Yes, the freedom to build a house of worship anywhere is a religious freedom issue, but-- as Ron Paul aptly points out-- it's a property rights issue as well.

The "mosque" (actually a cultural center with a prayer room) supposedly at (but actually two blocks away from) Ground Zero took considerable time and money to put together. Now people want government to step in and take away the right to use that property for a lawful purpose based on the occupants having unpopular thoughts. And this has gone well beyond blocking one "mosque." In some states, there are efforts to close down existing mosques based on nothing more than religious bigotry.

The next thing, it could be synagogues, Bahai temples... or even churches of minority Christian sects like Lutherans and Presbyterians. In the south, they could close Catholic churches.

We founded this country with enormous religious freedom because we understood that religion is an emotional people over which people will come to blows unless tolerance is a principle of the State.

It's good to hear this issue being addressed sanely.

Good show, thought the comment about conservatives and a 1 year old was funny. Regarding your first topic, the death penalty, you came very close as to why conservatives say it's more effective even though it is expensive. We went through this here in Illinois before the death penalty was suspended indefinitely several years ago.

During that time, conservatives made the same arguments you are hearing now in your state. When it came time to discuss the costs, once again they said it could be "reformed" and that so-called "justice" should still be met. That's when their side made a revelation that ultimately proved their undoing, and this is something you almost hit on.

You see, to them, if you're on death row, you're there for a damn good reason and should be put down so we need to keep it. To make it fiscally sound, they contended, we needed to look at the biggest cost which was the prisoner's ability to appeal. I don't have the specifics on appeals for Illinois, but every state that has the death penalty grants you only so many appeals. That's what the conservative promoters were objecting to, that prisoners were given, in their eyes, too many chances to appeal.

Given at the time that several inmates (including one who was severely mentally disabled) were just found innocent do to DNA, the people began to ask some real questions. DNA type testing was only then starting to be used on inmates and past cases for appeals. The worry was, as then Governor Ryan noted, what if we put an innocent man to death? What if there were mistakes in the case? What if the some folks were railroaded into death row? It's no secret, that going back decades ago, Chicago police were known for tactics to "get results." This was especially true during the days when Jon Burge was a detective and then commander within the CPD. He is now on trial for stuff that would have sounded common at Nuremberg in the 40s. All of his cases and those of his colleagues of that era are now under scrutiny. It was stuff like this that prompted then-Governor George Ryan to impose a moratorium. Despite some attempts to revive it by some "law and order" types in the state legislature, no one really wants to touch this and bring back capital punishment.

Now I can't speak for the LAPD or the SFPD or any law enforcement in the state of California. But I do urge you to look at what happened here in Illinois. Law experts from Northwestern University found many individuals here on death row who turned out to be innocent, either through DNA or confessions by police detectives or lieutenants who weren't kosher with procedure (especially with regards to the Burge cases). We don't know how many we put to death who were innocent, and that is something our state has to live with. Once more, learn from our experience, if you're not entirely sure about the case, err on the side of caution and remove your capital punishment.