Editor's note: Erick Erickson is a CNN contributor and editor of Redstate.com

(CNN) -- There is a lot of buzz about CNN's new poll that shows Rick Perry seemingly solidifying his lead among Republican in the primary contest. Forty-two percent of Republicans think Rick Perry has the best shot at beating Barack Obama. Forty-five percent of seniors support Perry compared to 21% for Mitt Romney.

There is one question that is not getting as much attention, though in my mind it explains every other question. CNN asked, "Which Republican candidate is most likely to fight for their beliefs?" The winner? Rick Perry with 29%, followed by Sarah Palin at 23%. Mitt Romney? Michele Bachmann? They tied at 11%.

The answer to the question really says very little about Rick Perry and a great deal about Mitt Romney. It plays into the "opportunist" critique that many primary voters have of Romney.

We knew our story on a possible human ancestor called Australopithecus sediba would be controversial, but never expected more than 1,900 comments to come in.

The post generated some pretty intense discussions involving readers who do not believe these new findings - or any evidence of human evolution, for that matter - because of their religious beliefs.

blake

Maybe your ancestor, not mine. I was created in the image of God, not evolved from from some lifeless goo over billions of years. The accident of time and chance. I don't have enough faith to believe those kind of fantastical fairy tales.

Religious sentiments such as this received a lot of backlash from readers such as gary, who writes:

Evolution is fact. Deities and demons are pretend. Bible is folklore, myth, superstition and legend.

There's also a large contingent of readers who don't see a contradiction between accepting the facts of science and having religious faith. Judas Priest writes:

Excuse me, but why does believing in god mean denying the wonders of creation that you can see and touch and evaluate? How does accepting that the world is billions of years old, and the universe billions of years older still, deny god? How does observing that things change over time refute god in any way? Why must god, and god's creation, be small enough to be encompassed by your tiny little mind and your tiny little book?

It seems wrong to begin a story like that, doesn't it? Particularly a story about a bookstore. It should begin "In the beginning," or "Once upon a time," or "It was love at first sight."

Especially "It was love at first sight."

After 40 years in business, Borders No. 1, the company's original Ann Arbor store, is scheduled to close on Monday. By late August, posters on the windows declared, "NOTHING HELD BACK!" -- and that meant the fixtures and furniture as well. The goods -- books, but also games and puzzles and teddy bears and throw rugs -- gave off the sour tang of a picked-over flea market.

A lonely security guard stood watch; he was added just recently, an employee said, after a shoplifting incident.

Borders Rewards customers have been receiving e-mails for some time now, ever since the chain declared bankruptcy and announced it was closing its 399 remaining stores. A month ago it was "30 to 50 percent off!" Now it's "60 to 80 percent off!"

There was recently a sign taped to No. 1's front door. It said, "Now Hiring: Apply Online at Borders.com." It was serious -- the liquidators needed to hire part-time help -- but it seemed like a sick joke.

What happened to the love?

"Borders used to be chockablock with books," said Jonathan Marwil, a University of Michigan history professor and author of a history of Ann Arbor. "It has increasingly looked less like a bookstore than a bowling alley, with its wide-open spaces. Now they're selling children's dolls on the front counter. It's really pretty grim."

It was a place where employees were devoted to their jobs. They prided themselves on their knowledge of their assigned sections -- and everybody else's. It was a gathering place and community center, just up the street from the university's main campus.

"We worked when we didn't have to work because we didn't know we were working. We would go into the store when it was closed to do more work," said Sharon Gambin, who arrived for the 1982 holiday season and went on to hold several positions during a three-decade career. "That's how much we loved what we did."

It's an odd thing to mourn for a store. Mourn for the employees who have lost their jobs, yes, but the store? Just another box on the roadside. Hundreds more like it. Move it along, capitalism.

Woolworth is long gone; few were saddened at its passing. Circuit City went belly up; silence. Great downtown department stores have vanished, changed names, disappeared to that Great Retailer in the Sky. (Jacobson's, the upscale department store that once occupied Borders' East Liberty Street storefront, is but one example.) With rare exceptions -- the late Atlanta newspaper columnist Celestine Sibley once wrote a valentine, "Dear Store," to the city's now-defunct retailer, Rich's -- the public yawns.

They'll probably soon forget about Borders as well. To most of the country, it's just another big-box chain, another in a series of disappearing strip-mall storefronts. Indeed, there's an irony in its demise, for as Borders is blamed for killing off some local independents, now it has been done in by Amazon and the Internet. The circle may go 'round again: Former customers may turn to independents, if their towns have them. Or, if they rule out their local chain, maybe they'll just go back to browsing on Amazon.

A shame, because when done right, there's something about a bookstore.

It's a library, a gathering spot, a refuge, a journey. Often it's small, maybe an 800-square-foot storefront jammed into a city street. Or it's idiosyncratic: an old house or converted barn, a rambling lobby or strip-mall space. It may not even be in your neighborhood, but that's where you go.

At its best, it's crowded: sometimes with people, always with books -- books stacked to the ceiling. Books lined up in bookcases. Books spread out on tables, highlighted on platforms, displayed in twirling, 5-foot-high wire racks.

Don't know what you're looking for? That's part of the adventure. A bookstore is governed by serendipity. You walk in and the world falls away. There's no rush. It's just you and the books, these pockets of words and paper that somehow transport you to a different place.

The best bookstores have a certain feel, a certain comfort to them. They're stately but not forbidding. The employees are a mix of the young and the eccentric, college students and lifers. The front of the store features their recommendations, a little offbeat, a little intriguing. If you're looking for something specific, they know where to find it; if you don't know what you're looking for, they can be your Virgil and Beatrice, guiding you through the world.

It is a place with a soul.

