NEW ALBANY, Indiana — At a debate this evening with his Democratic opponent Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-IN), Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock claimed that raped women should be forced to carry their rapist’s baby to term because their forced pregnancy is a “gift from God”:

I believe life begins at conception. The only exception I have for to have an abortion is in the case of the life of the mother. I struggled with myself for a long time but I came to realize life is that gift from God, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape. It is something that God intended to happen.

Watch it:

Throughout his campaign, Mourdock has left no doubt that he believes in a sacred right to life that begins at conception and ends at birth. Earlier this year, Mourdock mocked the very idea that Social Security and Medicare — programs that millions of seniors depend on to save their lives — are even constitutional.

For the second time in as many weeks, election officials in Maricopa County, Arizona are in hot water for providing Hispanic voters with false information about when election day is.

Last week, ThinkProgress reported on how Maricopa County Elections Department officials attached a document to voter registration forms that gave the wrong date for anyone reading it in Spanish. The English version of the same document provides the correct date — November 6 — next to “8 de Noviembre.”

At the time, county officials dismissed the error as a clerical mistake, saying that only 50 people received the incorrect document. But a local ABC News affiliate has uncovered at least one more incident of the wrong date being disseminated in Spanish by Maricopa’s Elections Department.

Paper bookmarks found in three separate election counters throughout the county again give November 8th as election day, and again the mistake is reserved to just the Spanish version of the document. Activists who were perhaps willing to overlook the first incident as a genuine mistake are no longer keeping quiet:

Randy Parraz, President of Citizens For A Better Arizona, says the blame lies squarely with Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell.
“It shows she’s incompetent and not qualified,” said Parraz.
[...]
“The moment you found the first problem, there should have been an inventory,” said Parraz, referring to the voter ID document. “Anyone with common sense would have done an inventory on everything that’s been printed to catch this.”

Maricopa County happens to be the home of the controversial and xenophobic Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has led the nation’s most anti-Latino police force for years.

HENDERSON, Nevada — A Republican congressional candidate in Las Vegas wants to get rid of the Voting Rights Act’s guarantee that citizens can receive a ballot in their native language if they’re not comfortable speaking English.

ThinkProgress spoke with Chris Edwards, the GOP nominee in Nevada’s 1st congressional district, at a candidate forum last week about whether English should be the official language, even if that meant all ballots would have to be printed in English only. “I think that’s a smarter approach,” Edwards said. “That’s not too much to ask for, expect, or do.”

KEYES: I know one of the issues that comes up every once in a while is whether or not English should be declared the official language of the United States, which would necessitate all the government documents, all the government ballots only be in English. Do you where you would stand on that?

EDWARDS: I think that’s a smarter approach, especially when you look at it historically. I know that a lot of people prefer to have multiple languages and so on, but if you look at things throughout world history, when a nation has a common language, they’re able to talk with one another better and able to work with one another better and society is better for it. [...]

KEYES: Even if that meant not having, because right now we allow for instance ballots to be printed in Spanish or other languages. Even if it meant that? [...]

EDWARDS: My preference would be that we make that. That’s not too much to ask for, expect, or do.

Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act protects those American citizens who aren’t native English speakers by requiring all government election materials, including ballots, to be translated wherever 5 percent of the local population or more than 10,000 adult citizens speak a different language. For example, because of recent upticks in Asian voter populations, San Diego County is now translating ballots into Mandarin and Vietnamese.

Currently, over one-quarter of Nevada’s 1st congressional district residents are Latino. For many citizens, ballots in Spanish help them fully understand their vote without having to employ an outside translator.

Edwards’ desire to outlaw translated ballots is just the latest attack on voting rights that could disproportionately impact minority voters. Elsewhere, states have passed voter ID laws and legislation requiring proof of citizenship to register in order to combat the non-existent threat of voter fraud.

