In an interview published Saturday, Republican presidential hopeful John McCain said we are a Christian nation and he prefers a President of the Christian faith.

"I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles ... personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith."

.... He added that "the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation."

Jewish groups roundly criticized him. The American Jewish Committee released a statement:

McCain should know that the United States is a democratic society without a religious test for public office.

"To argue that America is a Christian nation, or that persons of a particular faith should by reason of their faith not seek high office, puts the very character of our country at stake," Jeffrey Sinensky, the group's general counsel, said Monday in a statement.

Who came to McCain's defense? Joe Lieberman. And of course, McCain is now backtracking.

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New passport rules went into effect today. You'll need one to fly to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda, and to re-enter the U.S. from those countries when traveling by air.

Beginning in January, the passport rule will extend to travel by sea and land, including automobiles.

And if you're behind on your child support? Forget about it.

Here's how to apply for a passport if you don't have one.

Re: the video. Yes, that's actor Steve Martin on banjo accompanying Roger McGuinn.

Media Matters:

Summary: Discussing Rush Limbaugh's recent description of service members who advocate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq as "phony soldiers," John Gibson asserted on his radio show: "Rush was specifically talking about a particular one, Jesse MacBeth, who had pled guilty in court to lying about even being in Iraq." To support this claim, Gibson aired a clip in which Limbaugh purported to air the "entire" segment in question. In fact, that segment did not include a full 1 minute and 35 seconds of the 1 minute and 50 second discussion that occurred between Limbaugh's original "phony soldiers" comment and his subsequent reference to MacBeth.

As Rob Corddry said, "facts have a liberal bias," so they need to be adjusted by the likes of Limbaugh and Fox.

Update [2007-10-1 18:16:27 by Big Tent Democrat]: You gotta respect the chutzpah the Republicans have:

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Shakespeare:

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

A writer named Patrick Healy yesterday critized Hillary Clinton in a tabloid-type trash article in the New York Times because of her laugh which he calls a "cackle." The implication: Hillary is a witch.

The weirdest moment was with Bob Schieffer on the CBS News program "Face the Nation" when Mr. Schieffer said to Mrs. Clinton, "You rolled out your new health care plan, something Republicans immediately said is going to lead to socialized medicine." She giggled, giggled some more, and then could not seem to stop giggling — "Sorry, Bob," she said — and finally unleashed the full Cackle.

As Media Matters has reported, Healy has been doing hit pieces on Democratic candidates for years while giving Rudy Giuliani a pass. More inexplicable is that Maureen Dowd, whom Atrios calls Wanker of the Day today, chimes in.

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Thousands of monks in Burma have been executed or moved into prisons.

According to one Swedish diplomat who has now left the country, the military has won.

Liselotte Agerlid, who is now in Thailand, said that the Burmese people now face possibly decades of repression. "The Burma revolt is over," she added.

"The military regime won and a new generation has been violently repressed and violently denied democracy. The people in the street were young people, monks and civilians who were not participating during the 1988 revolt. "Now the military has cracked down the revolt, and the result may very well be that the regime will enjoy another 20 years of silence, ruling by fear."

This was the lead and main story on the news in Spain this weekend....Sky News, BBC, CNN International, and Bloomberg devoted most of their half-hour programs to it. The military blocked journalists from entering the country so they reported news they received from "citizen journalists" and aired their videos. Some journalists reported from Bangkok. They also aired a lot of telephone calls they received from people inside the country.

In another nice piece of reporting, Solomon Moore examines the slow progress that states are making to address the problem of wrongful convictions -- a problem that states generally refused to acknowledge until DNA evidence made clear that mistaken or knowingly false accusations often lead to erroneous guilty verdicts.

All but eight states now give inmates varying degrees of access to DNA evidence that might not have been available at the time of their convictions. Many states are also overhauling the way witnesses identify suspects, crime labs handle evidence and informants are used. At least six states have created commissions to expedite cases of those wrongfully convicted or to consider changes to criminal justice procedures. ...

