So what will Glenn and Sarah be talking about at this upcoming event? No one knows. Glenn Beck mentioned on his radio program today that he would be speaking in Alaska, with Sarah Palin, "a week from Saturday." He didn't mention that a week from Saturday is 9/11, because Glenn Beck forgot about 9/11.

Oh, also! Next month is the Iowa Republican Party's annual fall fundraiser. And Sarah Palin will be the keynote speaker! She was invited to do this in 2009, but she never even bothered to get back to them. This year, apparently, something is different.

Either Sarah Palin is running for president, or she and Glenn Beck are just embarking on another of the money-making schemes that they are both deeply devoted to. Almost certainly the latter.

The man who is reportedly inside the Discovery Channel building in Maryland with a gun and an explosive device is suspected by police to be James J. Lee, whose unconfirmed Internet manifesto demands that Discovery run progamming based on the book "My Ishmael," that immigration be banned, global warming stopped, and civilization "exposed for the filth it is."

The unconfirmed demand list is above all preoccupied with the problem of overpopulation (read the complete manifesto here).

Here's how it begins:

1. The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas. Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both. Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!

In form -- plain text on a blank website -- the message is reminiscent of the rambling online note left by Joe Stack, the man who flew a small plane into an IRS office in Austin earlier this year.

Unlike the Stack case, no injuries have been reported at the Discovery building (though there are reports of a shot fired).

Lee has been protesting the Discovery Channel for some time. The blog DCist reported in 2008:

 As you can see, the singularly named "Lee," with his faux-tough mug shot and all-caps, is dishing out a little of the old insane rambling on the cable network to promote his "Save the Planet Protest Against the Discovery Channel," which the web site says is planned from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. for the entire week of February 15—23, 2008:

The site also reported that Lee paid homeless people to join his protest at Discovery. He was also arrested at the time for disorderly conduct after allegedly throwing money into the air to attract attention to his cause.

What appears to be Lee's MySpace page says he is 43 and hails from Hawaii.

The Times also had a more serious piece on the time Greene unloaded a bunch of worthless property he'd developed in California on a criminal who is now in jail for fraud. There's been no correction in that one.

Rich people sometimes like to sue for libel because they're mad that the newspapers said mean things about them, but they very seldom win, in America. If you're rich enough, though, it's totally worth it just to make the newspapers suffer through expensive and time-consuming litigation.

Nor is it the first time Feingold has faced a difficult fall race. In his three successful Senate campaigns, his winning margins have been seven, two and 12 points and he's never secured more than 56 percent of the vote. It's tempting to think that this battle-tested past will help Feingold survive this year, but there's a big -- and potentially decisive -- difference between his previous campaigns and this year's: the national climate. Never before has he run with swing voters so predisposed to vote against the Democratic Party, and with such an apparent enthusiasm gap between the two parties' bases.

Here, the story of Feingold's 1998 reelection victory -- a two-point squeaker -- is instructive. On paper, Feingold probably should have lost the race: '98 was the sixth year of Bill Clinton's presidency, and since 1822 every president's party had suffered losses -- sometimes significant -- in "six-year itch" elections. The GOP recruited an up-and-coming congressman, Mark Neumann, to challenge Feingold and the national party marked the seat as one of its top takeover opportunities. Then, as now, Feingold was attracting less than 50 percent in polling around Labor Day, and by late October, Neumann actually charged into the lead in several polls.

But something funny happened on Election Day: The Republican base did not turn out in big numbers while the Democratic base -- particularly union voters -- did. Plus, moderate swing voters, who would typically vote against the White House party in a six-year itch election, were unexpectedly friends to Democrats. This was partly due to a massive national turnout effort from the AFL-CIO, but the bigger reason was the GOP Congress' drive to impeach Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky saga. The House hadn't yet taken formal action against Clinton, but its leaders spent the campaign steadfastly moving toward impeachment -- even as poll after poll warned them not to. In the November election, self-identified moderate voters opted for Democrats by a 54-43 percent margin -- with 60 percent of all voters saying they were upset by the GOP Congress' Clinton/Lewinsky posture.

This backlash, coupled with the AFL-CIO's outreach and the failure of Neumann's partial-birth abortion message to motivate cultural conservatives, was just enough to rescue Feingold. Nationally, Clinton became the first president since James Monroe to see his party win seats in his sixth year. 1998 stands as one of political history's great exceptions: a midterm election in which the normal rules didn't apply.

But they do apply this year -- more so than usual. Unemployment and economic anxiety are high, and economic growth is stalling. And with Democrats controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, swing voters -- who possess little collective memory or foresight -- are strongly inclined to latch onto the GOP as a protest vehicle. Feingold, whose other Senate victories came in 1992 (when Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush) and 2004 (a tight presidential election in which John Kerry narrowly carried Wisconsin), has never faced this kind of headwind. Just as a backlash against the GOP Congress bailed him out at the last minute in '98, it's not hard to see the anti-Democratic tide taking him down at the end of this race.

