This latest shooting in Connecticut of innocent children and adults is horrible. It's going to take mothers to sign this petition to get Congress to once again ban assault weapons and also provide funding for mental health so that these troubled angry shooters get help before they go on another rampage. I want to see millions of mothers (and dads) sign this petition. This senseless violence has to stop.

Keeping weapons whose sole purpose is to kill people off the streets.

Ongoing mass murders to to US lax gun control laws

Every year more and more people leave a federal courthouse with a felony conviction that they cannot have taken off their record. It affects their ability to obtain housing, work, and lead normal lives. After the debt has been paid to society by the convicted, there should be a path to having: rights restored, record sealed from the public, and/or record expungement

Next week the Senate is taking up the reauthorization of George Bush's warrantless wiretapping scheme. Opposition to it used to be in every Democrat's stump speech, but now It looks like Democrats and Republicans alike are lining up to support extending it for 5 more years -- without even having a meaningful debate about these invasive powers! Advocates -- and even many senators -- believe these powers are regularly abused to spy on Americans. But law enforcement agencies are refusing to provide meaningful data on how they use them and whom they're snooping on. This spying regime is likely even unconstitutional, with the Supreme Court about to take up a case in opposition to warrantless wiretapping. Tell the Senate to reject the extension of warrantless wiretapping, and, at the very least, to make sure that there's a serious debate.

Gun control and school shootings need to be dealt with. For someone to walk into an elementary school and shoot children is disgusting. We need to come together and show Washington that this is something we will not stand for in this country. Something must be done, NOW. Government has one true responsibility and that is to protect the people of this country from threats foreign and domestic, its time they start to focus on the domestic side.

Meteorologist Rhonda Lee from the Shreveport-based KTBS-TV was fired after responding to a racist facebook comment about her hair style.

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear landmark cases regarding gay marriage, it is painfully obvious that justice Antonin Scalia should recuse himself based on his deeply held views which make him unfit to rule on these cases. He has recently equated homosexuality on the same moral plane as murder.First, let’s stipulate that people are entitled to be crackpots. They are entitled to hold absurd viewpoints; and in the United States, thanks to the First Amendment, they are even entitled to express them. But an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court has to play by different rules. We elect presidents and members of Congress precisely because of their political views; but we appoint judges only if we believe they will make every effort to transcend them. If they cannot or will not, it’s Congress’s job to take them out of the game. In Justice Scalia’s case, the time for that drastic action has long since arrived.

Just days after Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia shockingly equated homosexuality with murder in an appearance at Princeton University, another troubling revelation has emerged: Scalia’s son Paul, a Roman Catholic priest, has served as chaplain for the Arlington, Virginia chapter of Courage, an official Catholic apostolate that ministers to people with so-called “same-sex attractions” — or what the rest of the world refers to as lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Michael McGough writes that Paul Scalia’s anti-gay beliefs are so extreme that he isn’t even willing to concede the fact that gay people exist: He has written: “We must always distinguish the person from the attractions. Most errors in this area come from the reduction of the person to the attractions: to say, ‘A person who has homosexual attractions must be homosexual.’ This reduces the human person to the sum total of his sexual inclinations.” The last time I heard that frighteningly dehumanizing lie was when I was undercover receiving “ex-gay” therapy at the Bachmann clinic. No joke. McGough also points out that when the Vatican acknowledged the reality of homosexuality, it too earned the wrath of Scalia the Younger: In a 2005 article in the magazine First Things, Paul Scalia warned against the labeling of high school students as “gay” and even took the Vatican to task for using the term “homosexual person,” which, the younger Scalia said, “suggests that homosexual inclinations somehow determine, which is to say confine, a person’s identity.” Of course, this is a straw man; psychologists and other who speak of a gay identity don’t argue that “gay” is an exhaustive description of an individual’s personality traits, only that there is more to being gay or lesbian than participation in sexual acts. Courage, the “ministry” that Paul Scalia was affiliated with, uses a 12-step program similar to Alcoholics Anonymous to encourage Catholics struggling with “same-sex attractions” to suppress their sexuality and live totally celibate lives. It’s essentially a Catholic version of the widely-discredited “ex-gay” programs, just wrapped in a more subtly-colored bow. As I read McGough’s op-ed I couldn’t help but be reminded of the lyrics of a song from the legendary musical South Pacific: You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, you’ve got to be taught from year to year. It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear — you’ve got to be carefully taught. . . You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late — before you are six or seven or eight — to hate all the people your relatives hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught.

La Trobe University is attempting to victimise several students who were involved in a campaign of peaceful civil disobedience against cuts to the La Trobe Humanities and Social Sciences department

My partner lives in Indonesia, and I cannot bring him here thanks to DoMA. Please repeal DoMA and support the United American Families Act.

In 2008 Congress has passed legislation (PUBLIC LAW 110-387 SECTION 408) to provide comprehensive health care for the birth defect A/O children of Vietnam combat vets exposed to Agent Orange.. Five Years LATER, the VA has STILL NOT provided the care legislated by Congress in 2008. They stall and verbally tap dance for year after year. My mission with this petition is to EMBARRASS the VA bureaucrats into simply obeying federal law PL 110 387 SECTION 408. I will do so, or bust a gut. All help appreciated. Ron Nesler 812 270 0699