Last week, the Lifetime Channel kicked off their Every Woman Counts Tour, a nationwide bus tour that asks ordinary women what they would do if they were president. Starting their tour in Indianapolis, the bus will travel to eleven different cities, including Denver and St. Paul during the Democratic and Republican Conventions, respectively. Their mission: to empower women voters and create a forum where they can discuss the issues that matter most to them. Here’s their first video report from Indianapolis.

Three months ago, Indian authorities arrested Ajay TG, the 35-year-old activist filmmaker who created this video, on trumped up charges.  The police held Ajay prisoner in the central Indian state of Chattisgarh, claiming he had violated the Chattisgarh Special Public Security Act (CSPSA).  This anti-terrorism law, which went into effect in 2006 and bears a resemblance to our country's Patriot Act, criminalized political beliefs and associating with "banned" organizations.  But what exactly was Ajay's crime?

Ajay inadvertently carried a Swiss Army pocket knife in his backpack when he attended the trial of Dr. Binayak Sen, a well-known doctor and social worker in Chattisgargh.  Police on security detail apprehended Ajay and accused him of being a terrorist threat. They further claimed Ajay had made "unlawful contact" with a Maoist organization, alleging Ajay wrote to the group asking them to return his camera after they robbed him years before.

Both the knife and the letter appear to have been red herrings.  They provided Indian police with more concrete grounds to arrest Ajay when what they were really concerned with was his affiliation with Dr.  Sen.  Before his arrest, Ajay had been working on a documentary called "Anjam," which was drawing attention to Dr. Sen's trial.  Police had arrested Dr. Sen in May 2007 under suspicion of being a Naxalite, or communist. 

Dr. Sen had worked for decades treating the adivasis, a poor indigenous Indian minority.  He was general secretary of India's human rights group the People's Union for Civil Liberties (of which Ajay was also a member), but was accused of being linked to members of the Communist Party of India.  What Dr. Sen had actually done was call attention to the police involvement in the killings of 12 adivasis earlier that year. 

Many supporters of the Beijing Olympics argue that hosting the Games will ultimately lead to a more open China.

So have the seeds for such change been planted - and if so how long will it take for them to bear fruit?

Tony Birtley reports.

It's back-to-school time! Parents are starting to shop for their children's school supplies: notebooks, pencils, crayons, and of course, Bill O'Reilly's book, "The O'Reilly Factor for Kids." Talk about one of these things being NOT like the others!

O'Reilly thinks he can teach our children proper behavior, and we can't think of a worse father figure than an angry, hate-filled shock jock notorious for telling guests to "Shut up!" We wondered what would happen if kids read O'Reilly's book and then saw the real O'Reilly for themselves. So we put together a video to illustrate O'Reilly's duplicity.

O'Reilly's bullying antics show he never learned the lessons the rest of us were taught in school. Send this video to all the teachers, parents, parents-to-be, and anyone who has contact with kids, and don't forget to Digg it! Tell us what your teachers taught you that O'Reilly should have learned about how to be a responsible grown-up, or what your kids' teachers have taught them. We'll put all your suggestions together and send the list to O'Reilly at FOX News.

It's bad enough O'Reilly spews hate-filled lies on his shows to grown-up audiences, do we really want our children to be exposed to the same behavior? Do we really want this angry adult influencing our kids? While we only subjected the kids in our video to a few minutes of O'Reilly in order to prevent permanent damage, imagine the harm his children's book could do!

This video drops a major asterisk on the so-called "success" of the surge in Iraq touted by John McCain, George Bush, and many other conservatives.  If violence has declined, it is largely because the U.S. military has carved up cities like Baghdad with miles of 12-foot tall concrete walls.  So while there may be stability at the moment, these barriers have separated Sunnis and Shias without improving their living conditions, isolating them in a desperate situation.  Which leads me to ask how long such stability can possibly last?

Part 2 of this report that looks at a makeshift cemetery and victims of militia violence.

And part 3 focuses on the lost generation of Iraqi children who have been affected by this war.

Watch more at www.theyoungturks.com

Check out Cenk's new show: Meet the Bloggers.

"Iraq has been getting a windfall because of rising oil prices. They have a 79 billion dollar budget surplus. At a time when we're spending 10 billion dollars a month in Iraq, they've got almost 80 billion dollars that is not being invested in services for suffering Iraqis or recontruction. Some of this money is sitting in American banks in NY on Wall Street collecting interest, while you the taxpayers are paying for reconstruction efforts in Iraq.

That's why we've got to bring about fundamental change," Obama told a crowd in Indiana.

Via LA Times:

"Oil sales are estimated to bring Iraq between $66 billion and $79 billion this year, more than double the total of recent years, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said today.

