A new investigative report by the Columbia Human Rights Law Review reveals that Carlos DeLuna, who was executed by the state of Texas in 1989, was likely innocent as well. The full report, titled "Los Tocayos Carlos: An Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution," can be viewed at CHRLR’s newly launched interactive website where readers can view all of the evidence cited in the article.

DeLuna, a poor Latino man described as having the intelligence of a child, was convicted of murdering Wanda Lopez, a 24-year-old single mother who was stabbed to death with a folding knife in 1983 while working behind the cash register at a gas station in Corpus Christi, Texas.

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On Monday, a U.S. District Court judge didn't buy the state's legislation defunding Planned Parenthood, putting a temporary stay on the enforcement of the law. But within a day, there was another judge who found the argument persuasive: Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, last seen obnoxiously demanding that a female Justice Department lawyer "submit a three-page, single-spaced letter by noon Thursday addressing whether the Executive Branch believes courts have such power." (Kevin Drum memorably compared it to "a middle school teacher handing out punishment to a student because of something her father said at a city council meeting the night before," and you wouldn't have to look hard to find the sexist condescension.)

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Since 2006 many of the key figures in state-led border security operations and information campaigns have identified themselves as DPS employees or part of the Texas Rangers to the public, policy community and the media, disguising their true identities.

The business card he handed me during the sheriffs meeting identified Sikes as the director of the Border Security Operations Center (BSOC) – which is a type of fusion center for border-security operations in Texas. It’s a project of the Texas Rangers Division, which in turn is a branch of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS).

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According to the AP, Perry said he doesn't support a campaign (mentioned by Joan Walsh earlier this week) by the Sons of Confederate Veterans to introduce specialty license plates featuring an unambiguously hateful symbol of white supremacy.

The Republican presidential hopeful was in Florida for a fundraiser and told Bay News 9’s “Political Connections” and the St. Petersburg Times that, “we don’t need to be opening old wounds.”

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There are still these federal laws limiting how much individuals can donate to political campaigns (which is why God and the Supreme Court invented 501(c)(4)s), and while minors aren't forbidden from sending their hard-earned allowances to candidates who promise to fill school libraries with R-rated movies, the minors themselves are supposed to be the ones donating:

Under current law, three conditions that must be met for a minor to donate to a political campaign: that the donation was made knowingly and voluntarily; that the funds donated must belong to the minor in question; and that the parents may not reimburse the child for the donation. A Perry spokesman declined to say whether there is an age that the campaign considers too young to knowingly and voluntarily donate.

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The story isn't actually that Rick Perry is a KKK-style racist. It's about how Rick Perry grew up in a very homogenous region in an era of white supremacy, and how that upbringing is reflected in the fact that he and his father regularly went hunting at a place named for that most powerful and despicable racial epithet, because to many people there was nothing offensive about it. And that name was eventually, literally whitewashed over (though some recall seeing it as recently as in the last 10 years, most agree that the rock was painted over decades ago). Ta-Nehisi Coates says the story says more about America than it does about Rick Perry.

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The national media overlooked the George Bush Park fire, just as they ignored the link between climate change and the hellish summer Texas experienced, but the fire was big news in Houston. Local TV stations showed trees burning like torches, unleashing orange flames and black smoke.No evacuations were ordered, but guests at nearby hotels were spooked. "The hallways in the hotel here, you can hardly breathe," said hotel guest Shawn Porter. "It's in all the rooms. They're getting filled with smoke." 

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Alas, the cheers that broke out among a well-heeled Republican audience last week at the mention of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's execution of 234 convicts at a recent GOP presidential debate were all too real. Such is their anger and alienation that they'd gladly drag us back to the 19th century, when public hangings competed with traveling Wild West shows as popular entertainment.

Granted, these "debates" are basically TV game shows, with celebrity hosts and contestants competing for audience approval. Repenting of his early career as a Democrat, Perry has reinvented himself as the embodiment of the perennially embattled religio-political cult I call "Texanism."

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Perry has spent this entire disastrous year berating the feds for not spending enough time, attention and -- most important -- money on helping his fire and drought-ridden state, at one point claiming the president had a personal vendetta against the state of Texas. (The U.S. Forest Service and National Interagency Fire Center are currently commanding firefighting efforts near Bastrop.)

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Here's the problem:

Prosecutors firmly established Buck's guilt, but to secure a capital punishment conviction in Texas they needed to prove "future dangerousness"—that is, provide compelling evidence that Buck posed a serious threat to society if he were ever to walk free. They did so in part with the testimony of a psychologist, Dr. Walter Quijano, who testified that Buck's race (he's African-American) made him more likely to commit crimes in the future. (Quijano answered in the affirmative to the question of whether "the race factor, [being] black, increases the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons.")

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There was the time Perry bought some random undeveloped land in 1993, and then it turned out that rich businessman Michael Dell needed that land to connect his new house to the sewer lines. Perry made $342,994 selling it to him. And he's made decent sums trading in stock in companies founded by Perry donors. And there was this bit:

Perry purchased the land from state Sen. Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, in 2001 for $314,770. Six years later, Perry sold it for $1.1 million, pulling a profit of $823,776. Perry has attributed the gain to a favorable market for Hill Country land.

"We bought a piece of property, the property appreciated and we sold it," Perry said last year.

Critics, including the liberal watchdog group Texans for Public Justice, have suggested a dubious dealing considering that the man Fraser bought the land from and the man Perry sold the land to were business partners.

