Comedian Denis Leary is a frequent guest on The Daily Show. It is clear that he and Stewart have a long friendship dating back to before they were famous and their exchanges have the teasing quality of good friends relaxing together, though Leary’s humor has always had a slightly edgier quality. I quite often skip the celebrity interviews but enjoy Leary’s appearances.
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You may recall Kim Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky, whom I have been writing about because she refused to let her office issue all marriage licenses because she objected to doing so for same-sex couples since, of course, Jesus told her she would be a bad girl if she did so. Naturally she was taken to court and just today, US District Judge David Bunning, who is described as a “conservative judge who was appointed by President George W. Bush”, ruled that she had to comply. Despite that, a couple said that they had been turned away again this morning.
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Maryn McKenna shares the excellent news that midnight August 11 marked one full year with no cases of polio reported in the whole of Africa. It takes three consecutive years of absence for a region to be designated as polio-free but this step is significant nonetheless, given the opposition by Muslim imams in a few countries that nullified the World Health Organization’s goals of making the entire globe polio-free by the year 2000,
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Just a few weeks ago, there was a jocular comment that was circulating along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be funny if the 2016 presidential race ended up being between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders? Yuk! Yuk!” The reason it was so funny of course was because the very idea was absurd. On the one hand you had someone widely seen as a buffoon (a very rich buffoon but a buffoon nonetheless) and on the other someone who called himself a democratic socialist, seen as the kiss of death in a political climate where even the label of liberal was seen as an epithet. It was felt that the Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton machines would easily crush these upstarts once the going got serious.
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No doubt all of us have as children played ‘ballooning’, where we try to keep a balloon in the air for as long as possible without actually holding on to it. Those who are more agile use only their feet or limit themselves in other ways. But could you do it with just your nose?
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Bernie Sanders continues to pack record-breaking crowds into stadiums to hear his message, being received more like a rock-star than a white-haired politician. After 15,000 in Seattle and 28,000 in Portland, he then pulled in 27,000 in Los Angeles. He was introduced by comedian Sarah Silverman.
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While measures to legalize, or at least decriminalize, the use of marijuana are spreading all over the country, we should look at the heavy toll that the war on drugs, and marijuana specifically, is taking on everyone. Because so many people think marijuana is safe to use and do so recreationally, it leads to repeated police-public confrontations by over-zealous police, who can use the excuse that they smelled something to launch highly intrusive searches.
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The 60-day deadline for Congress to vote its disapproval of the deal arrived at between Iran and the P5+1 nations is September 17, giving them roughly two weeks to do so after they return from their August recess. If a vote of disapproval does pass, president Obama has guaranteed a veto and so much attention is focused on whether the two chambers can muster the 2/3 majority to override the veto.
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On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver describes how the world of sex education in the US is all over the place, rife with misconceptions and harsh moral judgments rather than providing dispassionate factual information.
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Over at The Intercept Peter Maas has a fascinating article that turns the tables on one of the people at the NSA who takes pride in his job conducting surveillance on people and finding out all that they can about them. He had been invited by the NSA to be the ‘Socrates of SIGINT’ (SIGINT stands for Signals Intelligence) and to blog internally and ‘write a philosophically minded column about signals intelligence’.
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