For much of its 40-year history, that was Borders. Though it was a chain, with hundreds of locations around the world, during its best years it maintained the feel of a great, expansive local bookstore, the 800-foot space multiplied by 10 or 20 (and much better organized). The choices were manifold, the employees passionate, the adventure always beginning.

In some towns and cities, Borders was it.

"I find in books a comfort and a companionship, a refuge from an urgently insistent world," wrote Ann Miller in the Longmont (Colorado) Weekly about the closing of that town's Borders, its only new-book bookstore. "I am worried about the folding of bookstores like Borders and the lost opportunity for browsing. ... There was no better place for grazing the written word and for meeting the best of friends."

Joe Gable, who managed Store No. 1 from the mid-'70s to the mid-'90s, puts it more simply.

Malone, Washington (CNN) -- The post office in the tiny Washington town of Malone sells beer and cigarettes. Live worms for fishing, too. The boxes for fixed-rate shipping are wedged between racks of beef jerky and $6.99 sunglasses.

The Malone location is what the U.S. Postal Service has dubbed a "village" post office. It's inside Red's Hop N' Market, the town mini-mart where locals like to buy lottery tickets and a case of beer before the weekend.

It's the only village post office in the country, but soon a similar hybrid may be coming to a town near you.

As the Postal Service buckles under a $9 billion debt, the mail agency has looked for ways to slash operating costs.

"The primary thing we look at is how much revenue they (post offices) generate (and) has that revenue been going down," said Ernie Swanson, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service in Seattle.

"(At) a lot of these offices, there's a postmaster and no other employee. So do they have an hour or two of work a day, and we are paying them for eight hours?"

Some 3,700 post offices may soon face being turned into village post offices, according to the Postal Service. Last week, Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe testified at a Senate hearing that as many as 220,000 post office employees could lose their jobs in the restructuring.

Postmaster general's warning to Congress

For Malone -- the test ground for the first village post office -- having mail service quite literally put the town on the map.

Search for Malone on Google Maps, and the only landmark that comes up for the entire town is the original, now closed, post office.

Cheryl Kim and her husband, Johnny, own the Red's Hop N' Market, where the village post office is located.

When the couple received a letter last year from the Postal Service inquiring whether they would incorporate the post office into their store, Cheryl Kim said they were confused.

iReport —
The tenth anniversary of 9/11 was a relatively quiet one, from what I saw. Starting off at St. Paul's Chapel, in lower Manhattan, I met up with my friend and fellow photographer Brenna around 11am. We saw a group of protestors holding signs and wearing T-shirts that said "The Bush Regime Engineered 9-11" and "9/11 Was An Inside Job". They were standing across the street from the Chapel, where visitors came to tie a ribbon and pay their respects to the victims of 9/11. The entire area around City Hall and Ground Zero was cordoned off and under heavy security. Apart from some heated exchanges, the inside-jobbers were allowed to stage their protest.



After St. Paul's Chapel, we visited the Madina Masjid, a mosque in the East Village, which is overseen by Imam Hafiz Choudhury. Imam Choudhury has been at the Masjid for thirty-five years. He and his fourteen-year-old son Ahsan showed us around. My colleague Brenna, an Irish-American woman, was allowed access to all areas of the mosque, and Imam Choudhury took the time to patiently explain some prayer rituals to her, including where the women sit during prayer (in the back, behind a curtain). I asked if the Masjid had faced any trouble in the neighborhood, and Imam Choudhury waved away my concerns, saying that they never had any problems as a mosque in the East Village of New York City. His friendliness and openness probably had a lot to do with the mosque's peaceful relationship with its neighbours. Outside the Masjid, seventeen-year-old Shumon was selling perfumes and other Muslim knicknacks from a sidewalk table -- a business that he inherited from his grandfather. Shumon arrived in the US one and half years ago, from Sylhet, Bangladesh. His English is rapidly improving, and he is in school taking extra lessons. We were welcomed warmly by everyone at the mosque, and spoke to our hosts at length. We thanked everyone for their time, and moved on to our next event, the ICP.

New York (CNN) -- For the first time since the terror attack on the World Trade Center, the general public is being allowed back onto the site.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, members of the city council and some 9/11 victims' family members welcomed the first visitors to the 9/11 memorial plaza that opened on schedule Monday.

"The opening fulfills a promise we made to the families on the 10-year anniversary and keep it open for them and the rest of the world forever to reflect on what happened and to honor the 9/11 victims and heroes," said Bloomberg, who is also the 9/11 Memorial chairman.

Families of victims were able to visit the memorial Sunday during ceremonies honoring those who were killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks that brought down the twin towers.

"We're so proud of this memorial," said Monica Iken, who lost her husband, Michael, in the attacks and was able to visit the memorial, along with other victims' families Sunday. "I can go see Michael. He's home."
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Monday's visitors passed through metal detectors and surveillance cameras as they began making their way to the the two huge, square fountains that mark the footprints of the World Trade Center towers.

The fountains' water flows into granite reflecting pools at the center of the eight-acre, tree-lined plaza. Bronze plates surround the fountains and bear the names of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the 2001 attacks, as well as the six who were killed when a terrorist truck bomb exploded in the parking garage beneath the towers in 1993.

Some of the visitors were visibly emotional as they walked into the plaza Monday. Some rubbed their fingers across the etched names of those who died. One man took out a paper and stenciled over a name and carefully rolled up the paper to take with him.

The names forming the perimeter where the North Tower stood are those who died in the building and the passengers on American Airlines Flight 11, which was crashed into it, as well as the six dead from the 1993 bombing.

The South Tower site includes the names of dead who were in that building and United Flight 175, as well as the names of the first responders who were killed, the dead from the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, and the dead of United Flight 93, which crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.