* After listening to Ben Carson on the hustings, you have to wonder how long the lexicon will continue to countenance: “This isn’t brain surgery.” At least Lincoln Chafee wasn’t a rocket scientist.
* Cartoonist speaks volumes. Here’s the sobering perspective of Laurent Sourisseau, who replaced a slain colleague as editorial director of “Charlie Hebdo“: “It’s worrying to hear people tell us, ‘You’re the only ones who can say such things.’ We don’t want to be alone in seeing the world the way we do.”
* How’s this for irony? Germaine Greer, the iconic, Australian feminist author best known for her best-seller, “The Female Eunuch,” has sparked a student protest over her speaking engagement at Cardiff University in Wales. What has prompted such a response? Greer, 76, has an unenlightened take on transgender women.
While noting that she has no issue with those having sex-reassignment surgery, she does stress that “it doesn’t make them a woman.” She has also commented that “a great many” women don’t dare deign to say transgender people “don’t look like, sound like, or behave like women.”
Imagine, Germaine no longer germane.