http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/02/palins-church-may-have-sh_n_123205.html

Religion is the basis of her policies, since she thinks that the Iraq War is part of "God's" plan:

"Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God," she exhorted the congregants. "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."

Does America really want this totally unqualified - albeit very nice - religious woman to be one heartbeat away from the Oval Office?

"The best way to handle a proposed vice presidential nominee who has not been tested in national or big-state politics or high appointive office -- and I have the obvious benefit of hindsight -- is to float the name a few weeks before the convention and let the games begin. By opening gavel, the candidate will have run the gauntlet of press scrutiny or opposition research, or have dropped out. This approach wouldn’t necessarily work in a contested convention, and, unfortunately, it eliminates the drama of dropping the name at the convention. But it would pretty well guarantee that the news from the convention would not be dominated by questions about the vice presidential selection."

Who wrote this "Guide to Choosing a VP?" None other than Reagan Consigliere, James Baker, in his book, Work Hard, Study...and Keep Out of Politics!

Do you think McCain's campaign should have read the book?

From a DemocracyNow! press release:

Goodman was arrested while questioning police about the unlawful detention of Kouddous and Salazar who were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. Goodman’s crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.

And what on earth could they have been doing which resulted in this?

All three were violently manhandled by law enforcement officers. Abdel Kouddous was slammed against a wall and the ground, leaving his arms scraped and bloodied. He sustained other injuries to his chest and back. Salazar's violent arrest by baton-wielding officers, during which she was slammed to the ground while yelling, "I'm Press! Press!," resulted in her nose bleeding, as well as causing facial pain. Goodman’s arm was violently yanked by police as she was arrested.

In case you don't know who Amy Goodman is:

Amy Goodman is one of the most well-known and well-respected journalists in the United States. She has received journalism’s top honors for her reporting and has a distinguished reputation of bravery and courage. The arrest of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and the subsequent criminal charges and threat of charges are a transparent attempt to intimidate journalists.

Watch DemocracyNow! to follow the repercussions of these illegal arrests...

Just check out this clip of McCain's campaign surrogate trying to come up with some example, any example, of her foreign policy experience. Beware - it's painful:

It goes on from there, with Palin herself weighing in on her thoughts on Iraq:

Alaska Business Monthly: We've lost a lot of Alaska's military members to the war in Iraq. How do you feel about sending more troops into battle, as President Bush is suggesting?

Palin: I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq. I heard on the news about the new deployments, and while I support our president, Condoleezza Rice and the administration, I want to know that we have an exit plan in place; I want assurances that we are doing all we can to keep our troops safe. Every life lost is such a tragedy. I am very, very proud of the troops we have in Alaska, those fighting overseas for our freedoms, and the families here who are making so many sacrifices.

It goes on and on and on...Incredibly surreal. And incredibly irresponsible by McCain. Will Americans see it this way?

Mr Ahmed and his buddies work for about $230 a month guarding one of several dozen checkpoints in his hometown. Fluorescent yellow sashes identify them as SOIs -- 'Sons of Iraq' -- the name given by the US military to the largely Sunni militia they created to help drive out al Qa'eda.

There are more than 90,000 SOIs -- a force of untrained, armed, minimally employed young men which the United States cannot disband and the Iraqi government is reluctant to embrace.

The movement started as the Sahwa -- the Awakening -- in al Anbar, in western Iraq, when tribal leaders facing increased challenges from al Qa'eda two years ago turned against the people they had been harboring.

As US and Iraqi troops surged in and around Baghdad last year, other Sunni leaders threatened by extremists realized that aligning themselves with coalition forces could give them back some of the power they had lost.

Some military strategists believe US forces could not have stabilised Iraq without the help of tens of thousands of Sunnis unexpectedly turning against al Qa'eda.

...through the bribes we've been paying them, for sure...

It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of "long-time standing" that victims of Bush's torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely "enhanced interrogation."

So, when American soldiers suffer the same fate in some future war (or next week in Iraq or Afghanistan), we as the people of this nation cannot complain that they are being tortured. Why? Because our own government, that we elected, says it is not torture.

It's been a week since the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, and we now have the historical achievement of Michael Phelps' winning of 8 gold medals in 2008. This marker will probably not be matched ever, or if so, in a very, very long time, especially considering that it's been 36 years since Mark Spitz won 7 gold medals in the '72 Olympics.

It was striking that in one interview Phelps gave he mentions the power of imagination and the role it played in making his dream real. His coach also mentioned that he always stressed to Phelps how important imagination was in his pursuit of his dream. It's a deep concept, that none other than Albert Einstein stressed in a famous interview: "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

In the arts, too, of course, this concept of imagination is central to making real a vision, be it in painting, dance, music, literature, etc. So here you have imagination as central to creating something new - in the Olympics, in Science, and in the Arts.

Now, if we could only get our leaders to imagine a new world order full of peace and green energy, with universal health care and prosperity for all, we might be able to achieve something. Remember - things only got this way because of humans and they can change because of humans...and our imaginations...

