"It is dead," said Andy Sullivan, a New York construction worker who has spent much of the last year organizing against the project, which is known as the "ground zero mosque" or Park51. "They didn't count on the public taking such a hard line against it."

A spokesman for the real estate developer Sharif El-Gamal, who owns the property at 45-51 Park Place, insisted that the project is on track and that "nothing has changed."

"The financing is moving forward," said Park51 spokesman Larry Kopp, while declining to give details on the fundraising status of a project whose cost has been put as high as $100-$150 million.

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The giant retail chain that has successfully held the lead in America's race to the bottom would like to expand into New York City. The City Council is against the idea. Geller, obviously, supports Wal-Mart, because liberals dislike Wal-Mart, and liberals love Muslims, and Muslims hate America, and so therefore Wal-Mart is good and loves America.

The beautiful thing about her little flier is how confusing and incoherent it is. It is anti-mosque, and pro-Wal-Mart, but the Wal-Mart happy face is wearing a veil, and there is an Islamic crescent in place of the style guide-confounding hyphen?

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Leading mosque foe Andy Sullivan, who signed onto the boycott after being taken in by a hoax report that Bieber had spoken out in support of Park51, has now apologized to Bieber, his fans, and his family. 

Sullivan, a Brooklyn-born construction worker who will be touring in opposition to Park51 this year, published the apology on his blog, Blue Collar Corner: 

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To be sure, Google News is a blunt instrument for measuring volume of press coverage. But the timeline nevertheless conveys a lot about the strange, still somewhat inexplicable burst of coverage surrounding what became known as the "Ground Zero Mosque."

The story began inorganically, with misleading framing pushed into the mainstream by a right-wing blog and the New York Post. It evolved into the national political obsession of the summer and, finally, into a midterm election issue. And then, just like that, it disappeared. 

The course of the media coverage had little to do with the facts on the ground at 49-51 Park Place in lower Manhattan, the proposed site of the mosque. To review what happened: 

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So it was quite a surprise this month to read that Sullivan has set his sights on a new target: Canadian teen pop superstar Justin Bieber.

Mosque foes recently started a boycott of Bieber after he made comments in support of the mosque project in an interview with Tiger Beat, a teen fan magazine, Sullivan told WYNC earlier this month. Now, his 8-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son have been banned from attending Bieber performances.

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In interview excerpts published by the Dubai-based Arabian Business magazine, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal was quoted as saying that moving the planned mosque and other facilities would respect the memory of those killed in the 2001 attacks and allow American Muslims to choose a more suitable location.

The comments are reportedly the prince's first public views on the dispute, which has stirred street protests and fiery debates between religious and political leaders over America's freedom of worship versus the lingering anger over the 9/11 attacks.

Prince Alwaleed's Kingdom Foundation has contributed to the group run by New York's Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, but said he has given no funds to the planned center.

Prince Alwaleed urged the backers of the proposed Islamic center not to "agitate the wound by saying, 'We need to put the mosque next to the 9/11 site.'"

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(There will be no live ceremony, so we ask you to please just imagine that the winners in each category were introduced by an oddly mismatched couple of celebrities, like Katherine Heigl and Pau Gasol.)

Best Attempt at Convincing People That Mexican Immigrants Are Drug-running Cartel Assassins

First up, California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman wins an honorary Baity for putting the border fence in her ads, then lying about it, then running a Spanish-language ad claiming that she's against the Arizona immigration law.

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Pamela Geller, the main instigator in this summer's anti-mosque frenzy, is a bigoted conspiracy theorist. She's a liar and probably slightly insane. She regularly compares Muslims to Nazis. Geller's called Barack Obama's birth certificate a forgery, and Obama a Muslim. She published a lengthy "investigation" on her site in 2008 claiming that Obama's father was actually Malcolm X. And Charles Johnson recently documented her many ties to far-right neo-fascist movements in Europe. Johnson has examples of Geller defending white supremacists and even genocidal war criminals.

She's not the sort of person whose endorsement you want to advertise.

Update: Shortly after Salon pointed this out, O'Donnell removed the endorsement from her website -- which upset Geller so much that she withdrew it.

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One reader, Larry Peck, founder of TeesWithTude.com, went ahead and made it happen. The image isn't exactly identical to the original, and, I hasten to note, it is completely unauthorized (I still haven't heard a word from anyone claiming to have created the mini-masterpiece), but I thought I would pass the link along anyway.