To look at him now, one would never suspect California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu was the failed federal appeals court nominee tarred by some Republican senators as a radical who wanted to make America more like “communist-run China.” After the Senate filibustered his Ninth Circuit nomination, Liu was snapped up by Gov. Jerry Brown to join the California Supreme Court, where he has already developed a record of striving for unanimity with his Republican-appointed colleagues. The Los Angeles Times explains:

During his first year on the California Supreme Court, the failed nominee for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has been anything but extreme. He has affirmed the death penalty 21 times, joining the majority in all the capital cases he considered and writing two of the affirmances himself. He has favored limiting the reach of the court on such matters as redistricting and bowing to the authority of the Legislature in a dispute over a wage law.

Although it’s still too early to assess the kind of judge Liu will become, the former board member of an ACLU chapter has blended easily with the six other judges, all Republican appointees. “A paragon of judicial restraint,” opined Santa Clara University law professor Gerald Uelmen in describing Liu’s early record. […]

If you asked the prominent legal figures from across the ideological spectrum who backed Liu’s nomination from the start, they never doubted that Liu would be the careful and rigorous jurist who follows the law as it is and not as he wishes it could be. Former Clinton inquisitor Ken Starr called Liu an “extraordinarily qualified nominee,” torture memo author John Yoo called him “very well qualified,” and Goldwater Institute lawyer Clint Bollock said he “clearly possesses the scholarly experience and credentials to serve with distinction on this important court.”

But the young and brilliant U.C. Berkeley legal scholar – a potential U.S. Supreme Court pick — could not overcome the bitter Republican obstruction that has come to characterize the judicial nominations process since President Obama took office, enduring 18 months of waiting and two lengthy Senate Judiciary Committee hearings during which his academic writings were picked apart and distorted.

The federal courts’ loss is the California Supreme Court’s gain, and what Justice Liu’s record has shown is that alarm bells about Liu’s alleged extreme views were entirely without merit. Liu’s failed nomination stood for the disheartening proposition that anyone who produced a breadth of scholarship or criticized a public official was putting their federal judicial future at risk, and that those best positioned to be nominated to federal courts would have to refrain from ever publicly offering their opinions.

Fortunately, Liu has also demonstrated that there is still a place on the bench for those who speak frequently and openly. Contrast the California vetting process to the one Liu experienced on the federal appeals court. Gov. Brown came to Liu because he wanted to put a major intellectual on the court. And when he approached him to discuss his candidacy, they didn’t discuss his policy preferences on issues like abortion and affirmative action. Brown instead probed Liu on his philosophical approach to the law, raising English philosopher John Locke and the French social commentator Montesquieu.

Reflecting on his experience as a justice, Liu told the Los Angeles Times this week, “There are plenty of cases I wish could come out a different way, but they are not going to because the law compels a different result.”

The Ohio Democratic Party is calling for corrections to an Ottawa County Board of Elections mailer riddled with errors. 2,300 voters in the northern Ohio county received the notice informing them the election was November 8 and that their precinct was relocated to a different building. The Deputy Director called it a “costly mistake,” and said they were reissuing the mailer with the correct information. President Obama won Ottawa County in 2008 with 52 percent of the vote.

On Saturday, a federal trial court stayed the execution of John Errol Ferguson, a mentally ill Florida man who has paranoid schizophrenia and believes that he is the “Prince of God.” Late yesterday, in a rushed order handed down shortly after they received the briefs in this case, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit vacated this stay. Ferguson is scheduled to be executed today.

The outcome of yesterday’s decision was probably decided as soon as the identity of this three-judge panel was announced. Judge Edward Carnes was known as “the premier death penalty advocate in the country” when he left his job as Alabama’s chief death penalty prosecutor to ascend to the federal bench. Judge William Pryor was only confirmed to the Senate as part of the misguided “Gang of 14″ deal that placed several of George W. Bush’s most ideological appointees on the bench. Ferguson would have had an easier time convincing Justice Scalia to tattoo the words “God Bless Obamacare” on his forehead than he would convincing this severely conservative panel to stay an execution.

Nevertheless, the panel’s order is both unfortunate and irregular. It is unfortunate because the trial court did not issue a particularly broad order. Rather, it merely stayed Ferguson’s execution long enough to hold a hearing and avoid rushing to judgment on whether or not a man should be killed. Yesterday’s rushed order stands for the proposition that two appellate judges who have virtually no time to consider a case are better suited to answer questions of life and death than someone who actually takes the time to hear the best arguments on either side.