Rick Anderson over at The Whispering Crane Institute has similar comments...

By choosing Albert Speer Jr, the son of Hitler's favorite architect and the designer of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, to design the master plan for the Beijing games, China's government has itself alluded to the radical politicization of aesthetics that was a hallmark of 20th century totalitarianism. Like those regimes, whether fascist or communist, China's leaders have sought to transform public space and sporting events into visible proof of their fitness and mandate to rule.

A fascinating tid-bit to chew over during the next two weeks of this spectacle...

OK, he emphasizes the word, "may," as in the anthrax attacks "may" be linked to Saddam Hussein. But some journalist should ask him what intelligence he was privy to at that time that led him to make that claim.

We seem to argue and go back and forth without dealing with the true human cost of this disaster, as we sit in our sanitized and safe environments. It is completely unfair to those who are there and those who have lost their lives to remove this most important aspect from the equation - the reality of the situation, with all it's smelly and bloody components.

Arguments both for and against staying in Iraq can be made, but only with the following images in mind. These photographs were taken by photojournalist, Zoria Miller, who was subsequently removed from his embedded position with the Marines. The Public Editor of the NY Times discusses his case today under the title, "The Painful Images of War." He covers both the pros and cons of publishing these photos.

You make your decision on which side of the debate you stand. But for the love of your country, look at the photos and read Miller's account of that horrific day in June in Anbar Provence in Iraq before you make up your mind.

The tactics the president denounced were precisely those he had authorized and encouraged in the growing network of secret prisons around the world. The detainees in these scattered sites -- many of them innocent -- have been held for months and years without charges, without lawyers, without notification to their families and often without respite from torture for weeks and months at a time.

No one knows how many people were rounded up and spirited away into these secret locations, although the number is very likely in the thousands. No one knows either how many detainees have died once in custody. Nor is there any solid information about the many detainees who have been the victims of what the United States government calls "extraordinary rendition," the handing over of detainees to other governments, mostly in the Middle East, whose secret police have no qualms about torturing their prisoners and face no legal consequences for doing so.

This shameful story is so disturbing you almost can't believe our country has been doing this:

Mayer provides a particularly ghoulish description of James Mitchell, a former military psychologist, who introduced the C.I.A. to a secret military program that had been designed in the 1950s to teach high-risk personnel to withstand torture. Known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), it rested on the belief that inflicting a controlled level of pain and humiliation on those who might face it in combat would help them survive the real thing if they were captured. For the C.I.A. after 2001, SERE became not a tool for resisting torture, but a template for inflicting it -- a template soon adopted by interrogators in the far-flung "black sites" where detainees were imprisoned. Mitchell dismissed the arguments of F.B.I. agents that his tactics were ineffective and that he had no experience with the Middle East or Islamic terrorism. "Science is science," he said. At one point, the F.B.I. agents collaborating with the C.I.A. on interrogation plans were so alarmed by what they were hearing that they urged their superiors to arrest Mitchell. Soon after that, they withdrew from the program altogether. "We don't do that," one of the F.B.I. agents said. "It's what our enemies do!"

It's what our enemies do. And we're doing that now. And it doesn't even seem to work!

This vast regime of pain and terror, inflicted in the name of a war on terror, rests in large part on the untested belief of a few high-ranking leaders in Washington that torture is an effective tool for eliciting valuable information. But there is, Mayer persuasively argues, little available evidence that this assumption is true, and a great deal of evidence from numerous sources (including the United States military and the F.B.I.) that torture is, in fact, one of the least effective methods of gathering information and a likely source of false confessions. Among the many cases Mayer and other journalists have chronicled -- including the case of the most notable Al Qaeda operative yet captured, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed -- the information gleaned from tortured detainees has produced unreliable and often entirely unusable information. That many of the interrogations were conducted by American servicemen and -women with scant training made the likelihood of success even lower. (Some of the interrogators had no qualms about what they were doing and welcomed being unconstrained by any laws or rules. "It was the Camelot of counterterrorism," one officer later told a journalist. "We didn't have to mess with others and it was fun." Others were traumatized by what they had done and seen, and suffered psychologically as a result.)

Boy, hasn't it been fun to completely trash the reputation of this country that was built up over 200 years? A reputation as a country that upholds freedom and the rule of law?

There has been so much damage inflicted on this country by Bush/Cheney over the past eight years that it will probably take at least another eight to undo the disaster. Torture is just one area that will need some serious repairs applied...

Matthews: "Did you see FOX television as a tool when you were in the White House? As a useful avenue to get your message out?"

McClellan: "I make a distinction between the journalists and the commentators. Certainly there were commentators and other, pundits at FOX News, that were useful to the White House." That was something we at the White House, yes, were doing, getting them talking points and making sure they knew where we were coming from.

Matthews: "So you were using these commentators as your spokespeople."

McClellan: "Well, certainly."

