while this is hardly proof that it doesn’t work — plenty of teenagers get pregnant after having traditional sex-ed, too — it’s a fair point.

My daughter, meanwhile, got one of those robot babies — I think it was called “Baby Think Twice” or something like that — that wakes up and cries and has to be fed, changed, etc, and produces a printout of how well you did. But although it’s clearly intended to make motherhood look less appealing, she liked it and, like several of her friends, said it made her want a baby more. Gulp.

UPDATE: Sissy Willis: “If McCain can get the votes of all the women who were pregnant at their weddings, it’ll be a landslide!”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Pointing out that Palin is pro-contraception. So am I!

MORE: Some thoughts from Hilzoy.

J.W. VERRET on hurricanes as a way of life.

WIRED: Sarah Palin not actually a “hacker,” despite Internet claims:

Palin, as chairwoman of the Oil and Gas Commission and its ethics supervisor, was entitled to examine Ruedrich’s computer since the computer was state property. According to the Anchorage Daily News, a technician who worked for the commission found a way around Ruedrich’s password (presumably by simply using an administrative password — hardly an example of hacking, by anyone’s definition of the word) and recovered some files from his computer’s trash bin. Palin found dozens of e-mails and documents on the computer that suggested an improper relationship between Ruedrich and oil companies, which she forwarded to the attorney general’s office.

They seem almost disappointed, but then, it’s Wired, for whom a hacker VP would probably be cool!

WHAT WE NEED IS MORE PUN CONTROL.

UPDATE: Reader Fred Boness emails: “I’m just Biden my time until the election is over.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: The inevitable response: “When puns are outlawed, only outlaws will have puns.”

I’LL BE ON MICHAEL GRAHAM’S RADIO SHOW in just a minute, at WTKK.COM.

BEST SPIN YET: The Palin Family Saves Social Security.

UPDATE: Lots of thoughts on the subject over at Ann Althouse’s.

WE WANT OUR giant robot vehicles.

RAN INTO JIM HOFT OF GATEWAY PUNDIT on my way into the Xcel Center. His bus was attacked by protesters who dropped sandbags from an overpass, but he was unscathed. People here seem to be in a surprisingly upbeat mood: bemused, but not terribly upset by the latest Palin twist. Meanwhile, we’ve taped a lot of interviews and reports for PJTV, and live streaming will start a bit later this afternoon.

I MENTIONED S.M. STIRLING’S The Scourge of God a while back, when I read the advance copy. I liked it, and I note it starts shipping tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’m a bit over halfway through Neal Stephenson’s Anathem and I’m liking it a lot. The setting is different from Stephenson’s other books, but the quality is just as high. Plus it retains his trademark geek-intellectual humor.

STRATEGYPAGE: “European nations are alarmed at the recent increase in probes, via the Internet, of public utilities (electricity, water, sewage, transportation). Cyber War experts are divided on whether this is just the next big thing in criminal activity (finding out how to shut down utilities via the Internet, then using the threat of that to extort money), or military Cyber War operations, scouting utilities in anticipation of damaging them in wartime or a time of crises.”

FROM JIM LINDGREN, more thoughts on “national service.” “Senator Barack Obama is proposing to remake American society in a way that the American public does not yet understand.”

JOHN MCCAIN: Bad for Israel?

SO I GUESS THIS REALLY BLOWS THE WHOLE FAKE PREGNANCY THEORY: Sarah Palin’s 17 Year Old Daughter, Bristol Palin, Is Pregnant. Reportedly, the McCain vetters knew and were okay with it.

I can’t wait for the Kos Kidz’ reaction. . . .

UPDATE: Main Republican response seems to be that she doesn’t seem to feel she’s being “punished with a baby.”

DRINK TO THE FOE: Biden: Palin’s good-looking.

NEWSWEEK: Top Hillary Supporter Endorses McCain. Sounds like blowback from the Netroots’ attacks on Palin: “Coale, who traveled with Sen. Clinton, President Clinton and her family through out the primary season, complained of sexism, and said the Democratic Party is ‘being taken over by the moveon.org types’ in an exclusive interview with Newsweek.com’s Tammy Haddad.”

SO WHAT I’M HEARING from people who covered the DNC as well as this convention is that the former was a lot better organized, with event schedules available online and everybody (at least in the press) knowing what was going on when. There’s certainly a lot of confusion about what’s going on here now. Some of that can be blamed on the hurricane, of course, but apparently the RNC decided not to make schedules online for “security” reasons, which means that it’s much harder to update things on short notice, and to get the word out.

Whether you can draw a larger political lesson from this is up to you. It does mean that the Crackberry addicts — which is, apparently, nearly everybody here but me, and a few iPhone users like Roger Simon — are spending even more time punching those little buttons even more frantically trying to figure out what’s going to happen. And yes, that’s Mary Katharine Ham in the picture at right.

So it’s time for another insta-poll:

IN THE MAIL: Russell Roberts’ The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity. Seems very appropriate for Labor Day.

NEW YORK TIMES: U.S. Hands Back a Quieter Anbar. Plus, some further thoughts from J.D. Johannes. Remember that just a couple of years ago — heck even a year ago — most people seemed to think that a Vietnam-like debacle in Iraq was inevitable. And it would have been, had we given up instead of pursuing the Surge. The hurricane story is getting all the attention, but this is the big news.

UPDATE: Prof. John Wixted compares August 2008 with August 2007 and adds: “Good news or bad news, I’ve been bringing you the casualty-in-Iraq story every month for years now (it’s amazing how time flies). Back when the news was bad, liberals loved that topic. But they don’t love it anymore. Now that the news is good, conservatives are more interested in casualty data than they ever were before. I guess that makes sense, but I’d like to just toot my horn ever so slightly by pointing out that I have been steadily analyzing the casualty picture — and learning a great deal from it — through thick and thin.”