Apparently, Chile has it’s own version of Gov. Rick Perry:
“Chilean President Sebastian Pinera has praised as ‘brave and mature’a pregnant 11-year-old rape victim who said she was happy to have the child.” (BBC news)
*Update- the Texas House voted in favor of the 20 week ban on abortion, moving it to the Senate where it’s expected to pass.
While the Supreme Court was concluding their historic 2012 session, there was another important political story last week taking place in the Texas legislature. State Senator Wendy Davis led a 11 hour filibuster against a restrictive anti-abortion bill, which resulted in Gov. Rick Perry calling for another special session after time ran out before the bill could be voted on. Since the drama unfolded last Wednesday, the I-can’t-remember-the-third-one Texas governor has been following the Todd Akin model, giving a speech to a Right to Life group where he mentioned that since Ms. Akin had been a teen-age mom herself and said that it’s “unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example”.
animation: Rick Perry’s condescending response to Wendy Davis’ filibuster
Turkey has her ‘Standing Man’, America has her ‘Sitting Man’.
Standing Man in Turkey-AP
Here’s a few photos from this morning at the Court: 
We’re down to the last week of the Supreme Court’s 2012 term and still no opinions on gay marriage, affirmative action, and voting rights. SCOTUSblog will begin live blogging Monday at 9am and expect opinions to start coming in at 10am. As I mentioned before, I’ll be doing live sketches of the action outside of the Court so check back here and at the Washington Post. 
Where to start? It seems like new developments about domestic spying are coming every hour. Before we get ahead of ourselves, here’s a good AP piece which will give you some background about how we got to this point. Glenn Greenwald & Ewen MacAskill from The Guardian broke the story and revealed the identity of the whistleblower, Edward Snowden while Barton Gellman & Laura Poitrus of The Washington Post had the breaking story of the metadata mining program, “PRISM”. Here’s the link to my take on metadata gathering.
For almost 2 months in 1989 tens of thousands of protesters led by university students occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The protests were triggered by the death of Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party General Secretary who was forced to resign for his positions on reforming the party . The students were also demonstrating against corruption in the government, for workers’ rights, and for freedom of speech and the press. On June 3, 1989 the Chinese government ordered martial law and cracked down on the protesters in Tiananmen Square, killing an unknown amount (estimates range from the hundreds to thousands). Here’s an article about some survivors from yesterday’s Washington Post.
At the time I was living and working in Los Angeles. I can still remember sitting at my drawing desk at home when the news started broadcasting those horrifying images from Beijing. 
Associated Press
June is going to be a busy month for the Supreme Court of the United States. The justices will be issuing decisions on affirmative action, same-sex marriage, voting rights, and gene patents over the next few weeks. Be sure to regularly check SCOTUSblog; they’ll be live-blogging this morning on the affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.
*I’ll be doing live sketches for the Washington Post the week of the same-sex marriage decisions.
It’s the 10th anniversary of the infamous George W Bush’s photo op. 
Let the revisionism begin! The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum opens today. Here’s a few cartoons from my archive; the Washington Post should have a slide show later with more. *Update: here’s the full slideshow.
C-Span opened its Washington Journal program this morning with the question “Should religion play a role in politics?”,which led me to think about Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists and the issue of Separation of Church and State. Several years ago I was fortunate to see at the original at the Library of Congress:
Very cool.
Crowds line up for gay marriage cases. Photo by David Lloyd
Today the Supreme Court of the United States will hear the first of two cases for same-sex marriage. Opponents will argue that legalizing these unions will destroy the traditional definition of marriage since marriage is about “responsible procreation and child-rearing” (tell that to couples who choose not to have children or the elderly couple who have found happiness again). This is a simple question of equal rights. Why shouldn’t gays, who pay taxes and participate in society just like anyone else, be able to marry? Churches will still be able to decide which couples can be married within the church; this will not impact them. It will be interesting to see which Justices support the Separation of Church and State and which ones are still living in the pre-Loving v. Virginia era.