Eideard

Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat…

What was a science-fiction scenario not much more than a decade ago has become today’s news. In Iraq and Afghanistan, military drones have become a routine part of the arsenal. In Pakistan, according to American officials, strikes from Predators and Reapers operated by the C.I.A. have killed more than 2,000 militants; the number of civilian casualties is hotly debated. In Yemen last month, an American citizen was, for the first time, the intended target of a drone strike, as Anwar al-Awlaki, the Qaeda propagandist and plotter, was killed along with a second American, Samir Khan.

If China, for instance, sends killer drones into Kazakhstan to hunt minority Uighur Muslims it accuses of plotting terrorism, what will the United States say? What if India uses remotely controlled craft to hit terrorism suspects in Kashmir, or Russia sends drones after militants in the Caucasus? American officials who protest will likely find their own example thrown back at them.

“The problem is that we’re creating an international norm” — asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues Dennis M. Gormley…“The copycatting is what I worry about most…”

Last December, a surveillance drone crashed in an El Paso neighborhood; it had been launched, it turned out, by the Mexican police across the border. Even Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, has deployed drones, an Iranian design capable of carrying munitions and diving into a target, says P. W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, whose 2009 book “Wired for War” is a primer on robotic combat…

“I think of where the airplane was at the start of World War I: at first it was unarmed and limited to a handful of countries,” Mr. Singer says. “Then it was armed and everywhere. That is the path we’re on.”

Radio-controlled model airplanes – nowadays – aren’t a whole boatload away from capabilities of our military drones. They may be limited to smaller, lighter payloads. That doesn’t limit the inventiveness of terrorists who design underwear bombs. And no more reliance on suicide volunteers who may get nervous when the time comes to go BOOM!

But, Uncle Sugar presumes that only American genius can design these death-goodies. Just as our government thinks we’re above international law on torture, financing breakaway provinces, freedom fighters headquartered in foreign yacht clubs – our arrogance usually comes back to bite us on the butt.

Emmanuel celebrates in a Chicago bar

The Chicago elections board underscored an important rule for politicians Thursday when it cleared Rahm Emanuel to run for mayor, which is that it’s fine to rent your house out to a complete stranger, as long as you leave your wife’s wedding dress stuffed under the stairs, or maybe just some old pasta in the refrigerator.

But for all the farce surrounding the question of Mr. Emanuel’s residency, the elections board, whether or not it intended to, also affirmed a serious and more important principle with its ruling — that Washington is in fact an extension of the rest of the country, rather than some alien territory cloistered within it.

This, of course, was not the most obvious issue to surface in the proceedings to decide whether Mr. Emanuel really was or was not a Chicagoan, a sideshow that must have made the former White House chief of staff pine for the relative sanity of Congress. Led by the man who rented Mr. Emanuel’s house from him and who had himself threatened to run for mayor, about 30 citizens questioned Mr. Emanuel, under oath, about whether he had actually left behind any boxes in the basement that might prove his continued residency…

“Were you ever a member of the Communist Party?” one of the interrogators jokingly asked Mr. Emanuel, tacitly acknowledging, it seemed, the ludicrous nature of the entire hearing.

Illustrating the stupidity and core values of populist opposition to this union called the United States, describing teabagger ideology by repeating the ironic question characteristic of paranoid nutballs years back in our poltical history of fear.

And yet there was a serious cultural subtext to the debate, beyond the question of whether Mr. Emanuel, a lifelong Chicagoan, is enough of a Chicagoan to run the city. At issue was also the larger question of whether someone who goes to Washington to serve his community and his country, as Mr. Emanuel did as both a congressman and a presidential aide, can be seen as having left his home to take up residence somewhere else.

This was essentially the argument [countered] by Mr. Emanuel’s lawyer, Kevin Forde, who pointed out that the residency law made allowances for people who were away “on business of the United States,” like soldiers stationed overseas. “If being chief of staff for the president of the United States isn’t in the service of the United States, I don’t know what is,” he said…

As it is, assuming the decision survives an inevitable appeal, Mr. Emanuel, who is leading handily in public polls, can now look forward to the election. After that, perhaps, he can return to his house and unpack the contents of those disputed storage boxes, the accumulated this-and-that of your average American life.

