CHALLENGES AT HALLMARK TV!  At Christmas time, the Hallmark Channel is being criticized on two fronts.

First, it is airing the story of two gay men getting married at the holiday season – drawing the ire of evangelicals.    Second, in an attempt to include the Jewish community in the season, it’s “everybody is really the same” attitude is being criticized as anti-Semitic.

DICTATOR.   Novelist Robert Harris writes about Cicero, greatest orator of his time – and the collapse of the Roman Republic. Some may see a parallel to our own times when Harris writes:

·        There is really no other occupation [than politics] in which human virtue approaches more closely the august function of the gods;  no individual, or combination of individuals, should be allowed to become too powerful… Politics is a profession, not a pastime for dilettantes….

·        Divide power three ways in a state and the nation is balanced; divided into two — sooner or later one side must seek to dominate the other – it is a natural law.

·        If the final episode in the long history of our Republic has arrived, then let us at least behave like champion gladiator s: they meet death honorably; let us see to it that we too – who stand foremost of all nations on the earth – fall with dignity rather than serve with ignominy.

·        No man – however gifted, however powerful, however ambitious for glory – should be above the law.  Whenever in the course of my 30 years in the service of the state we have yielded to temptation and ignored the law, often for what seemed at the time to be good reasons, we have slipped a little further towards the precipice

BURN PITS.   A new  law would require the Pentagon to identify all burn pit locations. The U.S. defense policy bill contains several provisions aimed at addressing the military’s ongoing use of open-air burn pits for waste disposal in combat zones and documenting locations where they operated.

DIVERSITY.  Congress wants more diversity in the highest military ranks.   The services are urged to take aggressive steps to make sure that minorities and women have a better chance to become general officers.