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Many feature sexual taunts and the kinds of scatological imagery scrawled on honky-tonk bathroom walls. I'll spare you the details.

Hey, it comes with the territory. Aiming to be provocative, I can't complain when readers are provoked. When they cross the line into overt threats, it's my policy to warn them that they've committed a crime, although I only turn in repeat offenders. That sometimes brings apologies. The police will tell you that people who make email and telephone threats are blowhards anyway.

Because the tough guy candidate I criticized is a Texan, I also anticipated a certain amount of the "Big Me/Little You" theme that some there find irresistible. "You, like most people from Arkansas, are both jealous and afraid of anybody from Texas," one braggart opined.

Actually, my all-time favorite Texas joke concerns the time somebody proposed building a pipeline to divert water from the Arkansas River to irrigate cotton fields around Lubbock. "Just give 'em a 900-mile straw," people said. "Then if they can suck as hard as they blow, no problem."

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Democrats have been chortling about running against yet another swaggering Texas governor. Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum explains why Perry can’t win:

"He's too Texan...Even in the Republican Party, not everyone is from the South and not everyone is bowled over by a Texas drawl. Perry is, by a fair amount, more Texan than George W. Bush, and an awful lot of people are still suffering from Bush fatigue."

I think this is wrong. The cowboy archetype runs so deep in American culture that even George W. Bush couldn’t ruin it. Besides, the Connecticut rancher was a trust fund poser who rode bicycles, not horses. Deep down, everybody knew that. Now that he’s no longer president, Republicans no longer have to pretend they believe the brush-cutting charade.

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Lots of people have a pretty cartoonishly oversimplified idea of how money corrupts politics, so it's nice when that cartoonish oversimplification turns out to be totally 100 percent accurate, as it is in the case of Mr. Perry and the 150 Texans who have given him $37 million over the last decade. The L.A. Times reports what those "megadonors" got for their money:

• "Permission to build a low-level radioactive waste disposal site in Texas" for $1.12 million.
• "$25 million a year in subsidies" for a Formula One racetrack for the low price of $400,000
• "Multiple transportation contracts" and a University of Texas board of regents appointment for "more than $320,000."
• A $500,000 grant for a chicken hatchery and processing plant for $165,000

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Among many Americans, especially wealthy rich white political pundits who live in gated communities in Maryland, it is considered "folksy" and charming to explicitly remind people of and seemingly endorse America's ugly history of lynch mobs doling out "frontier justice," but even among those who see nothing wrong with whitewashed nostalgia for gruesome, lawless vigilantism, Perry's comments were thought to have gone a bit too far. (Accusing the Republican-appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve of "treason" was a "serious unforced error," according to John Podhoretz.) New York Times Washington correspondent Binyamin Appelbaum summed up one strand of establishment response to the comments by calling Perry's remarks "horrifying."

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"That's New York, and that's their business, and that's fine with me," Perry reportedly said, when asked about marriage equality in the Empire State.

That wasn't good enough for professional equality-opponent Maggie Gallagher, who linked to Perry's comments and approvingly quoted a bitchy response from Rick Santorum, who'd never let "state's rights" get in the way of enshrining his small-mindedness in law.

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Reliant Stadium apparently has a blanket ban on "weapons," as if a handgun were a common cigarette or outside beverage.

A Perry constituent asked about bringing his licensed concealed weapon to the prayer festival, and received this response from event organizers:

Thank you for your question. According to the Reliant Stadium, weapons are prohibited. The following text can be found on our website: http://theresponseusa.com/faq.php

"What should I bring?

The Response is encouraging people to fast during the event, however there will be limited food vendors and water for sale. Bring a Bible and a notebook.

Stadium regulations prohibit: signs, flags, soliciting/promotion material, noise makers/instruments, coolers, tobacco, illegal substances, weapons or pets."

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Rick Perry was Bush's lieutenant governor. Whether the two men personally like each other is totally unknown (politicians don't like other humans anyway; that is why they go into politics), but Perry is "signaling" that he is very different from Bush because Bush was a terrible president who left office hated by everyone and Rick Perry would maybe like to be the next president (or he is at least surrounded by people who think he could be the next president).

Perry is distancing himself from Bush mostly by hating immigrants and healthcare for poor people and by basically announcing that he is against the small number of things Bush did to convince people that the Republican Party had grown a heart.

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The lethal injection of 32-year-old Milton Mathis was carried out Tuesday evening, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected arguments that he was mentally impaired and ineligible for execution.

Mathis was condemned for the December 1998 shooting that killed 24-year-old Travis Brown III and 31-year-old Daniel Hibbard. It also paralyzed then-15-year-old Melony Almaguer.

Almaguer and her husband witnessed Mathis' execution from behind a window at the state's death chamber in Huntsville. Mathis told Almaguer he never meant to hurt her. He also said the system failed him.

He began snoring as the drugs were administered. He was pronounced dead at 6:53 p.m.

Mathis was the sixth person executed in Texas this year.

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Air tankers have been dropping fire retardant on what is being called the Wallow fire in Arizona and firefighting crews have been mobilized from across the West, but the fire remained "zero contained" for most of last week and only 18 percent so early in the new week, too big to touch with mere human tools like hoses, shovels, saws, and bulldozers. Walls of flame 100 feet high rolled over the land like a tsunami from Hades. The heat from such a fire is so intense and immense that it can create small tornadoes of red embers that cannot be knocked down and smothered by water or chemicals. These are not your grandfather's forest fires.

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