WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

Remember Lt. John Pike and his pepper spray? You know, the campus cop who pepper sprayed peaceful Occupy protests at the University of California Davis campus. Pike, who was suspended from his job as his pepper spraying became a meme sensation, is singled out in a new independent report released this week by the university on the events of November 18.

Pike, says the report, “bears primary responsibility” for the use of the chemical. It also claims Pike used the spray incorrectly, standing much closer to his target than is recommended.

Pike remains on leave, as does his supervisor, campus police chief Annette Spicuzza, but the person most significantly named in the report for her utter failure of leadership is Chancellor Linda P.B.

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In a perfect world, Ozzie Guillen should be able to say whatever he wants. But then, in a perfect world, Guillen might have his wits about him, or he’d be so perfect as to be unrecognizable as the buffoon we’ve come to know.

His latest contratemps? He loves Fidel Castro, he respects the Comandante’s ability to survive all these years against so many adversaries.

The second part of that is no big deal: Some of Castro’s biggest haters respect the former dictator’s genius for survival.

But the first part of that?

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I've lost track of how many years we've been celebrating Passover in our very religiously and ethnically complicated home. But it's been ages. Every year, we write a new Haggadah, updating, refining, focusing on a new issue. But as I was sitting down to do this year's and looking over the many different versions of past years, I realized this particular passage seemed perenial. We borrow from many sources -- different poems, different haggadahs, a million internet sources -- so it's hard to know exactly where this began. If we wrote it, great. If we borrowed it, thank you. What we know is, it's food for thought, and it's worth sharing.

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One Jewish tradition that we actually think about following every year in preparing for Pesaj is eliminating chametz, or leaven from our house. Traditionally, we would go through our cupboards to remove all products of leavened grain from our possession.

When this task (called bedikah) is accomplished, we destroy a symbolic measure of the collected items by burning (biur), and a blessing is recited.

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Last week, while most of us in the U.S. were focused elsewhere, Pope Benedict XVI made a brief tour of Latin America that included a few days in Cuba. It was the second papal visit ever to the island, the first 14 years ago by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, who famously called for “the world to open up to Cuba, and Cuba to open up to the world.”

Back then, it was a meeting of titans: The famously anti-communist pope who’d nudged along the fall of Eastern Europe’s Soviet satellites and Fidel Castro, the longest serving Marxist head of state in the world and alumnus of prestigious Catholic schools.

John Paul got various concessions from Castro in exchange for the broad symbolism of his visit. The first and most enduring was the decriminalization of religion on the island. It had never been quite illegal to be faithful in Cuba, but the faithful were denied membership in the Communist Party until just before the papal visit, and party membership had, until that point, been a requirement for upward mobility in the socialist state.

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Look at this video:
Does this look like a man who was in a fight for his life? Does this look like a man with a broken nose? Whose head was repeatedly smashed to the ground?

I don’t care if George Zimmerman is a racist or not (his being half Peruvian and having black friends does not give him immunity), if he said “coons or goons” on the 911 tape, if he bawled for days after he killed Trayvon Martin (however much he hurts, he’s alive to hurt); I don’t care one whit about Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law (especially when most of the bill’s sponsors say the law doesn’t apply to this case).

Here’s what I know: Homicide isn’t even in the top ten causes for white males, but it’s the number one cause of death for black males, ages 15 to 34.

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Leaving a screening of The Hunger Games this weekend -- a movie I found mostly fun and enjoyable -- I walked away with a singular thought: The film was unnecessarily overwhelmingly white.

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Yesterday, the state of New Hampshire, which has been marrying same sex couples for two years, voted down an extraordinary attempt to repeal that law in its state house by a vote of 211 to 116.

That, in and of itself, is somewhat astonishing: The votes against the repeal almost doubled the votes for it.

But here’s the most spectacular part of this story: New Hampshire has a Republican majority in both state chambers. In the house, there’s a 189 vote Republican advantage. Gov. John Lynch is a Democrat who’d threatened to veto the repeal if it ever made it to his desk but the GOP, had it been willing, could have easily overriden it.

Instead, 118 Republicans -- 118! -- voted against the repeal.

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