• Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) calls in at 9:30am ET / 6:30am PT for another edition of “Face The Grayson
• Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) calls in at 10:30am ET / 7:30am PT to talk about her recent trip to New Orleans for the 5th anniversary of Katrina
• Will Bunch, Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, calls in at 11:05am ET / 8:05am PT to talk about his new book, “The Backlash: Right Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama”
• Officers scoured the Discovery Communications building in suburban DC overnight after a hostage-taker claiming to have “several bombs” was shot dead, but did not find any “active devices” at the scene, NBC News reported Thursday.
• Much of the East Coast is under warnings and watches as the Labor Day weekend approaches, including hurricane warnings for parts of North Carolina. Category four Hurricane Earl, which has maximum sustained winds near 145 mph, is located about 410 miles south of Cape Hatteras, N.C.
• The U.S. marked on Wednesday the transition to the final phase of the Iraq war, shifting the focus of the remaining 50,000 American troops from combat operations to preparing Iraqi security forces to protect the country on their own.
