St. Paul’s Police Department is planning to spend $1.9 million dollars on chemical irritants for the Republican National Convention. It will only spend $1 million on chemical masks. (Maybe protesters can borrow masks from our returning Olympic Team.)

The U.S. Department of Justice is giving St. Paul $50 million to spend on security costs. Denver, host of the Democratic National Convention, receives $50 million, too.

The majority of the money will be spend on overtime, training non-St. Paul officers, and private guards.

Police spokesman Tom Walsh told the Star Tribune that there weren’t a lot of “toys” being purchased.

Meanwhile, across the river, Ron Paul’s “Rally for the Republic” has grown into a three-day mini-convention. His organizers have given up on getting Paul a speakers slot at the RNC. But Paul will be sending at least six delegates.

“We’re not just looking at this November,” Marianne Stebbins, a longtime GOP activist who ran the Texas congressman’s campaign in Minnesota, told the Star Tribune. “There’s 2010, 2012—the Republican Party is not a barge that you can turn around in a single year.”

generation, yes. single year, no.

Joshua Casteel, a former U.S. military interrogator at Abu Ghraib, is asking John McCain to renounce his recent position on torture.

McCain once sponsored legislation to ban U.S. military personnel from using torture as an interrogation tactic. But this year, McCain changed his position and voted against an anti-torture amendment to the intelligence authorization bill.

In this video, Casteel says, “When I served in Iraq, every camera in the world was pointed at Abu Ghraib and two things happened as a result. Practices at Abu Ghraib vastly improved, but the dark activity which previously happened there went elsewhere. Techniques [in other prison facilities] included induced hypothermia, smashing hands with hammers and all sorts of activities which clearly are within the bounds of torture by any reasonable, humane standard.”

Casteel is speaking out, along with Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of School of Americas Watch, encourage people to sign on to a petition urging Senator McCain to renounce torture. So far, 20,000 people have added their names. The petition drive is sponsored by Catholics United, School of the Americas Watch, and TrueMajority.org. Click here to sign on.

Steve Powers installed a Guantánamo Bay interrogation scene at Coney Island. For a dollar, bystanders can watch life-like robots simulate waterboarding through the window bars.
Provocative or gimmicky? Inappropriate to ruin a day at the carnival with political art? (I don’t think so.)
“What’s more obscene,” Powers told The New York Times, “the official position that waterboarding is not torture, or our official position that it’s a thrill ride?”

Powers is not the only artist or intellectual to demonstrate the hideousness of Cheney- approved interrogation techniques. In a recent issue of Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens undergoes waterboarding himself.

As his interrogators poured water on his towel covered face, he writes: “The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. ”

“The combined effect was like being tortured for information that you do not possess.” Oh, wait, that quote isn’t from Hitch being waterboarded. It’s from his column about getting waxed.

U.S. Olympic athletes have chosen middle distance runner Lopez Lomong as the American flag bearer at the Beijing Olympics. The Sudanese refugee spent a decade in a camp in Kenya as one of the “Lost Boys of Sudan” before resettling in Syracuse, New York.

“This is the most exciting day ever in my life,” Lomong said. “It’s a great honor for me that my teammates chose to vote for me. I’m here as an ambassador of my country, and I will do everything I can to represent my country well.”

Americans aren’t the only athletes taking a stand for human rights. More than 100 athletes have signed a letter asking Chinese President Hu Jintao to respect human rights, end the death penalty, and find a peaceful solution for Tibet.

To see the letter click here.

Four cyclists on the U.S. Olympic team caused a ruckus when they arrived in Beijing Airport wearing black gas masks. Rider Bobby Lea said he and his teammates did not mean to offend anyone. The four apologized to the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee.

Here in the U.S., Tibet activists blockaded the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco while two 
others have staged a mock hanging from the Consulate building.

Just yesterday, four Students for a Free Tibet activists were detained in Beijing after
 climbing poles near the Olympic stadium and unfurling banners that
 read “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet” and “Tibet will be Free.”

On August 6, 1945, the U.S. military dropped an atomic bomb code-named “Little Boy” on Hiroshima, instantly killing 70,000 people in a searing flash of heat. (The pilot renamed the plane Enola Gay, after his own mother. Bizarre.)

On August 9, the U.S. military dropped a second bomb, “Fat Man,” on Nagasaki, vaporizing 20,000 people. Thousands more Japanese died from radiation exposure in the following weeks. Radiation exposure still affects people in Japan and even here in the United States—people who live in areas where the nuclear tests occurred.

Under the Bush Administration, there has been a resurrection of nuclear power and the development of new nuclear weapons. There’s a direct connection between the two: uranium enrichment is a process that can be use to generate nuclear power or build a weapon. The U.S. has more than 10,000 nuclear weapons and spends $54 billion annually on our nuclear arsenal.

A day before the 63rd anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, John McCain called for the 45 new nuclear plants by 2030.

“My experience with nuclear power goes back many years to being stationed on the first nuclear powered aircraft carrier [the USS Enterprise],” McCain said. “I knew it was safe then and I know it’s safe now.”

Funny thing is, some Japanese don’t see it that way. Democracy Now reports some 45,000 people gathered in Hiroshima today and stood in silent prayer at 8:45 a.m., the exact moment the bomb dropped in 1945. And on July, 15,000 people protested the scheduled deployment of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington at a U.S. naval base near Tokyo.

The federal government can take your laptop and copy everything on it, reports The Washington Post. Sigh. What ever happened to the Fourth Amendment?

“Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

The amount of personal information the government could collect from a laptop is staggering, along with its implications.