Two men taken off a Chicago-to-Amsterdam United Airlines flight in the Netherlands have been charged by Dutch police with "preparation of a terrorist attack," U.S. law enforcement officials tell ABC News.

U.S. officials said the two appeared to be travelling with what were termed "mock bombs" in their luggage. "This was almost certainly a dry run, a test," said one senior law enforcement official.

Playing the story as the next big terrorism case, ABC quickly posted mug shots of the two Yemeni-born U.S. residents along with a passenger's cellphone video of them being taken off the plane.

But within 24 hours, the story had fallen apart -- the latest in a string of terrorism exclusives by ABC's Brian Ross that have not held up to scrutiny.

It turns out the incident, involving a pair of Yemeni men, was not "almost certainly a dry run," as ABC reported. Rather, it appears to have been what Pete Williams of NBC termed a "weird set of coincidences." The Wall Street Journal is reporting the men were likely "unsuspecting fliers snared in the high-security net of international air travel." In fact, the two have no apparent connection to each other besides the fact that both missed the same flight and were booked on the same replacement flight to Amsterdam.

Despite the fact that the lead of the original ABC story reported  that the men had been "charged" by Dutch police with "preparation of a terrorist attack," it is now clear that they were merely arrested on suspicion of that charge. In an interview with Salon, Ross acknolwedged that there is a difference, but said that U.S. officials had given ABC incorrect information Monday.

"It may be that an arrest is not considered a charge," he said.

The original erroneous story is still up on ABC's website and has not been edited or corrected.

One of the arrested men, Detroit resident Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi, was carrying $7,000 in cash and had unusual items in his checked in luggage including a cellphone taped to a Pepto-Bismol bottle.

Citing the FBI, Ross referred to the phone and bottle on the World News broadcast Monday evening as "a kind of mock explosive."

Multiple media outlets including the AP have reported that al Soofi had one knife and one box cutter in his checked luggage -- which is legal. In contrast, ABC reported that there were "a box cutter and three large knives" (emphasis ours). It's not clear at this point which report is accurate. 

The story as it was originally reported by ABC fit neatly with the Obama administration's new focus on Yemen as a source of terrorism. It was seized on by many right-wing commentators, with the Heritage Foundation's James Jay Carafano concluding at National Review: "[T]his incident should remind us of three indisputable facts: 1) There are terrorists out there; 2) they are trying to kill us; and 3) if we don’t work proactively to stop them, one day they will succeed again."

Ross defended his reporting in an interview with Salon, saying that law enforcement officials genuinely suspected terrorism on Monday. He noted that the two men had been pulled off the plane and that FBI agents were chasing down leads around the country to find out who they were. 

"Sometimes when these things break you sort of have to report what you know, adding the best you can that there may be another explanation," he said. "As long as we're current and accurate, that's the best that you can do."

Ross said that he was careful to preface his report on ABC's World News Monday (watch it below) by saying, "There may be a perfectly innocent explanation for what happened."

However, that same segment with Diane Sawyer included this remarkable exchange (emphasis ours):

BRIAN ROSS: It's not clear why they shipped all these things in the bags. But it has raised serious concerns, especially with the approach of the September 11th anniversary.

DIANE SAWYER: They may have been a kind of advance team coming here to try to...

BRIAN ROSS: That is a concern.

It's worth noting that other outlets were far more cautious than ABC. Soon after ABC ran its exclusive story Monday, the New York Times had a piece that said in the second paragraph, "law enforcement officials cautioned on Monday night that the men had not been charged with any crime and that the episode might be a misunderstanding."

This is hardly the first time that Ross has been out front -- and, in hindsight, wrong -- on terrorism stories.

In 2007, Ross ran a now-notorious exclusive interview with former CIA officer Jon Kiriakou about, among other things, the efficacy of waterboarding. That story, hyped uncritically by ABC, was picked up in other media and informed the public debate about waterboarding for years -- until, of course, it turned out to be bogus.

In November, Ross reported that the Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, had attempted to make contact with "people" associated with al-Qaida. That turned out not to be true.

In December, he reported that a released Guantánamo detainee was a mastermind of the attempted Christmas Day bombing. As it turned out, the detainee in question had actually been in the hands of Saudi authorities for months and had no role in the plot. That didn't stop myriad media outlets from picking up the inaccurate story.

Bottom line: When it comes to ABC's terrorism reporting, reader beware.

Here is Ross' initial report on World News Monday evening:

An earth tones joke. In the year 2010.

The "earth tones" thing was a completely fictional story invented, almost simultaneously, by the entire 2000 campaign press corps, because the narrative everyone had decided on was that Al Gore was a phony and a wacko weakling liberal loser. MoDo led the charge, and has clung to that caricature, despite its basis almost entirely on complete fabrications, ever since.

As far as I know Maureen Dowd has never acknowledged -- let alone apologized for -- her relentless, inaccurate smearing of Al Gore. (In 2007 she pretended to apologize, in the voice of Clarence Thomas, but I'm not sure she's actually self-aware enough to get the real joke she ended up making.) And her blithe willingness to go back to the "earth tone" well illustrates both her lazy hackishness (it's been a decade, Maureen) and her complete disregard for any truth beyond the idiotic fantasies she constructs about public figures.

