While we're on the topic of elevating abusive cops above world leaders, I've got two more candidates for future beer summits–and one of 'em's local!

In Mobile, Alabama, cops tazed and pepper-sprayed a deaf man with a mental age of 10 because he spent too much time in a dollar store bathroom:

Love...says he was not feeling well and was in the bathroom for about a half-hour before the police "throw poison under the door." Soon they broke into the bathroom, he recalled in an account he wrote for his family, and "the police get the tazz three strings in my stomach, chest and hand and hit my head." Later, he says, "I saw police laugh at me."

According to Jacob Sullum at Reason, the cops arrested Love even after they learned he wasn't the average vagrant.

And according to HuffPo's Arthur Delaney, D.C. cops recently pulled a Gates-like stunt on U Street:

[Tuma] told the Huffington Post that in a loud sing-song voice, he then chanted, "I hate the police, I hate the police."

One officer reacted strongly to Tuma's song. "Hey! Hey! Who do you think you're talking to?" Tuma recalled the officer shouting as he strode across an intersection to where Tuma was standing. "Who do you think you are to think you can talk to a police officer like that?" the police officer said, according to Luke Platzer, 30, one of Tuma's companions.

Tuma said he responded, "It is not illegal to say I hate the police. It's not illegal to express my opinion walking down the street."

According to Tuma and Platzer, the officer pushed Tuma against an electric utility box, continuing to ask who he thought he was and to say he couldn't talk to police like that.

Tuma was arrested for disorderly conduct.

In fact, all three men–Gates, Love, Tuma–we’re charged with disorderly conduct. How many of them are going to sip beers in the garden behind the White House? The mentally disabled deaf man? He wouldn't have much to say. The loud-mouth gay guy? He had it coming. And Gates? Well duh! He’s already famous!

And a little side note to Warren Goldstein at HuffPo, who frames white privilege by talking about how he almost house-sat the wrong house but wasn't arrested when a patrol car showed up because he is white: You were spared arrest, Mr. Goldstein, not just because of your skin color, but also because you were polite. Authority demands respect, and when you give it, authority rewards you by not arresting your ass on bullshit charges.

More beer summits!

"The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention man need ever make." Statistician I.J. Good said that in 1965 in an early attempt to define technological singularity, or the moment when a machine's independent intelligence first genuinely surpasses a human's. (Think Skynet from the Terminator movies: machines run the show and humans are detritus; or, at best, slaves to their creations.)

Good's quote is the first thing readers will see nestled inside the front cover in Nanoman: The Post-Human Prometheus. Opposite the text is a panel, drawn by "rising star" Jon Reed, depicting a mechanical man dressed like Matlock sitting at a writing desk...on the bare surface of the moon.

Planet Nerd has plenty of people who believe in Singularity with all their hearts, minds, bodies, and souls; and also people who think the theory makes for great comedy fodder, like the Mayan Calendar or the Book of Revelation. Arthur Delaney, a frequent Washington City Paper contributor and the editor of Nanoman, seems torn between the two. He insists that the powerful technology in his comic book isn't all that far-fetched, and emphasizes that it's definitely not a joke. "Everything in here is fanciful, but they aren't things that don't already exist." But when pressed, he retracts the emphasis on "not": Delaney's trying to sell a graphic novel, not convince me that he's insane by ranting about the robot men on the moon and the mechanical spiders that can recall a person's life history by viewing him or her through a special camera (quick note: In real life, