The President traveled to Eric Cantor’s district today in Richmond, Virginia, to reiterate his demand to pass the American Jobs Act as a full bill, not in parts. And he asked the assembled crowd to pressure their representatives to get the job done.

To mark the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the ACLU released a report that looks at how “ever-expanding claims of national security” have subverted freedoms and justified an assault on civil liberties.

The report scrutinizes racial and religious profiling, the expansion of the surveillance state, the impunity of the Bush administration officials who created a legal justification for torture and the framework that has dominated America since the attacks: the belief that America is in an “everywhere and forever war” which justifies any program, regardless of how it undermines civil liberties or the rule of law.

The threat to Medicare is very real and pressing. Over the past several months more and more political forces in Washington have being slowly lining up behind a campaign to raise the Medicare eligibility age.

This most recent effort really got started when Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) put forward a bill to raise the Medicare retirement age in late May.

Obviously a refinancing initiative using an existing program, which may net $20 billion but not do much to arrest the foreclosure crisis, is more of a punt than anything as far as housing is concerned in the American Jobs Act. That’s Mike Konczal’s take as well. But the bigger news on the housing/foreclosure front was the final nail in the coffin of this increasingly farcical 50-state AG settlement. The banks are miffed about the FHFA’s lawsuit against them over representations and warrants on mortgage backed securities, particularly because the suit holds over 130 individuals responsible for the crimes, which is just not done. So these banks blew off the latest scheduled meeting with the AGs in a fit of pique.

The Hair points out that the Secessionist — who as a Texan has a more pragmatic view of immigration than you might think –might not be nativist/racist enough for the GOP.

Nine recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize including the Dahli Lama and Archibishop Desmond Tutu have written a letter to President Obama. They urge him to reject the proposed Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline which will affect “millions of people whose lives and livelihoods will be affected by construction and operation of the pipeline in Alberta, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas” and risks “contaminating the Ogallala Aquifer, the main source of fresh water for the Great Plains.”

If the package Obama outlined last night was actually a compromise that Obama got the Republican Congressional leadership to agree to, I might even consider this fairly poorly designed plan a decent deal. The problem is that this jobs package isn’t going to pass, so this speech wasn’t about policy, it was about messaging. In the middle of what should have been a speech about getting Americans back to work, Obama very publicly endorsed putting Medicare and Medicaid on the deficit-reduction chopping block.

If the American Jobs Act were just the bill described last night – one that would create millions of jobs and serve many of the country’s needs – that would be fine. But it’s not just that bill. The President was quick to address the idea that the bill would be “fully paid for,” and that he would lay out those items next week. Originally, the plan was to include the pay-fors in last night’s speech. The President was informed that this would not be a great idea and would substantially deflate progressives who generally liked the speech. So those items will come out “a week from Monday,” on September 19, according to the speech. But the President couldn’t help himself, and in one overlooked portion of the speech, he laid out what amounts to the grand bargain.

Thursday’s No Justice No BART protest–which shut down Powell Street Station in San Francisco–turned into an ugly attack on free speech and freedom of the press when BART police arrested between 25 and 30 people, a third of whom are reported to be journalists, including seven student journalists from San Francisco State University and the Chronicle’s Vivian Ho.

In anticipation of the President’s speech about jobs, and with a dismal NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, USAToday asked some CEOs (now where they found this bunch is beyond me, but…) about what they thought Obama should do.