Is it “cruel and unusual punishment” to sentence a juvenile to a life sentence in prison? That’s the question at the heart of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. The court will consider two cases involving juvenile convicts. Joe Sullivan was sent away for life for raping an elderly woman when he was 13. Terrance Graham was implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17.

No question, they were serious crimes. Very serious. The AP story says, “Graham, now 22, and Sullivan, now 33, are in Florida prisons, which hold more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for…

Friends, thank you for taking the time to chat about the future of Talk of the Day on our last post. We’ll continue it, and we’re start fresh on Monday. I hear the majority view that we should continue it. We may do fewer than daily topics. And I’m going to be more ruthless about deleting comments that are off-topic and accomplish nothing more than lobbing flames into the marketplace of ideas. If you care to continue commenting, do it over here on the original topic.

See you Monday.

The Talk of the Day blog is the second-oldest blog on STLtoday.com, second only to Political Fix. Some days, they might be indistinguishable. And many days, I am sorely tempted to stick a fork in TOTD and say it’s done.

If memory serves, we’ve been talking almost every day in this spot since September 2004. So it’s possible we’ve discussed more than 1,300 topics, subtracting weekends, holidays and the occasional lazy day.

Lately, I have wearied of the way every topic devolves into a partisan screed. Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals — all roads lead to the same tired, boring arguments….

I say this not to whine. It’s just a fact. If I could work two jobs that paid the same salary I make now, and if I worked those two jobs at that salary for my entire career, I would not come close to earning what Albert Pujols made just last year.

Albert can do something I can’t do. He won’t be able to do it very long — maybe 10, 12, even 15 years if he’s lucky. And what he does is in very high demand by the millions of baseball fans who watch the game. I understand why he…

It’s a rainy Friday, the day before Halloween and who’s got the stomach for a topic on some weighty issue like health care or the Afghanistan war? Not me.

So weigh in on the time-honored tradition of Halloween, where kids of all ages and costumes will ring your doorbell in search of treats. Is there a tradition behind what you  hand out? Or is it just whatever bags you grabbed as you pushed your shopping cart down the aisles of the local store? At our house, we buy in bulk because we get hundreds of trick-or-treaters.

Do you ask the kids to do…