The proprietor of a liberal blog on the possibility I may not agree with Juan Cole on what’s going on in Lebanon: “For many of us who are not Jewish, you lose us right there. For good. Very transparent. Poof. You – as a commentator – simply cannot post critical comments about Israel and continue normal social relations with your Jewish community. Ergo, you flip.”

Earmark barons grumble privately about the snooping of Copley muckraker Jerry Kammer.

Good article by Michael Hirsh in Newsweek on the dangers and foolishness of conflating al Qaida with Hizbullah and Hamas, and more generally how President Bush doesn’t understand who he’s fighting against.

Let me tell you about a new site we’ve launched to cover the 2006 election campaign, TPM’s Election Central.

It’s hosted over at TPMCafe.

Our goal is provide running news, updates and commentary on every competitive race in the country — and even some that aren’t so competitive perhaps, but still worthy of attention. Below the first post, you’ll see our poll tracker, with every campaign 2006 poll released in the previous 48 hours.

The site is edited by Greg Sargent (who you probably know from New York Magazine, the American Prospect, his Horse’s Mouth blog and other publications) and written by Greg, our TPM staff and our crack team of TPM interns.

Our goal is to have some new development, nugget or scoop from the campaign trail every time you return.

To make it every thing we want to make it, we need your help. If you know of a poll that just broke that we don’t have, send us an email. And tell us what’s going on in your district and state. We troll Google and follow all the politics sheets. But what makes us able to drill down and find stories that more conventional news outlets either can’t or won’t is your email, your tips and updates.

You read the papers and see the television coverage of the races in your area, go to the townhalls, get the flyers. So you’re going to know first when the revealing statement gets made, when the key development happens. None of our coverage on Social Security last year would have been possible without readers keeping us posted on how the story was developing at the district level. So we’re asking for your help again.

If you’ve got a tip or an update or just want to let us know about an angle we’re missing, shoot us an email at our regular comment email address up there at the upper right hand corner with the subject line “Election Central”. We’d love it if you’d be part of our project.

Thanks and let us know how we’re doing.

Okay, I know there are plenty of other things in the world of far more concern than this. But we’ve gotten a bunch of emails asking, ‘So what happened to your car? What’s the latest?’ If you’re more interested in the usual fare (which I can certainly understand), just skip down the post below.

Now, as was pretty obvious from the moment the garage manager called us Tuesday morning and told us someone had taken our car, the thing is clearly long gone. After that, the folks from Central Parking started making accusations blaming the whole thing on us, then saying our car wasn’t nice enough to steal and other bizarre behavior before finally admitting that it had been stolen and that they had apparently left the key in the car, which presumably made it rather easy to steal.

(For a point of reference, this is a big company, which may be why they act this way, I guess. I think they probably run like half the parking garages in New York City and their website says they’re the “leading provider of parking and transportation-related services throughout North America, South America and Europe.”)

Anyway, finally, the higher ups got back to us after we kept complaining. But despite some initial conciliatory words we found the same pattern of weirdly aggressive behavior toward customers that seems to run through the whole company. My wife and I were just talking to the company representative, Neal Sanderson, today who told us what the company thought it was reasonable for them to pay us. I pointed out that their offer didn’t seem quite equitable since it would only buy us like a third of the car we had. And, remember, this was the car that’s so lame that no one would want to steal it anyway.

Then the Monty Python portion of the conversation got underway.

Now in a graver voice, the Central Parking guy, Sanderson, said, “Well, we have evidence the car was not in mint condition. In fact, we have documentation that it had several scratches on the side …” At this point, as a uncontrolled chuckle started to sneak out of my throat I hear my dear pregnant wife saying, “Don’t even …”

A little backstory is in order. A few months ago, one of the garage employees ground another car against ours leaving a deep scratch and some miscellaneous nicks on the drivers’ side of the car. They gave us a claim ticket to get it fixed and they’d reimburse us, etc. We’d gotten the estimate. Hadn’t had the work done yet. But the ‘documentation’ was the report of Central Parking damaging the car.

So at this juncture in the conversation I point out that this seems hard to figure how they should pay us less to replace our car, which they got stolen, because it had lost value when they banged into it.

After all, if we wanted the thing crashed into and stolen we could have saved a lot of money just parking it on the street, right? (Has anyone else had this kind of experience with this company?)

Anyway, it went from bad to worse from there.

We’ll keep you posted.

New poll shows Hank Johnson leading Rep. Cynthia McKinney by 46% to 21% in the August 8th run-off for the Democratic nomination in Georgia’s 4th district.

(ed.note: Thanks to TPM Reader LJ for the heads up.)

Jersusalem Post: Israeli cabinet rejects IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz’s recommendation to widen ground operations in southern Lebanon, approves call up of three reserve batallions.

More analysis from Ha’aretz of what went on in the Israeli cabinet meeting.

An article in Ha’aretz questions whether Israel’s civilian leadership are too captive to the country’s defense establishment.

New York Times: Arab public opinion swings hard in favor of Hizbullah.

Days before he was killed by Israeli bomb strikes, Canadian UN peacekeeper told former commander that Hizbullah was using the UN base as a shield.