The election of Mayor Bill de Blasio has been a watershed on many fronts, the end of stop and frisk, totally different approach to tax policy and development, horses getting booted from Central Park. But nothing signals the true end of ‘Giuliani Time’ like his new decision to allow the ferrets back into New York City.
Drones are here, at home, and they’re here to stay. Not the wingnut fantasy of you being on a receiving end of a targeted assassination outside Hooters because you didn’t sign up for Obamacare. But what about a malfunctioning drone falling out of the sky and hitting your kid? Or maybe flying into the flight path of your 767 as it makes it final descent on your return home from vacation?
The thought is scary but the system the federal government is now forced to build to prevent these things from happening is mind-bogglingly complex. And the more I heard about it the more interested I got. Our whole air safety regime today is based on having still relatively few things up in the air. They all have human pilots. There are places where commercial planes can go and the recreational and small scale operators can’t. But how do you keep everything safe when you have an order of magnitude larger number of vehicles up in the air and the vast majority don’t have a pilot and often don’t have anyone controlling them anywhere nearby? There’s no increased number of air traffic controllers who can grapple with that new reality. The FAA has been given the job of solving that problem. And it’s the subject of our newest TPM longform One Nation Under Drones (sub req).
If you watch the press release mill there’s a steady stream of prominent Democrats calling, albeit in couched language, for Gen Shinseki to resign. But TPM Reader WW finds on irony in how things turned out over the long scope of time …
I find the greatest irony of all this is that Shinseki originally estimated about 300k troops to invade and stabilize Iraq. He was ignored, retired, and another general promised to do it on the cheap.
Orrin Hatch tells local radio station: Get over it, guys. Marriage equality is going to be the law of the land.
Seth D. Michaels tells us how the fight for immigration reform is like the world’s worst pizza party.
From a press release from the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department …
Isla Vista – May 28th, 2014
On Tuesday, May 27, 2014, at approximately 2:30 pm, Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Deputies responded to an apartment in the 6500 block of Pardall Road for a gunshot that had come through the reporting party’s apartment wall. Deputies arrived and found that a bullet had been shot through the wall from a connecting apartment, deflected off of a TV stand and lodged into the adjacent wall, narrowly missing the resident inside. Deputies went to the suspect’s apartment and contacted the lone resident, identified as 21-year old Kevin Tym (UCSB student). When questioned, Tym admitted that he was playing with his legally owned handgun and accidentally fired a Glock 17, 9mm round through his neighbor’s wall. During a search incident to arrest, Tym was found in possession of 7 firearms and approximately 1000 rounds of ammunition. In addition, he was found in possession of high capacity assault rifle magazines. All of the firearms were legally owned by Tym.
A great essay, from Ed Kilgore, on understanding the historical echoes and context of the Cochran/McDaniel race, the abject poverty, grandee stewardship, the never-fading, heavy history of the Civil War, the state and its traitors and favored sons.
Nichole Perkins writes about the life of Maya Angelou: “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings may have been styled after slave narratives, but it was unique in its storytelling because Angelou wasn’t trying to uplift all Black people. She didn’t write for a white audience in order to gain its empathy.”
A gun safe might be a good place to store your gun when you’re not actively defending your home against the crazed mobs of Obama’s America. But Baretta, the Italian gun manufacturer, has some other ideas in its new “down and dirty” guide to hiding handguns around the home. Like … in the cereal! Or in the laundry hamper! More great ideas here.
Last month there was a major stir when a study came to light suggesting that America was no longer a democracy but rather an oligarchy, a system in which the policy preferences of the very wealthy consistently held sway over those of everyone else. The authors of the study, Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page weren’t crazy about the ‘oligarchy’ terminology. But the findings fit into a larger discussion of wealth inequality and the threat it may pose to American democracy itself.
On Friday at 3 PM, Professor Gillens will join us at The Hive (sub req) to answer your questions about the study or on the general topic of wealth inequality and how wealth affects policy preference impact on the American political system. Get your questions in now.