Despite the state Board of Pardons and Parole voting to spare Robert Lee Thompson's life, Bush Jr's successor, Rick 'Hair Club of Men' Perry voted to kill him anyway. Why have a board when you have a dictator?

On Sept. 12, 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy gave a major speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a group of Protestant ministers, on the issue of his religion. At the time, many Protestants questioned whether Kennedy's Roman Catholic faith would allow him to make important national decisions as president independent of the church. Kennedy addressed those concerns before a skeptical audience of Protestant clergy. The following is a transcript of Kennedy's speech:---I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him. I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

The United States is in open competition with the same countries from which we buy our goods and finance our government. These countries supply our consumption while simultaneously competing fiercely against our companies in international markets. Nations like India, Japan and China, along with trade blocs like the European Union, rail against “protectionism” in the U.S. because they do not want to have their unfettered access to our market tampered with.

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) is warning fellow Democrats not to mess with his restrictive anti-abortion amendment. .... Now Stupak is saying he won't go easily.

President Barack Obama is under pressure — and not just from the burden of turning America around from the worst economic recession in this generation but also from gay rights advocates as fight for same-sex marriage, repeal of "Don't ask, don't tell policy" and the possible appointment of a gay Supreme Court Justice heat up.

Congress took a reasonable step in 1994 when it required states receiving federal education money to expel students who brought guns onto school property, but states and localities overreacted, as they so often do. They enacted “zero tolerance” policies under which children are sometimes arrested for profanity, talking back, shoving matches and other behavior that would once have been resolved with detention or meetings with the students’ parents. This arrest-first policy has been disastrous for young people, who are significantly more likely to drop out and experience long-term problems once they become entangled in the juvenile justice system. It has led to egregious racial profiling, with black and Hispanic students being shipped off to court at a higher rate than white students. And it has been a waste of time for the police to haul off children to the courts when they should be protecting the public from real criminals.

In a classic case of state-sponsored murder, the Commonwealth of Virginia is preparing to add another fatality to the murder spree in 2002 that terrified residents in the Washington, DC metro area. Despite John Allen Muhammad's continuing claims of innocence and possible withholding of exculpatory evidence, racial bias in the investigation, and Muhammad's history of post-traumatic stress disorder, brain damage and other mental illness, it appears unlikely that Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, nor anyone in the White House (who has the authority to commute his sentence) will intervene. Muhammad is sentenced to die for the murder of Dean Harold Meyers, one of ten people killed and three wounded during a three-week period in October of 2002. No word on whether those killed by Muhammad will come back to life and rise from the grave after the execution, thus justifying the taking of another life. There has also been no word from anti-abortion activists on whether Muhammad qualifies as an embryo or fetus.

"There's a very important editorial in The Nation this week that I hope everyone will take the time to read. It's about the wrongful conviction of Anthony McKinney, who's been in prison for thirty-one years for a murder he did not commit." NOTE: The entire editorial is here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091123/editors

The narrative has already started to emerge in the media, in which no one pays any attention to the fact that the Military apparently insisted on deploying to Iraq a man who was absolutely against the US mission there, in which instead the Fort Hood slayings become the reason why each and every American has to watch very carefully what he or she says in public, and on the internet particularly: where bad thoughts are increasingly viewed as proto-crimes. "At least six months ago, Hasan came to the attention of law enforcement officials because of Internet postings about suicide bombings and other threats, including posts that equated suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade to save the lives of their comrades. They had not determined for certain whether Hasan is the author of the posting, and a formal investigation had not been opened before the shooting, said law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the case. One of the officials said late Thursday that federal search warrants were being drawn up to authorize the seizure of Hasan's computer. Retired Army Col. Terry Lee, who said he worked with Hasan, told Fox News that Hasan had hoped President Barack Obama would pull troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Lee said Hasan got into frequent arguments with others in the military who supported the wars, and had tried hard to prevent his pending deployment."