It is probably no more than an ironic coincidence that the Kids on Fire camp is in Devil's Lake, North Dakota. Or perhaps not. Kids on Fire is not your mother's summer camp; rather, it is a place where children--some as young as six--receive instruction in glossolalia, go on field trips to political protests, and learn to chant for "righteous judges" for America.

At Kids on Fire, the children pray over a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush, and they wash their hands in bottled water to cleanse themselves of their wicked ways and drive out the devil. Some children are filled with the Holy Spirit and go down in a trance-like state. One little girl is said to have been "pinned to the floor" for over an hour by the Holy Spirit. Children describe seeing "gold dust" on their hands, feeling compelled to dance, and being "slain by the Holy Spirit."

Becky Fischer, leader of Kids of Fire, who wants to "take back America for Christ," says "I want to see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I want to see them radically laying down their lives for the gospel, as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine."

The documentary film, Jesus Camp, made by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, follows three children as they participate in camp activities. Opening today in Los Angeles, the film has already stirred quite a bit of attention. It won in the "scariest movie" category at the Traverse City Film Festival.

One of the children in the documentary, Tory, who is ten years old, says something that is scary enough for me. Tory explains that she prefers "Christian, heavy metal rock and roll" to Britney Spears:

"When I dance, I have to make sure that that's God. People will notice when I'm just dancing for the flesh."

It's a rotten time to be an Iraqi journalist. If being kidnapped and murdered by insurgents or detained indefinitely by the U.S. military aren't bad enough, now the government is cracking down. From today's New York Times:

Under a broad new set of laws criminalizing speech that ridicules the government or its officials, some resurrected verbatim from Saddam Hussein's penal code, roughly a dozen Iraqi journalists have been charged with offending public officials in the past year.

Currently, three journalists for a small newspaper in southeastern Iraq are being tried here for articles last year that accused a provincial governor, local judges and police officials of corruption. The journalists are accused of violating Paragraph 226 of the penal code, which makes anyone who "publicly insults" the government or public officials subject to up to seven years in prison. [snip]

The office of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has lately refused to speak with news organizations that report on sectarian violence in ways that the government considers inflammatory; some outlets have been shut down.

Meanwhile, back inside our own executive media bubble... President Bush, earlier this year: "I like the fact in Iraq that there's a burgeoning free press, there's a lot of press, which is a positive sign. It's a healthy indication."

Via PR Watch (whose other current endeavor is "The Best War Ever," a book exposing disinformation and deception around the Iraq War), this lovely bit on Seoul's efforts to promote the Bush administration's latest free-trade idea, a pact with Korea:

The "Korea-U.S. FTA Love Corner" established in the lobby of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in downtown Seoul symbolizes the government's belief that aggressive publicity would result in a successful FTA pact.

Response so far, reports the Korea Herald, has been "lukewarm."

This kinda makes you wonder why Bush was so hot to get the full intel report out in the open.

Portions of the report appear to bolster President Bush's argument that the only way to defeat the terrorists is to keep unrelenting military pressure on them. But nowhere in the assessment is any evidence to support Mr. Bush's confident-sounding assertion this month in Atlanta that "America is winning the war on terror.''

While the spread of self-described jihadists is hard to measure, the report says, the terrorists "are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion."

It says that a continuation of that trend would lead "to increasing attacks worldwide'' and that "the underlying factors fueling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities.''

Cue lapidary quote from terrorism expert. "I guess the overall conclusion that you get from it is that we don't have enough bullets given all the enemies we are creating,'' said Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University.

What to make of this? Either Bush truly believes that stuff about how we're an empire now and we make our own reality through action and wishful thinking; or he hadn't read the report, relying on "the filter" of Cheney et al., or he has entered a state of self-protective delusion. Whatever the explanation, the more important point is that the answer to the question Are We Safer? is pretty obviously "NO." So what to do about that?