Can we finally dispense with the "Fair and Balanced" shtick? Not that we didn't know that already, but c'mon, people!

After three days on the run, Ahmad Batebi picked his way down a rocky slope to the stream that marked Iran's border with Iraq. His Kurdish guides, who had led Mr. Batebi, an Iranian dissident, through minefields and dodged nighttime gunfire from border guards, passed him to a new team of shadowy human smugglers.

At the age of 31, after nearly eight years in Iranian prisons, subjected to torture and twice taken to the gallows and fitted with a noose, Mr. Batebi had fled.

It's an amazing tale that tracks his development into a student protester:

His own awakening began in fourth grade, when his teacher, fed up with the distortions of an official history textbook, burst out: "Go out and read other things to try to get the truth."

"The teacher probably doesn't even remember," Mr. Batebi said. "But he changed the course of my life."

A few weeks later came the stoning. Though forbidden by his mother, he slipped out of the house to see the commotion near his school. He saw a man, accused of adultery, buried to the waist, his head covered with a sack that turned red as Revolutionary Guards hurled chunks of concrete. A mullah standing atop a wall gave the orders, and an ambivalent crowd of neighbors looked on.

"I was utterly shocked," he recalled. "My hands and legs were shaking." Afterward, he suffered from nightmares.

Years later, he would witness public hangings and dismemberments. "But nothing had the impact of that stoning," he said. "I thought, This can't be Islam."

And what did he suffer from once he ended up in prison?

Mr. Batebi described 17 months in solitary confinement, including repeated torture by interrogators trying to force him to say on television that the famous T-shirt was stained with paint or animal blood.

His jailers thrashed him with a metal cable, beat his testicles and kicked in his teeth, he said. They held his face down in a pool of excrement. They tied his arms behind his back and hung him from the ceiling. At other times, strapping him to a chair, they kept him awake night after night, cutting him and rubbing salt into the wounds.

Twice he was led blindfolded to the gallows. Once the noose was left around his neck for 45 minutes, and he passed out from fear, he recalled. The second time, he sat, waiting, as a prisoner on each side of him was hanged.

This man's story is completely compelling and reveals how disgusting the state terror system is in Iran (it also makes you wonder what exactly has been going on in GITMO all these years). Yet, the most revealing part of the story is this:

He recoils when asked about the possibility of American military action against Iran, saying that if the United States attacked, "I might go back and fight for my country myself."

Italics are mine.

Here's a man who was tortured for years and led to believe that he would die by hanging, not once, but twice. And yet, given the scenario that if his country, which tortured him and denied him dignity, were attacked by the United States, he would go back to defend his country. It's an amazing admission that just goes to show that any attack by the U.S. against Iran will do nothing except strengthen the hard-liners there...

Read the entire story to get the full impact.

If the sweeping surveillance law signed by President Bush on Thursday -- giving the U.S. government nearly unchecked authority to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of innocent Americans -- is allowed to stand, we will have eroded one of the most important bulwarks to a free press and an open society.

The law, passed under the guise of national security, ostensibly targets people outside the country. There is no question, however, that it will ensnare many communications between Americans and those overseas. Those communications can be stored indefinitely and disseminated, not just to the U.S. government but to other governments.

He goes on further:

This law will cripple the work of those of us who as reporters communicate regularly with people overseas, especially those in the Middle East. It will intimidate dissidents, human rights activists and courageous officials who seek to expose the lies of our government or governments allied with ours. It will hang like the sword of Damocles over all who dare to defy the official versions of events. It leaves open the possibility of retribution and invites the potential for abuse by those whose concern is not with national security but with the consolidation of their own power.

In fact, he details how this new surveillance has already affected his work:

I was once told about a showdown between a U.S. warship and the Iranian navy that had the potential to escalate into a military conflict. I contacted someone who was on the ship at the time of the alleged incident and who reportedly had photos. His first question was whether my phone and e-mails were being monitored.

What could I say? How could I know? I offered to travel to see him but, frightened of retribution, he refused. I do not know if the man's story is true. I only know that the fear of surveillance made it impossible for me to determine its veracity. Under this law, all those who hold information that could embarrass and expose the lies of those in power will have similar fears. Confidentiality, and the understanding that as a reporter I will honor this confidentiality, permits a free press to function. Take it away and a free press withers and dies.

Let's hope the lawsuits coming down the pike will derail this new FISA bill, enacted with the support of top Democrats, including Barack Obama. If not, we've essentially kissed the Fourth Amendment goodbye and with it the continued role of the Fourth Estate.

Mr Hedges concludes with some powerful words:

I know the cost of terrorism and the consequences of war. I have investigated Al Qaeda's operation in Europe and have covered numerous conflicts. The monitoring of suspected terrorists, with proper oversight, is a crucial part of our national security. But this law is not about keeping us safe, which can -- and should -- be done in a constitutional manner and with judicial oversight. It is about using terrorism as a pretext to permit wholesale spying and to silence voices that will allow us to maintain an open society.