Griper News: Stories to Watch: 8/24/11

I missed the roundup today because I got into a fruitless war with the mods at Reddit's /r/politics subreddit. I tried to submit a story about elections in Libya and it was rejected as "not American news." It's a whole big thing, which you can check out here if you're interested. That subreddit used to be awesome, but lately they've been adding pointless restrictions and, worse, getting all anal-retentive about them and now it often sucks. And let's not even talk about their spam filter; since when is the New York Times a spam site? Anyway, my day sucked. The moral of the story here is don't waste time on pointless arguments. Now here's the news...

Gallup polling shows Rick Perry leading the GOP field by a pretty wide margin, ahead of Mitt Romney 29% to 17%. Michele Bachmann is now yesterday's news. Keep in mind, at this point people don't really know who Rick Perry is. He's just the new name in the race.

Obama's attempts at centrist solutions are costing him the middle.

And about those Libyan elections. If transitional team leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil is right, they'll happen in eight months. Do the math, that'll be right in the middle of the '12 US presidential campaign. Yeah, /r/politics -- no way is that a US political story. How silly of me.

The right gets punked by a hoaxer claiming to be Paul Krugman. Conservative gullibility know no bounds -- although rightwing media fact-checking is anything but boundless.

Dick Cheney kept a resignation letter ready -- in case his health took a bad turn, not in case he got drunk and shot some guy in the face.

Is Ron Paul just a nut? Yes, Ron Paul is just a nut.

Israel has more than 10,000 millionaires -- including 16 billionaires -- which raises the question, why on earth is the US sending them foreign aid?

Finally, here we have Jeb Bush; unlikely voice of reason.