The town of Killington, 25 miles outside the border of New Hampshire, voted to secede from Vermont today. The article says it was a symbolic vote and that decision will be up to Vermont and New Hampshire. Laughs aside, is this really possible? I wonder if a state has ever voluntarily given another state a town it didn’t want anymore. If it is possible, I move that Ohio just go ahead and give Cincinnati to Kentucky.

If it turns out that a town needn’t be near the border to be eligible, I’d also like to move that Ohio attempt to trade Akron for Muncie, Indiana.

The Washington Post reports that the Supreme Court is gearing up to wade into the issue of whether prisoners at the United States naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are entitled to access to civilian courts to challenge their open-ended detention.

What’s fascinating about this case to me is the fact that both sides agree that if the detainees were held on U.S. soil, they would be entitled to some constitutional rights. But the Executive branch is using the fact that Guantanamo Bay is not on U.S. soil to claim that under Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763 (1950), the U.S. courts do not have jurisdiction to hear any case brought by detainees.

According to the Washington Post:

How to characterize Guantanamo Bay is of such importance because it is clear that noncitizens do have certain constitutional rights if they are within United States territory. On the other hand, the court has frequently invoked the Eisentrager precedent, even out of its wartime military context, to stand for the proposition that outside the territorial reach of the United States, aliens have no such rights.

The brief filed for the Britons and Australians by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a liberal public interest law firm in New York, told the court that “we alone exercise power at Guantanamo Bay” and that the base should therefore be treated for jurisdictional purposes as part of the United States. In the administration’s view, not only is that conclusion incorrect but it is not one that the court is free to make. The determination of sovereignty over a particular territory is “not a question on which a court may second-guess the political branches,” Solicitor General Olson said in his brief.

The court seems a little hot and bothered by the audacity of the Executive branch. The Post notes:

It was evident on Monday that this, too, was a question on which the justices want to have the final word. That conclusion emerged from a comparison of how the administration phrased the question presented by the two cases with how the justices phrased it in their order granting review. Solicitor General Olson said the question was whether the federal courts had jurisdiction to decide the legality of detaining “aliens captured abroad in connection with ongoing hostilities and held outside the sovereign territory of the United States at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.”

The Supreme Court, by contrast, said it intended to decide the jurisdiction of the courts to hear challenges to “the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.” The court’s question incorporated no assumption about whether the base was or was not “outside the sovereign territory of the United States.”

As reported by the New York Times - the C.I.A. Needs to Learn Arabic.

The DoD wants to “slap an electronic tag on every item in its inventory. . . except bulk commodities such as sand, gravel or liquids” according to this story in the Register.

via Ernest Miller

This is why I need to get into government. The FCC is caving to pressure from Jack and the gang and is about to sign some laws in to effect that are down right scary. You can read about it here.

Basically, the FCC wants to have “broadcast flags” embedded in all digital television. They also want all hardware manufacturers (computers, DVD players, etc.) to build “broadcast flag” compliant products. Supposedly this will help thwart the copying and disseminating of “high value”content on the Internet.

There are so many problems with this. Top on my list is the fact that the government should not be regulating how our emerging technology gets built. This could have a drastic effect on innovation. Smaller issues include the fact that consumers may be forced to buy new systems, and I cannot believe that the MPAA has this much say. The quote below is from the article linked above:

Of greatest concern to some opponents, including major technology companies such as Microsoft Corp., is that device makers, tech firms and the entertainment industry could not agree on the technology that would be used in devices to recognize the flag and act accordingly.

Instead, the FCC has been working from a proposed rule drafted by the Motion Picture Association of America, which gives the moviemakers a strong hand in evaluating which technologies to use.

That is terrifying… the MPAA has the only seat at the table. They are literally writing the rules.