And while the Bush administration projects a record budget deficit for this country in the next year, the GAO says Iraq will have a "budget surplus of between $38.2 billion to $50.3 billion."

latimesblogs.latimes.com

Politics is a dangerous sport.

If you want others to see this video, help it climb the YouTube ratings. 5-star it, favorite it, comment, and pass to friends!

www.moveon.org

Your Daily Politics Video Blog: At Netroots Nation down in Austin two weeks ago, TPMtv caught up with Slate's Dahlia Lithwick and picked her brain about just what post-Bush accountability means. Is it really all or nothing? Sweep it under the rug versus Nuremberg trials, or are there a lot more grey areas in just how we pick up the pieces? That, and what might be in store for the Supreme Court under a President McCain.

The Dalai Lama's handshake on leaving the Royal Albert Hall was passed along a human chain of over 2000 activists who took to the streets of the city of London, shaking hands with each other right up to the Chinese Embassy.

The activists wore T-shirts saying "Give Real Talks A Hand" and, in Chinese, "One China -- Talks on Tibet." They joined a procession behind the handshake, led by three children, culminating in the delivery of Avaaz's 1.67-million global petition for meaningful dialogue between China and the Dalai Lama at the embassy.

John McCain suggests his wife enter a topless beauty contest at a Biker Rally in Sturgis, SD.

"I encouraged Cindy to compete," McCain told the mostly male crowd as they whistled at hollered. "I told her with a little luck she could be the only woman ever to serve as first lady and Miss Buffalo Chip."

According to the Crisis Intervention Center for domestic abuse, located in a house across the street from the event site, the Buffalo Chip beauty contest, which is often both topless and bottomless, has a history of domestic violence acts against women.

McCain has been criticized for other comments critical of women including telling a joke about rape, joking about Hillary Clinton daughter's looks and calling his own wife a "cunt."

Senator McCain and the Republicans in Congress are calling Senator Obama and the Democrats environmental wimps for refusing to allow the oil industry to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, environmentally sensitive offshore areas and anywhere else they please. The Republicans are claiming that the Democrats don't care about Joe Sixpack, who now has to pay $4 a gallon for his gas. Nor do they care that most of this oil is now imported.

In addition to concerns about the environment, one major reason that Democrats oppose drilling is that Joe Sixpack will never notice the effect of any oil recovered from these areas, even if we did allow drilling. According to independent experts such as the Energy Information Agency, there is too little oil in the offshore protected areas to have any noticeable impact on gas prices.

In other words, we are not debating about helping Joe Sixpack pay for his gas. We are only arguing over whether to put environmentally sensitive areas at risk for nothing. The Republican claims about the impact of drilling on oil prices simply are not true.

Crime in the United States has slowed since the nineties, but a disturbing trend is taking place as waves of violence are increasing across many American cities. Homicide is now five times higher in the U.S. than the international average.

Watch more at www.theyoungturks.com

And check out Cenk's new show: meetthebloggers.org

Investigative author Ron Suskind reveals that the Bush Administration had ordered the CIA to forge documents supposedly from lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta to Saddam Hussein in a blatant attempt to produce a nonexistent link between Iraq and 9/11 to justify a case for war.

In addition, Suskind reveals that Iraqi intelligence chief Tahir Habbush provided British intelligence evidence that Iraq had no WMD's. The Bush Administration dismissed Habbush as "unreliable".

Your Daily Politics Video Blog: Nothing says "not guilty" like dozens of leather-clad bikers. So it was a good thing that a large group of motorcyclists were on hand at the Anchorage airport yesterday to meet Sen. Ted Stevens and escort him to his first post-indictment campaign rally, where Ted shook his fist and reassured his fans: he's still in the race. Welcome home, Ted!

Richard Kim and Jonathan Tasini discuss The Nation's open letter to Barack Obama on GRITtv.

Slavery is defined as the act of keeping a person as a piece of property. If you ask the average American if slavery still exists in America, their answer is likely to be no. After watching this video, many will change their minds.

As the crack epidemic flooded inner cities across the country, in 1986 Reagan's "Anti-Drug Abuse Act" makes the penalty for crack possession a hundred times harsher than that of powder cocaine. The following year new legislation is passed allowing private corporations to own and operate prisons. Twenty years later over a million non-violent drug offenders are imprisoned while corporate stocks are traded based on how many prisoners are in the cages.

A report released in 2008 by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London states that the United States has the highest incarceration rate and most people behind bars per capita in the world. Over 50% of these people are imprisoned for drug crimes. At the same time, prescription drug companies account for over 50% of Fortune 500 profits. All illegal drugs combined kill approx 11K per year while cigarettes, alcohol and pharmaceutical kill almost a million. What's wrong with this picture?