The appeal is guaranteed by sufficient funding for delay by those in high places and low whose singular interpretation of Constitutional Law holds that holy writ supersedes legal precedent, secession remains a viable alternative to federal decision-making, dedication to parochialism in education, religion and jurisprudence is what is lacking in government.

You’ve heard of a long distance relationship but what about a long distance marriage? And by marriage, we mean the ceremony, not the subsequent relationship.

We all know how useful Skype can be for maintaining relationships that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. However, a couple in Texas took things to the next level by getting married over Skype. Though a Skype wedding is pretty remarkable in itself, there’s something else extraordinary about this marriage ceremony: It is the first legal same-sex wedding in Texas.

Mark Reed and Dante Walkup had been together ten years when they decided it was high time they tied the knot. Unfortunately, though they wanted nothing more than to get married in their native Texas, theirs is a state that does not legally allow same-sex couples to marry. However, Reed and Walkup were not to be deterred and the two came up with a way to have a legal wedding without flying family and friends to another state.

Jay Morris writes that the couple traveled to Washington D.C. back in May to receive their certificate of marriage. Fast forward five months and the two were married in Texas, with a D.C. official (accompanied by several witnesses) marrying them via Skype.

Bravo, Mark and Dante.

Take it one more step around the nutball reactionaries and the homophobic government of Texas.

We’re not sure what’s more humorous: That California Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, maintains two unencrypted Wi-Fi networks at her residence, or that a consumer group sniffed her unsecured traffic in a bid to convince lawmakers to hold hearings about Google.

A representative for Consumer Watchdog…parked outside Harman’s and other lawmakers’ Washington-area residences to determine whether they had unsecured Wi-Fi networks that might have been sniffed by Google as part of the internet giant’s Street View and Google Maps program.

The group wants the House Energy and Commerce Committee, of which Harman is also a member, to haul Google executives before it, so they can publicly explain why, for three years, Google was downloading data packets from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks in neighborhoods in dozens of countries. Google has repeatedly said it didn’t realize it was storing snippets of payload data on unsecured Wi-Fi networks, until German privacy authorities began questioning what data Google was collecting.

Yup. We really need to spend taxpayer dollars to have Google state for the umpteenth time what they were doing. And why. And why they don’t do that anymore.

Consumer Watchdog’s wardriving unintentionally highlights the murky state of wiretapping laws in the United States. According to the text of the federal wiretapping statute, it’s not considered felony wiretapping “to intercept or access an electronic communication made through an electronic communication system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public.”

So even if had been deliberate, Google’s sniffing would arguably not have been illegal. For its part, Consumer Watchdog says it only grabbed frame data, not content, in order to enumerate the devices on Harman’s network…

Doesn’t seem especially murky to me. Either flavor.

Two unencrypted networks, Harmanmbr and harmantheater, according to the group, were discovered outside Harman’s residence.

Har!

What was the really big demonstration in Washington DC over this weekend? Was it the teabaggers bringing their bigot baggage to town? Or my peacenik brothers and sisters still pissed because Obama and the Obamacrats have decided they can do military imperialism more successfully than the Republicans?

Sorry, folks. In fact, it was a rally for undocumentados.

Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in the U.S. capital on Sunday to demand immigration reform that defends the rights of foreign workers, but their voices may have been muted by Democrats’ push for a historic vote on healthcare.

Carrying signs that said “Justice and Dignity for All U.S. Immigrants” and “We just want to work,” the immigration activists filled five blocks of the National Mall. Some protesters wore T-shirts that read, “Our journey as immigrants is a journey for human rights.”