I Want You to stop being AFRAID.

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Uncle Sam wants YOU to stop being afraid of other Americans, of other religions, of other classes, of other nations, of speaking out. You're Americans first. Act like it.

This message gets to the heart of something very important. The conservative right likes to wrap itself in the flag and paint opposition to its values as un-patriotic and un-American. But tolerance is also an American value. And what is more craven than the fear that the American way of life will be undermined by the exercise of such a value -- by our welcoming of difference, our openness to that which threatens us?

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In the ad, Ellmers and a narrator refer interchangeably to "the Muslims," "the terrorists" and the organizers of Park51 in New York as if they are one and the same:

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The church had its inaugural services in a ballroom of the Marriott just south of ground zero on Sept. 5 to a crowd of about 25 people plus 25 journalists. But now the bill for that event is due, and Keller appears to be shifting into crisis mode, making an appeal to the readers of his daily Internet devotional to wire him $34,000 to help him get out of the hole and to ensure the continued operations of the 9/11 Christian Center.

(Keep in mind here that Keller, who turned to Christianity after being imprisoned for insider trading in the late 1980s, has been involved in schemes in the past to get people to send him jewelry and to make money off of a Birther informercial.)

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And that seems indisputable: Lazio spent the last couple months of his campaign talking almost exclusively about the mosque, denouncing the Park51 project and demanding investigations into the Muslims behind it. He still lost.

Lazio's loss does not prove, however, the Park51 issue was unimportant to GOP voters. Paladino actually took a more extreme anti-mosque position than Lazio -- and, like his opponent, hit on the issue ad nauseum.

Let's go to the tape.

First, check out this ad, in which Paladino promises to use eminent domain to block what he calls "a monument to those who attacked our country":

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I took that as my cue to return to the Pulitzer-winning historian's seminal essay on American political crackpottery. Originating as a 1963 speech delivered in Oxford and first printed in Harper's magazine in 1964, it can currently be found in a collection, also called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," reprinted by Vintage Books.

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The following slide show is a sampling of the literature circulated at the rally.

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New York's primaries are tomorrow, and despite invoking some of that 9/11 footage magic in a shockingly tasteless ad, Lazio may yet lose the chance to lose to Andrew Cuomo in November. (He is, depressingly, not the only one jumping on the 9/11 bandwagon.)

In a state paralyzed by a completely dysfunctional Democratic party-run legislature, Republicans across the state are primarily running on hating Islam -- though some also hate public employees and teachers. The Democrats are running mostly on hating the other Democrats -- especially the ones currently in Albany or Washington.

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Rushdie's satirical novel led in the 1980s to worldwide riots by Muslims and calls for his death. He tells The Associated Press in an interview Monday that he understands the "sensitivities" of building the site close to where thousands were killed during on Sept. 11, 2001.

But he says First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion should be honored. He adds that he is "not personally" a lover of mosques or any place of worship.

But he says that if people "want a mosque, it seems absolutely right they should have it."

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More than a flaky Florida pastor’s cancelled threat to burn the Quran (or the actual scattered torchings that took place the same day), the ground zerio rally answered the question posed repeatedly over the past few weeks: Why are millions of Americans suddenly caught up in a torrent of fear and fury over Islam so strong that both the president and the commanding general of U.S. forces in Afghanistan have warned of deadly consequences? What motivates the outpouring of rancor against Muslims, especially in the conservative media? How did they escape until now?

The answer is that until the advent of the Obama presidency, Republicans had no reason to scapegoat Muslims or demonize Islam -- and indeed, they could not have inflamed those prejudices without damaging their own leaders, especially George W. Bush.

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The names of all the people killed at the World Trade Center site were read aloud at a three-hour ceremony Saturday on the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

There were no protests at the ceremony, but some readers alluded to the emotional debate about the planned Islamic center and mosque.

Another rally is planned nearby, where organizers say they will speak out against the project. They believe it is insensitive to build a mosque so close to where Islamic extremists attacked the city.

Supporters say it is a matter of religious freedom and bridging understanding.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Family members of Sept. 11 victims recited loved ones' names through tears on the ninth anniversary of the attacks Saturday, avoiding direct mention of the political furor centered two blocks from ground zero. The city braced for protests over the mosque planned there as elected officials pleaded for religious tolerance.

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