The state secrets privilege, of course, is what the government invokes when it wants a judge to dismiss a lawsuit that it claims will reveal “state secrets” just by going forward, even if the judge is the only person who gets to see the sensitive secret evidence. The government invoked “state secrets” in the case of Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, and several other cases involving torture and warrantless wiretapping that the Justice Department wants dismissed. Pending legislation would limit the executive’s ability to use this confidential evidentiary privilege to dismiss outright legal challenges to government conduct. The administration so far has avoided taking a position on the legislation.

As I reported almost two months ago, Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 17 that he would issue a new policy on when the government will invoke the state secrets privilege to conceal evidence from the public — and even from federal court judges — “in a matter of days.”

Well, it’s August, and still nothing. After Ed asked me the question, I followed up with Dean Boyd, spokesman for the Justice Department’s national security division, asking him if that policy had ever been issued. After all, maybe we’d just missed it.

Boyd’s response:  “Not yet; still in the works.”

As Mike noted, most of this stuff is mundane. We’re talking sewage-project proposals, road-paving measures and resolutions to recognize winners of local snow mobile races. Here and there, we’ve found some interesting tidbits. Here’s one more, caught by Aaron. Resolution No. 02-16, which, passed unanimously in July 2002, calls on the city council to recite the Pledge of Allegiance before council meetings – “especially the words ‘one nation, under God.’”

Consider that one month before the resolution passed the six-member, part-time city council, in June 2002, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Michael Newdow — ruling that the pledge’s language violated the First Amendment, which says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

Newdow had sued his daughter’s school district over reciting the “under God” phrase in classrooms, claiming it injured his daughter by listening to teachers assert there is a god.

Palin, a pro-life Christian who ran for mayor on her conservative values, wasn’t going to stand for that. An ardent supporter of the phrase, she defended it again four years later when running for governor.

The Huffington Post has found a story from 2006, where Palin told The Anchorage Daily News that if the pledge of allegiance was good enough for the founding fathers it was good enough for her. Of course, the pledge was first written in 1892. The “under God” language was added during the McCarthy era.