This act strongly underlines that the growing and deadly anti-Semitism in this country is by no means limited to Islamist terrorists. Anyone still making such claims is lying and refusing to face reality. This act emphasizes that the protection of Jewish institutions in Germany is still vital, even nearly 75 years after the end of the Nazi reign of terror. The fact that the synagogue was not protected on a holiday like Yom Kippur does raise questions.

It was an anti-Semitic attack. But it was also an attack against liberal values and immigration, which on the far-right are identified with Jews… the target could be simultaneously Jews, Muslims, women, LGBT people and any other minority or immigrant group.

This is another act of xenocide where indiscriminate mass killing of a group takes place purely because they are identified by a place associated with their religion and ethnicity. This attack can and should galvanize governments and community leaders around the world to take the threat of xenocidal anti-Semitism even more seriously… This is not a time for fear, however fearful the physical threat may be. The only way to resist these xenocidal cowards is to be stronger than hate through the values of community and common values we share.

No one should be surprised if the White House chooses to fight back, and hard, when Democrats are trying to remove Mr. Trump from office and brand him as “impeached” for 2020. The Pelosi Democrats are fighting ugly, and Mr. Trump is fighting ugly back.

…focusing on the broader constitutional struggle shouldn’t obscure the facts at hand. It’s in Trump’s political interests to convince the American people (as well as the Senate) that the impeachment inquiry is nothing more than a partisan clash between himself and House Democrats. If he succeeds, Republican senators will find it easier to vote against his conviction and removal from office.

The bottom line is that Democrats need to honor basic fairness and conduct a thorough inquiry, but they also need to set hard limits on how much time they are willing to spend on any given negotiation or debate or vote. They are engaged in an asymmetrical struggle with a White House that has shown itself willing to set fire to the Constitution to protect Mr. Trump from the consequences of his own misbehavior.

…Warren’s inability to keep her first job had less to do with her pregnancy than with her lack of qualification. And when the education board tried to meet her halfway, she struck down the offer. But that’s not the story Warren is telling now. Instead, she’s playing the victim card and crying sexism.

As with the knee-jerk skepticism that greets too many women who report sexual harassment, the reflexive disbelief in Warren’s story shows that sexism often trumps basic common sense. Sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination are not rare events. On the contrary, they’re incredibly common.

Whether she was fired or left because she saw the writing on the wall that her job would be incompatible with motherhood — and who can blame her for not remembering the precise details of something that happened nearly five decades ago — the point is that our society makes it extraordinarily tough to be a working mom, especially a new mom.

Californians must not accept blackouts as the new normal every time the winds blow. But until we make the changes in land use and fire safety needed to ensure that utility lines won’t trigger the sort of devastation that leveled the town of Paradise last year, power shutdowns will be our collective cross to bear.

Forced power outages are not the right long-term solution for people who rely on powered medical devices, critical facilities like fire stations and hospitals, and our everyday connected lives. This week’s “public safety power shut-offs” for 800,000 California customers are a stark reminder of the new normal we cannot allow ourselves to quietly accept.

What we do need is for our federal, state, and local politicians to feel immense pressure now to realize this problem is only going to keep getting worse, unless they do something. We can’t keep hopping from crisis to crisis like this. We need to realize that we are living in climate change, and this is the cost. But my fear is that once the lights go back on, things will go back to normal until the next disaster strikes again.

Being kind doesn’t mean that you have to agree with everything or even anything someone else says. Let’s remember that the beauty of being a human being is that we are all different and even if you think someone has bad ideas, it doesn’t make them a bad person.

…it feels as though niceness is no longer enough, as though it might perhaps even be slightly immoral. In this age of Donald Trump and #MeToo and apocalyptic climate change and gun violence and all the other things that make our futures seem ever more uncertain, and as though those in power are ever more unqualified to help us — do we even want to be nice to the powerful anymore? Is uncritical niceness to people who have made the world a worse place a good and admirable thing?

Upper class individuals are also worse at recognizing other people’s emotions, and they’re less likely to pay attention to the people they’re interacting with. Maybe that’s why Ellen’s just not getting why everyone’s so mad. I wonder if she’ll start to get it soon? Or maybe we should just get this class war started, just to be safe.

Vlaming’s termination is and will remain a blemish in the history books. It represents an existential threat to our most fundamental freedoms and marks the day a hauntingly familiar precept found a home in our backyard: Say what I want or lose your job, no matter if you believe it.

As a country that separates church and state, we cannot simply allow public employees, whose salaries are paid by our taxes, to impose their personal religious beliefs within public institutions meant to serve everyone. That separation has been reinforced consistently in our courts, including in some high-profile cases like that of Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that marriage equality was the law of the land.

This French teacher was fired for refusing to speak in a certain way that violated his conscience. He had pledged to refer to this girl by her chosen name in order to avoid the pronoun fight, but the school’s leaders deemed that insufficient. Instead, they pursued a transgender “crusade” against the heresy of biological reality and traditional beliefs about men and women.