The panel’s order is irregular because, as Judge Charles Wilson points out in dissent, the pair of conservative judges did not simply lift the lower court’s stay, they decided on their own that Ferguson’s case lacks merit and his petition for relief should be denied outright. This is not the proper way for a court of appeals to act. Rather, their job is to allow the trial judge to fully develop the evidentiary record in a case, and only weigh in on key legal questions after they have been fully considered by the court below. In their apparent zeal to see Ferguson executed, Carnes and Pryor overstepped their rightful authority.

Ferguson will no doubt appeal the panel’s decision to the Supreme Court. The justices, however, already turned away Ferguson’s plea to save his life once.

In the latest personal testimony on the cruelty of solitary confinement, one of the American hikers who was held hostage in Iran details how the conditions at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison are at least as bad, and arguably even worse, than those he experienced in Iran.

Writing about his visit to Pelican Bay in Mother Jones, Shane Bauer says the distinctions between the conditions — a “piece of foam” in Pelican Bay versus a mattress in Iran and the fact that his Iran prison cell was twice the size of the American one  — are relatively insignificant, compared to the torture and mental manipulation of being totally and completely isolated, which left Bauer wishing every morning for an interrogation in which he would be “sat down in a padded, soundproof room, blindfolded and questioned, just so I could talk to somebody.” At least in his cell in Iran, he had a window, a luxury that allowed him to keep track of the time of day and lacking at Pelican Bay. He writes:

For hours, days, I fixated on the patch of sunlight cast against my wall through those barred and grated windows. When, after five weeks, my knees buckled and I fell to the ground utterly broken, sobbing and rocking to the beat of my heart, it was the patch of sunlight that brought me back. Its slow creeping against the wall reminded me that the world did in fact turn and that time was something other than the stagnant pool my life was draining into.

Equally significant is Bauer’s description of the process for putting some 80,000 prisoners into solitary confinement, often for years or decades at a time. Unlike in Iran, where Bauer was accompanied by a lawyer when he faced the Revolutionary Court in Iran (though he wasn’t allowed to speak to him), the decision in California to put an inmate in solitary confinement is made at a private hearing lasting about 20 minutes that absolutely no one can witness, and in which the evidence is secret. The decision is made at the discretion of just one man, an institutional gang investigator.

A common justification is to isolate those thought to be “associates” in prison gangs, and the types of evidence deemed to prove that fact have included possession of black literature, left-wing materials and writing about prisoner rights as evidence.

Defenders of the practice point out that an internal appeal process exists. But when Bauer asked “for an example of an appeal resulting in a reversal of a gang validation, they couldn’t produce a single case. Gang investigator Barneburg, who has worked at Pelican Bay for 15 years, has never seen a validation appeal succeed either—evidence, he says, of his team’s thoroughness.”

If inmates have exhausted the internal appeals process, they can take their case to court, where inmates who represent themselves succeed less than one percent of the time, according to one attorney who has represented inmates in the process. Getting out once in solitary confinement can be even tougher.

Inmates at Pelican Bay have been isolated for as long as 42 years, even as the ACLU, Physicians for Human Rights and The Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law all call the practice torture and Human Rights Watch calls it at the very least cruel and inhuman treatment in violation of international law.

A recent report revealed that even youths as young as 13 are being subjected to this treatment, though typically for weeks or months and not years. But every study of solitary confinement has shown negative psychological effects after just 10 days. Bauer includes an excerpt from his journal on the experience:

Solitary confinement is not some sort of cathartic horror of blazing nerves and searing skin and heads smashing blindly into walls and screaming. Those moments come, but they are not the essence of solitary. They are events that penetrate the essence. They are stones tossed into an abyss. They are not the abyss itself…

Solitary confinement is a living death. Death because it is the removal of nearly everything that characterizes humanness, living because within it you are still you. The lights don’t turn out as in real death. Time isn’t erased as in sleep…