President Bush says the U.S. does not torture. That's not the truth according to new documents obtained by the Associated Press.

The 91 pages of new documents detail concerns raised by military officials over the treatment of Yasier Hamdi and Jose Padilla, both U.S. citizens, and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident. The documents were provided by the U.S. Fleet Forces Command which is in charge of the military brigs in Norfolk, Va., and Charleston, S.C where the three were held.

The officials said the conditions of confinement had driven the three to the brink of insanity.

"These documents are the first clear confirmation of what we've suspected all along, that the brig was run as a prison beyond the law. There was an effort to create a Gitmo inside the United States," Jonathan Hafetz of the ACLU's National Security Project in New York said, using the slang word for the U.S. naval facility in Cuba.

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It isn't news every time a political candidate misspeaks. But when John McCain makes an unintended funny, it's worth a blog post.

In a campaign with plenty of gaffes to go around, John McCain added one to the mix Wednesday. The Republican vice-presidential candidate addressed a crowd in Pennsylvania as “my fellow prisoners.”

He meant to say "my fellow citizens." Freudian slip? Is the senator feeling a bit confined as the race draws to a close? Let's hope he's not having P.O.W. flashbacks.

While keeping in mind today's critique of the government's various data-mining programs by the National Research Council, see if you can contain your outrage (no need to bother, really) as you read this:

The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday.

Activists were classified as terrorists in Maryland because they publicly opposed the death penalty or the Iraq war. They were identified by law enforcement officers who spied on them as they engaged in constitutionally protected protest.

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Ah, I should have known there would be a catch in McCain's endorsement of HOLC and Brad DeLong spots it:

[McCain advisor] Douglas Holtz-Eakin says, this morning:

[W]e would in fact be taking the negative equity position and putting it on the taxpayers books instead of putting it on the private lenders books [BTD's emphasis] or the homeowners books. We think the balance of risk has shifted to the point where this is the way to go...

What does this mean? It means that John McCain wants to give $100 billion of taxpayers' money to America's worst-behaving mortgage financiers.

So McCain's idea is to give money to the mortgage lenders, not help the homeowners. No way, no how, no more corporate giveaways McCain. HOLC is this - the government buys the loan at market value, the mortgage lender takes its hit and the homeowner keeps his/her house on new affordable credit terms. That is HOLC. McCain's plan is nonsense.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Joe Biden is pushing back against the McCain-Palin claim that Barack Obama is a mysterious figure who "pals around with terrorists."

“The one they have chosen is to appeal to fear with a veiled question: ‘Who is the real Barack Obama?’ Ladies and gentlemen, to have a vice presidential candidate raise the most outrageous inferences, the ones that John McCain’s campaign is condoning is simply wrong,” said Biden, who blamed McCain’s Republican strategists - the ones that successfully deflated McCain’s chances against George W. Bush in 2000 with sensational rumors and attacks.

“These same people, they’re attacking Barack Obama in the ugliest of ways,” said Biden. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is beyond disappointing, this is beyond disappointing. This is wrong.”

Ugly is all the McCain campaign has left. As Biden said, the attacks on Obama’s character are "an attempt to get you to stop paying attention to what’s going on in this country." It won't work. This year, voters couldn't stop paying attention to reality if they tried.

Ipsos/McClatchy (10/2-6) has Obama up 7, 47-40.

Gallup has Obama up 11, 52-41, the biggest lead he has had in the entire campaign in the Gallup poll.

I'll say it, Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

it turns out it is in the crazy talk about Russia:

Brokaw: How can we apply pressure to Russia for humanitarian issues in an effective manner without starting another Cold War?

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There is no evidence that the Bush administration's reliance on data-mining has made the nation safer, but plenty of evidence that the practice endangers our privacy and burdens those who are victimized by the government's inevitable mistakes.

The National Security Agency’s program for wiretapping terror suspects without warrants, the screening of suspicious airline passengers and the Pentagon’s ill-fated Total Information Awareness program, shut down by Congress in 2003 because of privacy concerns, have all relied on aspects of data mining.

But in a 352-page government study released on Tuesday, a committee of the National Research Council warned that successfully using these tools to deter terrorism “will be extremely difficult to achieve” because of legal, technological and logistical problems. It said a haphazard approach to using such tools threatened both Americans’ privacy rights and the country’s legitimate national security needs.

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For non-HOLC related issues.

This is an Open Thread.

NYTimes:

The mortgage renewal idea actually originated with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, said Charlie Black, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain. And Mrs. Clinton, who proposed the idea in a recent newspaper column, borrowed it from a Depression-era New Deal agency, the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation.

Obama left this door wide open by not adopting the Clinton proposal earlier. He needs to close it. NOW.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

Every now and then, Thomas Friedman gets it right. It's rare but it happens. After trashing Sarah Palin's assertion that it isn't patriotic to ask citizens to pay the taxes that need to be paid to fund two wars and a bailout (not to mention government in general), Friedman echoes what many of us have been saying for some time: Palin has no business holding the vice presidency, and John McCain's choice of Palin reflects his impetuous judgment.

How in the world can conservative commentators write with a straight face that this woman should be vice president of the United States? Do these people understand what serious trouble our country is in right now?

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Matt Yglesias writes:

Here’s the CAP [HOLC] plan. All joking aside, it’s genuinely true that a progressive policy operation is always hoping some Republicans somewhere will cotton to some of our ideas. It’s genuinely difficult to achieve anything legislatively in the United States without some bipartisanship. Obama has made some similar noises in the past. Hopefully McCain’s embrace of this idea means something like it can actually get done.

(Emphasis supplied.) Um, how about more than "some similar noises" from Obama? How about a little leadership on the issue?

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only