Another The Daily Show newcomer Hasan Minhaj, making just his second appearance on the show, spoke about how despite its history of wreaking death and destruction all over the world, and despite the depravities revealed most recently in the torture report, the US is still, and always will be, the greatest, noblest, most humane and moral country in the world, facts be damned.
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Jon Stewart struggles to tries to find some way of injecting humor in reporting the horrors revealed by the torture report and the lies told about it, without at the same time trivializing the events. He manages to show how culpable everyone in power is in these acts of depravity, from the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Congress, and the intelligence agencies.
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Jon Stewart made an error in one of the examples he gave of police killings of black people and of course Fox News seized on it as if it discredited his entire thesis, which it did not. This illustrates a popular diversionary tactic of the right and especially Fox News and that is to try and find an error, however slight, in anything that reflects badly on them, their heroes, or the positions they take (whether be race, rape, the NSA, torture, etc.) and then try make the discussion all about that error.
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Trevor Noah, the newest correspondent to join The Daily Show, hails from South Africa and he used his introductory appearance to highlight one thing that really bugs me and that is the way that Africa is often portrayed in the west, as a continent that consists of wilderness or villages that have none of the features of modern society. People in the US need to be reminded of how rapidly the rest of the world is changing while the US shows all the signs of a decaying empire.
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I have long been a contributor to Partners in Health, the group founded by Paul Farmer that takes high quality health care to areas of great need around the world. It began when I read the book Mountains Beyond Mountains: The quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a man who would cure the world by Tracy Kidder that I wrote about here back in 2005, and listened to a talk by Farmer around the same time when he visited my university.
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The Daily Show looks at the extraordinary effort by those on the right to find something, anything, other than excessive and unreasonable use of force by the police to blame for the recent deaths of black people.
Incidentally, some are arguing that the fact that despite the clear video of the Garner killing no indictments were brought suggests that having police wear body cams will not help. I disagree. The existence of the video has created much greater consensus on the appalling nature of the killing which is why the excuses proffered on behalf of the police in this case are so absurd.
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It appears that the Chinese government has declared war on puns. Since I am extremely fond of this form of humor, I guess this rules out that nation as a possible future home for me.
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I had known that you could take small pets on a plane as part of your carry-on luggage as long as they were in a suitable container but a 70lb pig? Jon Stewart discusses what happened when one such pig started acting up on a plane while in flight and manages to tie that story in with pig-related brazen political pandering by the governor of New Jersey.
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The Daily Show continues its excellent coverage of the recent deaths of black people at the hands of the police and ridicules the absurd whining of the St. Louis County Police Association that the raised arms ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ stance of five Rams football players as they on the field before a game constitutes some grievous insult to them that requires the NFL to apologize and punish the players. To their credit, the Rams coach and management have refused to do so.
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Today saw another grand jury, this time in New York, fail to indict a white police officer Daniel Pantaleo in the July 17 death of Eric Garner, a 43-year old black man, a father of six, who had been stopped for peddling loose cigarettes. The police put him in a chokehold, a practice that is actually prohibited by the New York City and many other police departments, and he died despite his cries that he could not breathe. So a man died for the trivial offense of selling cigarettes.
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