I'm coming to the conclusion that what's most crucial here is ensuring that these mistakes are not repeated. In the end, that may be more important than punishing those who acted wrongly in pursuit of what they thought was right.

Much more important than punishing murderers or getting caught up in protracted disputes about prior murders is the need to prevent murders from occurring in the future.  Therefore, we ought to abandon our quest to impose punishments on people who get caught having murdered someone.  To expend resources trying to punish murderers is to squander vital resources on the past, to waste energies that could instead be more productively devoted to preventing future murders.
There are too many important challenges we face to waste time bogged down litigating past murders.  Let's allow murderers to go unpunished so that we can move beyond the past and concentrate instead on the more important priority of minimizing the number of murders in the future.

Yeah. Where is David Duke's invitation? Or as Blue Texan notes, when do Phelps and Hagee get their invitations? Heck, throw up Tom Tancredo up there for good measure, so us Latinos can feel some of the hate!

Obama is validating the views of the Christian Right and they may very well be moved enough by that to become Democrats. But it naturally follows that in order to keep their votes, the Democrats would have to honor their agenda and views --- the evangelicals are big voting bloc and if the Democrats become the social conservative party, they could count on their votes for sure. (If they don't make substantial moves toward social conservatism, this won't work, obviously.)

After all, the decision really gives Warren an extraordinary platform -- not to mention yet another data point supporting the bogus notion that the radical Warren is some kind of "moderate." If the first black president doesn't mind him giving the invocation at his historic inaugural, how bad and bigoted can he really be?

Rick Warren is a bloated, narcissistic egomaniac who got elevated in the last election because McCain and Obama shared the common goal of diminishing the importance of people like James Dobson.  Warren is cut from the same mold, with just slightly less offensive packaging.  He's a vicious homophobe who used the political power he gained from the Saddleback event to spread the lies that helped to pass Prop 8.

It's odd, and therefore telling, that Obama considers all of us equals, yet he only seems to reach out to those who bash gays, and not those who bash blacks, or Jews, or people with disabilities, or any other member of America's civil rights community.

Of all the preachers Obama could have selected to elevate and validate (and, in every sense, it was Obama's choice), Warren is one of the most destructive -- not only having been one of the most vocal supporters for Proposition 8, but also using the most inflammatory rhetoric on gay issues generally, expressing anti-abortion views in the most fanatical terms possible, and even sitting with Sean Hannity recently and urging the murder of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"A lawyer shall not make an extrajudicial statement the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is likely to be disseminated by public media and, if so disseminated, would pose a serious and imminent threat to the fairness of an adjudicative proceeding,"

The above is a quote from the court in which Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is being charged, cited by Former federal prosecutor Barry Coburn in a New York Times opinion piece published yesterday.

Patrick Fitzgerald's "inflammatory" statements, such as the one about Lincoln rolling in his grave, run counter to the rules set by this court and the American Bar Association, Coburn says.

Here's progressive media critic Bob Somerby the day after the arrest: