When you see politicians on television cheering each other on about the use of drones, it is all made to seem so abstract and clean. The reality is quite a different story and raises some fundamental questions that are being glossed over: Is it lawful or wise for the Executive to be sending missiles and drones into other countries, outside of places where the U.S. is engaged in active combat, to kill people, including American citizens, that it suspects of involvement in terrorism? Haven’t we seen unchecked power lead to enormous life and death mistakes over the past decade? And doesn’t this set a dangerous precedent for the rest of the world?

Religiously speaking, the answers given at the VP debate by Paul Ryan and Joe Biden to the question of how their personal faith relates to their work as politicians were striking. The difference between the two candidates — and the parties and platforms they stand for — could not have been starker. Ryan spoke with absolute certainty that he/his party/his church are absolutely correct when it comes to banning abortion, while Biden expressed both his own personal beliefs alongside respect for those who hold other views and the concomitant right to act on their religious views.

But while abortion was the specific example Martha Raddatz used to frame her question, it is hardly the only one. The editors of the Jesuit magazine “America” pose another very good question themselves, that deserves an answer from both Obama and Romney. If no one brings it up at the town hall-style debate next week, I’d love to see Bob Schieffer ask it at the foreign policy debate that follows.

Tonight’s debate is supposed to be focused mainly on the economy, but the Romney campaign has worked hard to get the Benghazi consulate attack into the conversation. And given the shifting story from the White House and the potential implications, that might be a good idea.

Today the US State Department pulled out all of their government personnel from Benghazi – essential personnel and non-essential alike. In the wake of the attack on the US consulate, they have determined the city too unsafe, even after residents drove militia groups operating in Benghazi from their bases. The FBI has still not reached the site of the consulate attack as part of their investigation.

US intelligence agencies have officially described the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya on September 11 that killed four Americans as a planned terrorist attack carried out by militants friendly to Al Qaeda. That’s distinct from it being an Al Qaeda attack, though the decentralized (and also battered) nature of the organization means that such a thing doesn’t exist anymore.

Let’s just be very clear right up front, Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco may have both collected their share of mainstream awards, like Pulitzers, American Book Awards, and the like, but with this book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, they remove any doubt about whether they are “celebrity couriers,” as they derisively term a lot of what is left of the mainstream, main street journalists out there today slapping whitewash on poverty and helping spin the machinery that manufactures rose-colored glasses. They have traveled through some of the hellholes on the dark side of the American economic reality and they are angry about the whole damn thing, fired up, fed up, and desperately looking hard for a fight. This book needs to be read, and it needs to sell very well because these guys are pretty much unemployable now. Trust me, I know this!

Less than a week after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, then-President Bush infamously called the resulting “war on terror” a “crusade…[that] is going to take awhile.” The use of the phrase brought about global rebukes, ranging from French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine, who said that we “have to avoid a clash of civilizations at all costs” to Soheib Bensheik, the Grand Mufti of the mosque in Marseille, France, who warned that the use of the phrase was “most unfortunate.”

Bush’s trip-up was seen largely as a gaffe that U.S. public affairs officials sought to avoid in the future. But in John Feffer’s Crusade 2.0: The West’s Resurgent War on Islam, we are shown that the current conflicts the United States is involved in with the Muslim world — both at home through Islamophobic protests of mosque construction and abroad in hot conflicts in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere — in a way do resemble a renewed Crusade.

This morning, Chris Hayes did a segment on his show that examined President Barack Obama’s reported “kill list,” whether the number of civilians being killed by drones is being hidden from the American public, and whether the program is, in fact, legal as the Obama administration claims. The segment aired just days after a major story by the New York Times on the “kill list” catapulted US drone policy into the national conversation. It also was one of the few segments that MSNBC aired on the Obama administration’s drone program all week.

Colonel Jack Jacobs, MSNBC military analyst, Hina Shamsi from the ACLU’s National Security Project, Jeremy Scahill of The Nation magazine and Josh Treviño of the Texas Public Policy Foundation appeared on the program for the discussion.

By any objective measure, Republican dominance in either state or local government ends in failure. Deficits, cronyism, declining services and economic malaise are always the result, conveniently leaving in their wake increased public cynicism about the value of government at all. But that leaves out the curious paradox that it precisely when government is so thoroughly trashed, rich people are more eager than ever to buy it. Why? For the same reason they love to buy “troubled” companies and fixer-uppers; somewhere, someone has left money on the table, and they’ve got to get their paws on it.

There’s a lot that can be said about the NYT article on the Administration drone program, especially by Glenn Greenwald. The Administration has minimized admitted civilian casualties by changing semantics, using the term militants to refer to all adult males within a particular kill zone. And Marcy Wheeler adds that John Brennan has been proven as a liar through this article on the subject of civilian casualties. I want to focus on the incredible context of secrecy for this article.