Today’s selection of important stories you might have missed:

~ Serious questions are being raised about the McCain campaign’s crowd size numbers. There’s something seriously fishy about a campaign attributing crowd size numbers to a fire marshal who denies ever releasing a count and releasing a number 3x larger then what on-the-scene campaign reporters estimate.  There’s room for error here, but a 3-fold difference?  No way.

~ The talk on the grapevine is that the Obama campaign’s August donation numbers might top February’s $55 million record.  It seems Palin hasn’t just energized the GOP base.

~ When you’re the mayor of a town you’ve got a limited but noticeable amount of power, especially over town employees.  Asking the local librarian how to go about banning books from the library three times and then sacking her for not helping (but reversing course due to public outcry) is many things, “rhetorical” isn’t one of them.

~ Now that both political parties have wrapped up their nomination conventions the Gallup daily tracking poll is showing the race has again settled down into a statistical dead heat.