Salon's indispensible Glenn Greenwald is all over the RNC "thoughtcrime" arrests.

There is clearly an intent on the part of law enforcement authorities here to engage in extreme and highly intimidating raids against those who are planning to protest the Convention. The DNC in Denver was the site of several quite ugly incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether. Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state as can be imagined.

Firedoglake has a lot more. They're talking about this at Boing Boing and MetaFilter, too.

Midnight links.

* A mandatory evacuation has been ordered in New Orleans—and Gustav is looking very ugly.

* Somebody shut up Michael Moore. This guy, too.

* Apparently you can now arrest people for intent to protest. Good to know.

* Flowers for Algernon: The Blog. Via MeFi. See it now before the DMCA takedown.

* Steve Benen has a good roundup of shocked reactions to the Palin pick from both Alaskans and Republicans. (Apparently Romney and Pawlenty are not happy either.) Or take this from an off-the-record Bushite:

If it said something admirable about President Bush that he chose a running mate who would be more helpful in governing than in campaigning, what does it say about Senator McCain that he did the opposite? One of the most loyal Bushies calls the selection “disrespectful to the office of the presidency.”

And this, from the Politico:

Whatever you think of the pick, here are six things it tells us about McCain:

1. He’s desperate.
2. He’s willing to gamble — bigtime.
3. He’s worried about the political implications of his age.
4. He’s not worried about the actuarial implications of his age.
5. He’s worried about his conservative base.
6. At the end of the day, McCain is still McCain.