Mayor Villaraigosa talks realignment, infrastructure and jobs. Federal judge green-lights Alabama immigration enforcement. Can robots replace soldiers in the theater of war? The decisive moment – is it for real?
Mayor Villaraigosa talks realignment, infrastructure and jobs
Between the looming prison realignment starting this weekend, the sign-off from the Governor on Los Angeles’ Farmer’s Field and sundry infrastructure projects, LA’s Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has a lot on his plate right now.
Last week, Villaraigosa led a delegation of mayors in urging President Obama and Congress to work together to create jobs and rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. And earlier this month one of his pet projects, the expansion of the Expo line, broke ground.
Mayor Villaraigosa was also one of the earliest supporters of the new football stadium that will be built in downtown, and with the Governor signing a bill to fast track environmental complaints on the project, it looks like we could have a team on the gridiron by 2013.
WEIGH IN:
Will the Mayor’s major projects bring jobs to the city as he promises? What impact will the prison realignment have on an already stretched police department? And, will Villaraigosa’s focus on infrastructure make a difference in LA’s city streets, sidewalks and public utilities?
GUEST:
Antonio Villaraigosa, Mayor, City of Los Angeles
Federal judge green-lights Alabama immigration enforcement
With a rapidly growing Hispanic population, Alabama Republicans have long sought to stem the tide of illegal immigration. Last June, GOP Governor Robert Bentley signed HB 56, the nation’s toughest immigration law, saying it was necessary to protect jobs for Alabama’s legal residents. The law was immediately challenged by the Department of Justice and numerous advocacy organizations who said it goes too far.
Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Sharon Blackburn decided to allow most of HB56 to stand. She said federal law doesn’t prohibit police from stopping people suspected of being in the country illegally. The ruling also allows for schools to verify the immigration status of students, which civil rights advocates say will inspire fear in schoolchildren and impose financial burdens on schools.
While Blackburn agreed with portions of the DOJ’s challenge, she disagreed with many more. It’s a win for state-rights advocates, but immigration-support groups are stunned and almost certainly will appeal. In the past, federal courts have blocked similar, less restrictive immigration laws in other states, including Arizona, Utah, Indiana and Georgia. But yesterday Blackburn refused to extend the temporary block, which expires today.
WEIGH IN:
Do you think the Alabama restrictions go too far? Are its policies unconstitutional? Should other states follow suit to protect American jobs?
Guest:
Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State; Constitutional law expert and former law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City; Former counsel to Attorney General John Ashcroft on immigration law
Marshall Fitz, Director of Immigration Policy, Center for American Progress; Previously Director of Advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association
Can robots replace soldiers in the theater of war?
Earlier this month, the CIA killed a top al-Qaeda leader in Pakistan, according to US officials. The method of attack was a CIA drone strike, and while details of the method remain secret, in all likelihood the drone was controlled remotely by a pilot thousands of miles away from the scene.
But what if there wasn't even a pilot in a far-away land? What if the drone had been programmed to locate certain characteristics of the al-Qaeda operative and execute a kill without any direct human involvement? As The Washington Post reported recently, the military wants even more sophisticated unmanned technology to fight its enemies. It's said robots can act faster in challenging real-time scenarios. Scientific advances could lead to drones hunting, identifying and killing a targeted enemy based on calculations made by software.
The developments are so worrying to a group of scientists that they are calling for an international ban on "automated lethality." The International Committee for Robot-Arms Control says all the ethical, legal and societal factors of war cannot be programmed into an automaton. How far along are scientists in developing such drones?
WEIGH IN:
How sophisticated could they be and should they be? Is it realistic to think that humans can be taken so far outside of the loop? Should there be a ban on "automated lethality" before the military is even capable of it? What about the current use of drones -- do you support the Obama administration reportedly expanding use outside of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia?
Guests:
Ron Arkin, Regents’ Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing, has published extensively on autonomous systems; Consultant in the area of intelligent robotic systems
Peter Asaro, Founder, International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) and Professor at The New School in New York
The decisive moment – is it for real?
It’s one of the most infamous images of the Great Depression: the sun-bleached skull of a steer on the parched, drought-stricken plains of South Dakota. When the photo, taken by Farm Security Administration photographer Arthur Rothstein, ran in The Washington Post, it served as a graphic depiction of the scourge of overgrazed land and the plight of the nation’s homesteaders.
It was later revealed that the skull had been positioned by Rothstein, and the image selected and captioned by the Post’s editors, presumably to make a more dramatic point. The photo was subsequently branded a “fake” and labeled New Deal propaganda.
There are countless examples of such iconic images, from the Crimean War through Abu Ghraib, that have served to inflame, astonish and galvanize us with stark reality. But how real are they? Even before the advent of Photoshop, we’ve had reason to wonder - is this a decisive moment, captured by a skilled and objective photojournalist? Or an image staged or selected to tell a specific story, convey a chosen point of view? What does it tell us about the photographer and his or her motivations?
In his new book, award-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris explores the mysteries behind well-known photographs, seeking out the true relationships between the pictures and the real world they supposedly record.
WEIGH IN:
So, is seeing believing? When it comes to photography, can we trust our eyes? What do the images in our daily newspaper or on the internet tell us about our world? What do our reactions tell us about ourselves? What famous photographs have affected you deeply – and why?
Guest:
Errol Morris, author of "Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography)." Morris is the Academy Award-winning director of "The Fog of War" and the recipient of a Macarthur “Genius” Award.