In the waning days of his tenure in office, Attorney General Eric Holder has taken some actions that are praiseworthy. First he has criticized the trigger-happy behavior of many police departments, including the Cleveland one. Then he said that his office will defend the rights of same-sex couples to marry in the upcoming case before the US Supreme Court.
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After keeping observers guessing for a long time as to whether they will take on the issue of same-sex marriage during this term, the US Supreme Court in a notice yesterday finally decided to do so. There were many cases that had been appealed to them and what I found interesting was that they accepted for review the four cases that the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decided. This was the only Appeals Court circuit that back in November upheld bans on same-sex marriage and I strongly criticized its weird reasoning.
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A French satirical news show Le Petit Journal had fun with Fox News and a claim by one of their ‘experts’ that parts of Paris are no-go zones that look like Iraq or Afghanistan and are so dominated by violent and intolerant Muslims and that outsiders cannot enter those neighborhoods without fear or protection.
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I wrote last month about a mentoring program for K-12 students that was created by the state of Ohio. At the last minute, governor Kasich added a requirement that any schools applying for funds for that program had to partner with a faith-based organization. I suggested that he was pandering to the religious.
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Race is a highly sensitive topic and yet so important that we cannot, and should not, avoid talking about it. But what makes discussions about race fraught with pitfalls is that even what to call people of different races is problematic, with terms that were considered appropriate at one time becoming frowned upon later, with those who grew up in one era having to remind themselves that the terms they once used casually are no longer socially acceptable.
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While I have my criticisms of some aspects of Jimmy Carter’s record while he was president, there is no question that he was one of the better ones in recent times and has been doing some good work since returning to private life. The former president spoke with Jon Stewart about the efforts, in which his own center has participated, that have led to the almost complete eradication of the awful disease caused by the guinea worm.
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The odious Rupert Murdoch has weighed in with a series of tweets that all Muslims are essentially responsible for the Charlie Hebdo killers, and author J. K. Rowling and others have responded ridiculing him. Jon Stewart and a panel of The Daily Show correspondents used the Murdoch episode as a springboard to discuss the double standard of those like Murdoch who demand that all Muslims denounce all acts of violence by any Muslim anywhere.
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As long time readers know, I have long had a crush on Orly Taitz, the triple threat of realtor, dentist, and lawyer whose life work is to prove that Barack Obama is ineligible to be president of America because he was born in Kenya, and that government authorities and the media have engaged in a massive cover-up to deny Americans the truth.
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One of the shocking things that emerged from the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of the police was that the federal government does not have a reliable national database of deaths at the hands of the police. Allie Gross and Brian Schatz report that there are some hopes that this may change.
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Hasan Minhaj of The Daily Show looks at how Salt Lake City Utah has addressed the problem of the homeless. Why, the idea is so crazy that it just might work.
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