That, as I said, is only the very first sentence.

The "earth tones" crack is because there was some utterly inane pseudo-news over the weekend about the Oval Office getting redone. Which, obviously, is a subject of much more interest to political opinion columnist Maureen Dowd than a "war," because it is utterly inane pseudo-news.

So! She refers to the Oval Office as President Obama's "redecorated man cave," because "man caves" are a trend thing she read about, in the year 2005. She then throws in a gratuitous reference to the terrible, trashy taste of those awful Clintons, another Dowd pet topic.

And then the column ends with a dreadful series of Dowd's trademark stupidly obvious, terribly out-of-date pop culture references. ("Cool Hand Luke." "Jaws." "Scarface." "Body Heat." Yes, "Body Heat.")

Maureen Dowd is a Pulitzer-winning columnist.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Murkowski's relatively quick concession (by the standards of Alaska, where it takes much longer to tally votes), can be viewed as a pragmatic move. Dragging out the process further with litigation and recount demands was unlikely to overturn the result -- but it would have allowed Miller to further poison her reputation with the GOP base by continuing to accuse Murkowski of trying to "pull an Al Franken." And that, in turn, would have made it far more difficult for the 53-year-old Murkowski to mount a comeback bid sometime in the future.

The question now is whether the right-wing Miller's candidacy will give the Democrats an unexpected opportunity for a Senate pick-up this fall. The idea gained some steam with a PPP poll two days ago that showed Miller just eight points ahead of the Democratic nominee, Scott McAdams. But it's hard to believe McAdams will put up much of a fight. Alaska is simply too conservative -- and the climate of 2010 is simply too hostile to Democrats, especially in contests for federal office.

The only Democrats to score major wins in the state in the recent past both benefited from extenuating cirumstances: Tony Knowles eked into the governorship in 1994 when a right-wing independent candidate split the GOP vote, and Mark Begich edged out Ted Stevens in 2008 thanks primarily to Stevens' conviction on federal corruption charges days before the election (it also helped Begich that the national climate was unusually favorable to Democrats in '08). If Murkowski had managed to finagle the Libertarian nod, maybe there'd now be a theoretical victory scenario for McAdams. But in a two-way race in 2010, here's guessing whatever swing voters there are in Alaska break pretty decisively to the candidate without a "D" after his name.

Obama talked at length about the state of America at home. He mentioned our recession in the fifth sentence. He positioned the official end of the Iraq war not as our opportunity to refocus on Afghanistan, or defeating al-Qaida, but as the time to get America back to work.

I don't think it was a particularly great or memorable speech, and I also think it scarcely would've mattered if it had been a great speech in this media environment and political climate, but this is more or less the withdrawal we were promised, even if tens of thousands of troops remain, and some of them are sure to be killed in the months and years ahead.

The president reminded us that he never wanted this war to begin with, but he said it is "time to turn the page" on the disagreements of the early 2000s. And, at the end of the day, we all love the troops, very much.

The president brought up "responsibility" multiple times. The Iraqis are now responsible for rebuilding their own nation, after we upended it. We are now responsible for taking care of our veterans and getting back to work. "And, next July," the president said, "we will begin a transition to Afghan responsibility." So next year we'll be done with that war, too. (Depending, of course, on the "conditions on the ground.")

We are now able, we were told, to "go on the offense" against al-Qaida, which is made up of a couple hundred people located mainly in Pakistan. We were reminded, again, to be concerned about the deficit, but told, again, not to hold Obama responsible:

Unfortunately, over the last decade, we have not done what is necessary to shore up the foundation of our own prosperity. We have spent over a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits.

President Obama doesn't want to be a war president, even if he'll eventually be defined, as most presidents are, by how he handled the wars. Presidents have more power over how we conduct ourselves abroad than they do over domestic issues anyway, as Obama's stressful first term is proving. So while we got odd campaign boilerplate about how "we must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines, and nurture the ideas that spring from our entrepreneurs" (and go ahead and add "end our dependence on foreign oil" to your Bingo card), we learned no more about how we'll achieve that than we learned about how we'll decide, next July, if Afghanistan is ready for us to leave, yet.

But Barack Obama didn't start these wars, and there's no good way to end them.

Why would anyone, in the words of the Minnesota Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Prevention and Parenting "turn down almost a million dollars for youth programs that require no match, but take funding for failed programs that require a 75 percent match?” Easy: To prove that while he may have Romney's height and head-shape, he's got Huckabee's God.

Then Pawlenty went all-out and announced this was just part of his plan to make Minnesota opt out of the federal health insurance overhaul. Of course, all he can actually opt out of is the bits where Minnesota gets money, for healthcare. He will issue executive orders requiring state agencies to not seek federal grants for anything healthcare related, because of the constitution.

Mark Halperin -- "leaving aside now the substantive merits of the Minnesota governor's executive order," he says, hilariously -- thinks this is genius, which means it is plainly idiotic.