Obama has before compared the drone program to dealing with a sniper on a roof of a building who is pointing the rifle at children on a playground. And he say, you know, “I understand what the ACLU’s objections are and human rights people and stuff. But do we need to go to a judge to get authorization to take that shooter down before he kills a bunch of kids on a playground? No we don’t.” And I think… everyone in this room agrees with that. If you have someone who’s going to kill a bunch of kids, and they’re a sniper, and they’re not responding to any kind of attempts to get them to put the rifle down, people in this society overwhelmingly would say, “Yes. If we need to kill that person we’ll kill them.”
The problem is, that’s a fake analogy. They have never provided a shred of evidence that a single person that they’ve killed in a drone strike represented an imminent threat to US persons or the security of the United States. They have never given a shred of evidence to suggest that they killed someone en route to putting a bomb on a plane. I guarantee you, because this White House leaks like crazy, if they had that evidence they would put it out there…
If their standard was just that we’re killing people that we think maybe in the future might in certain circumstances try to encourage others to commit acts of terrorism — If that was the policy! — okay, that’s what they’re doing. But that’s not what they say the policy is. They say the policy is we’re targeting people who represent an imminent — “imminent” is their word — threat to US interests, US persons, and US facilities around the world. If that’s the standard then you have to say then what is the definition of the word “imminent.”
There was a white paper of the Justice Department leaked in advance of John Brennan’s confirmation hearings to be CIA director, that had a definition of the word “imminent” not even the most barely literate English speaker would recognize as the definition of “imminent.” It basically was like if you ever thought about terrorism in your life, we can kill you in a drone strike.
—Jeremy Scahill
The Government’s Secret War with Drones
As many of you know, I have a soft spot for losers. Even when a clear serial killer is on trial, I feel bad for them. And as a result, I’ve long felt somewhat protective of the Neanderthals. Over three years ago, I wrote, 
There is a difference between focus and exclusion. If something matters, this does not imply nothing else does. If I saw “Law Students Matter” it does not imply that my colleagues, friends, and family do not. Here is something else that matters: context. The Black Lives Matter Movement arose in a context of evidence that they don’t. When people are receiving messages from the culture in which they live that their lives are less important than other lives, it is a cruel distortion of reality to scold them for not being inclusive enough…
John Jay was the first Chief Justice of the United States. Appointed at a time when the Supreme Court played a far more diminished role than it does today — the Court heard only four cases during Jay’s six years on the bench — Jay took a break from his judicial duties to serve as President Washington’s envoy to negotiate a trade agreement with Great Britain.
Bloomberg is really pushing the frontiers in journalism. In order to give readers a balanced account of a proposal by Representative Peter DeFazio to impose a 0.03 percent tax on financial transactions (that’s 3 cents on every hundred dollars) it went to the spokesperson for the Investment Company Institute, the chief investment officer from Vanguard, and an academic with extensive ties to the financial industry. It also presented an assertion on the savings from electronic trading from Markit Ltd. Based on this diverse range of sources, Bloomberg ran a headline: “Democrats assail Wall Street with plan that may hit mom and pop.” …
When I first started this blog, I had no idea whatsoever what I was doing. I knew computers, of course. And I set up my first web server in 1993. And I was, I guess, an expert with HTML, CSS, JavaScript. And I’m a decent enough PHP programmer. But I’d never used a content management system before. And I didn’t read blogs. In fact, I wouldn’t even call Frankly Curious a blog for the first couple of years. Most of all, I had no thoughts about it being publishing in the grand sense: there was no layout, and most of all: no webpage images.
Police are civilians. They are the civil power. They are not soldiers. They are subject to the rule of law adjudicated within civilian courts — not military justice. They are tasked with special powers and thus burdened with specific responsibilities and duties — but they’re civilians. They answer to mayors and (civilian) police commissioners and city councils and ultimately the public.
Is Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog right when he says, 
None of this means that a split, should it come, is something anyone in the Labour Party should welcome. It would be unspeakably selfish and venal, conducted for the most narrow, shortsighted and base of motives. And the mere fact that it would be intended to trash Labour, to hurt it so badly that it returns to obedience, should inspire rage and contempt.
I got an email message from one of my writers about our style guide, “Frontend vs front-end vs front end?” I love that because writers tend not to pay attention to style guides. And the truth is that while writers should have a decent knowledge of the style guide, it is really for the use of the editor. The better the writer knows the style guide, the less work there is for the editor. But this was a really good question. It wasn’t in the style guide, and I had to decide.
Over the past few years, we’ve heard a lot about President Obama’s secret kill list. Yet still we know virtually nothing about its implementation. Despite mild Congressional scrutiny and ACLU lawsuits directed at the shroud of secrecy, some basic questions remain unanswered. How do you get on the list? Am I on the list? Who put me on the list? How do you get off the list? Can you get off the list?