Jon Stewart opened Wednesday night’s Daily Show dropping the comedy to tackle the “utterly depressing” non-indictment in the Eric Garner case. He said, “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know what to say. If comedy is tragedy plus time, I need more fucking time.”

At least with Ferguson, Stewart said, there was conflicting testimony, “but here there is none of that.” And there’s no question about unreliable witnesses because there’s video and “we are fucking watching it.”

Stewart wrapped by literally just showing a video of kittens to cheer everyone up… but even then he couldn’t escape race issues.

EDITORS’ COMMENT AND EXPANDED MATERIAL FOLLOWS. CLICK ON THE BAR

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AS REPORTED BY NBC NEWS:
President Barack Obama said he is committed to improving strained relations between police and minority communities Wednesday in the wake of two recent grand jury decisions that failed to indict white police officers in the deaths of unarmed black men, saying “we are seeing too many instances where people do not have confidence that folks are being treated fairly.”

Obama may excuse us for saying his rhetoric about equality rings a bit hollow to our ears, for he is the man who has done little or nothing during his tenure to combat entrenched inequality, in fact he has helped it considerably, being a de facto ally, “the man in Washington”, of the Wall Street gang, a sector of society that represents the most outrageous case of unchallenged inequality in the United States.  It is also ironic, to say the least, that Holder, a nullity, a corporate lawyer who did absolutely nothing—obviously with Obama’s assent and direction—to prosecute both racial crimes and corporate crime—should also be posturing here and promising swift remedial justice. Hell, maybe because the system has lost so much credibility, because the images cannot be falsified, this heinous crime, the murdering by police of yet another unarmed man trying to make a living for his family, he may finally do something. Even so, the system will still remain a crime unto itself. —The Editors
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The president spoke a little more than two hours after a New York City grand jury did not indict white NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, 43, who died after being arrested for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes on Staten Island July 17.

“This is an American problem when anybody in this country is not being treated equally under the law. That’s a problem and it’s my job as president to help solve it,” Obama said at a Tribal Nations Conference in Washington, D.C.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday evening that the Justice Department is launching “an independent, thorough, fair and expeditious” civil-rights investigation into Garner’s death. Federal investigators have been closely following the case all along, but wanted wait for the local proceedings to conclude before beginning their own probe, he said.

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