Maryland, North Carolina, Vermont and West Virginia passed legislation this year to create tougher standards for the identification of suspects by witnesses, one of the most trouble-ridden procedures. ... Two states, Vermont and Maryland, passed laws this year to improve crime lab oversight to eliminate errors and omissions.

More than 500 local and state jurisdictions, including Alaska, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia have adopted polices that require the recording of interrogations to help prevent false confessions, according to the Innocence Project.

Unfortunately, progress has been halting and inconsistent, at best.

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Here's the moral of the story:

The problem is that when the police focus on gangs rather than the crimes they commit, they are apt to sweep up innocent bystanders, who may dress like a gang member, talk like a gang member and even live in a gang neighborhood, but are not gang members.

Solomon Moore's first-hand experience with abusive police behavior toward suspected gang members -- "Reporting While Black" -- is worth your time.

Starting at 5:30. Rahmbo is pathetic and dissembling, just like Pelosi. Transcript here. The key parts, via andgarden:

In an interview with Wolf Blitzer this morning, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi demonstrated she has no intention of doing anything to end the war in Iraq:

BLITZER: Let's talk about the war in Iraq. When you became speaker, you said, "Bringing the war to an end is my highest priority as speaker."

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), SPEAKER: It is.

. . . BLITZER: The war, if anything, is not only continuing, but it's expanding. There's more troops now in Iraq than there were when you became the speaker. What are you going to do about that?

PELOSI: Well, we did, when we took office, we took the majority here. We changed the debate on the war. We put a bill on the president's desk that said that we wanted the redeployment of troops out of Iraq to begin in a timely fashion and to end within a year. The president vetoed that bill.

He got quite a response to that veto, and the Republicans in the Senate then decided he was never going to get a bill on his desk again. So we have a barrier and it's important for the American people to know that while I can bring a bill to the floor in the House, it cannot be brought up in the Senate unless there's a 60 vote, now 60 votes.

He got quite a response? What the heck is Pelosi talking about? He got, FROM HER, a bill with no timetables! Who does Speaker Pelosi think she is fooling? Blitzer is not fooled:

The first Monday of October marks the start of a new Supreme Court term. A New York Times editorial reviews some of the important issues soon to come before the Court and offers a useful tip for divining the likely outcome of those cases:

The best predictor of how they will vote is to ask: What outcome would a conservative Republican favor as a matter of policy?

Of course, conservative Republicans don't inevitably agree amongst themselves; e.g., the moneyed Republicans differ from the Christian-focused Republicans on immigration policy. Sadly, the Times predictor will probably work well for criminal justice and civil liberties (including voting rights) issues. Here are some of the important questions the Court has agreed to consider:

Rounding out the first two weeks of oral argument are a group of criminal cases, addressing the gulf between sentences for crack and powder cocaine, the latitude sentencing judges have to reduce prison time in routine cases, and whether trading drugs to obtain a gun fits the definition of gun "use" barred in the federal drug law. The Court will also weigh the constitutionality of New York's judicial selection system and the appeal of a Mexican death row inmate.

Briefs for cases to be argued in October are available here.

I just landed at O'Hare after a nine hour flight from Madrid and am waiting to change planes to get back to Denver.

One constant thought I've had since packing the night before I left: International travel is exceedingly overrated. Thanks to Lexis Nexis and Martindale Hubbell, all of the board members flew business class (first class on the domestic portions.) I flew Denver to Chicago on American and then Iberia Airlines to Madrid. Iberia was terrific, seats that converted to flat beds for sleep, electrical outlets, even excellent food and champagne. Once in Madrid we stayed at the five star Ritz -- elegant with a great location, across the street from the Prado Museum and Botanic Gardens.

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This morning Frank Rich has the temerity to write:

What I saw on television last Sunday was the incipient second coming of the can't-miss 2000 campaign of Al Gore. That Mr. Gore, some may recall, was not the firebrand who emerged from defeat, speaking up early against the Iraq war and leading the international charge on global warming. It was instead the cautious Gore whose public persona changed from debate to debate and whose answers were often long-winded and equivocal (even about the Kansas Board of Education's decision to ban the teaching of evolution). . .

Come on Frank. Are you going to be the old Frank Rich again?