New York Democratic Representative Nydia Velazquez said: “Every day without reform is a day that 12 million hard-working immigrants must live in the shadow of fear, and … a day that a family is torn apart. That is wrong and it is unAmerican…”

President Barack Obama benefited in 2008 from a huge Hispanic turnout, drawn by his promise to deliver immigration reform allowing millions of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

Frustrated that Obama has yet to fulfill a pledge to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, immigration supporters have warned him to deliver this year or face the consequences in congressional elections in November…

While Hispanics are seen as unlikely to switch support to Republicans, who have fought immigration reform without a clampdown on illegal immigrants, they could hurt Democrats by failing to turn out at the polls.

Which is a funny way to put it. Republicans have traditionally opposed anyone being able to immigrate here unless they had education and skills and could pass for white.

So, which is it? Americans have the attention span of a cricket? Americans multi-tasking is watching TV and drinking a beer at the same time? Or must we always rely on the entertainment mavens who control what passes for news drooling from the lips of well-sculpted talking heads?

Washington, D.C., will become the first city in the United States to give away female condoms.

The project will distribute 500,000 free condoms at beauty salons, convenience stores and high schools in sections of the city that are plagued with high HIV rates.

The effort could begin within the next three weeks.

A 2008 report showed HIV rates in D.C. to be at 3 percent, making it a major epidemic. Nationally, HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death among black women between the ages of 25 and 34…

The free female condom effort comes after a decade-long campaign to combat the HIV and AIDS epidemic by distributing free male condoms in Washington, D.C. The effort was largely seen as ineffective.

The female condom was first approved by the FDA in 1993, but its use has been limited. A second version was approved last year and consists of special polyurethane that conducts body heat to enhance sexual sensation for both men and women, the makers say.

All I can ever picture when the topic is female condoms is Edina’s mom in Ab-Fab slipping a couple over her hands and lower arms and enquiring if they’re for dish-washing?

Daylife/AP Photo

Tim Geithner may be the latest political piñata in Washington these days, but — policy aside — there may be another reason he is the one fellow everyone is picking on at Treasury: He’s there alone.

President Obama’s ethics code requires that no lobbyist can work for an agency he may have lobbied.

Believe it or not, Geithner is the only confirmed official at his department. Some top nominees, even those who have served in government before, have decided to withdraw. Others are still pending as they go through arduous background checks that one pro-Obama Democrat calls “maddening vetting hell.”

The staffing problem is not just at Treasury, and it goes way beyond the time-consuming nature of extensive background checks. It’s also about overreaching anti-lobbyist rules.

Read the rest of this entry »

…to celebrate the coming inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States. Plenty of folks will say things more elegant than anything I might conjure up; but, I wanted to say something about the event.

I spent thirty-seven years of my life as a performing artist. Seventeen of those picking on a guitar and singing. I have a great belief in the honesty and power of music. I am convinced people can learn to love and strive, side by side, through the lyric and song and poetry, the thunder and dance of musical notes. Otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed with it so long.

I’ve given away my last guitar. The notes I listen to are birdsong as often as digitized – nowadays. But, I was proudest of all, today, that so many people who live and die inside the craft I love so well – were able to present themselves before the nation and the world – and offer their songs of freedom.

Like Woody said, “This machine kills fascists!”

Washington city officials say U.S. President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration will cause many logistical problems, including where to park 10,000 buses.

The thousands of chartered buses will pour into Washington for Obama’s Jan. 20 swearing-in ceremony, and the sheer size of the fleet — which will be carrying as many as 500,000 people — is posing a huge challenge for municipal officials.

Officials are estimating that 2 million to 4 million people will attend the inauguration and one of the questions is where to park the buses. With widespread street closures in downtown Washington, they won’t be able to drop off passengers at events, so officials have to find a central place for them to gather. But once that is determined, it will affect the city’s Metro system when the bus passengers try to squeeze on to public transit.

Washington City’s…call center staff has begun contacting hundreds of bus companies to ask about bookings and by the end of the week, they hope a statistical sampling will come up with a firm number of expected buses.

It’s gonna be worse than going to the shopping mall the day before Giftmas.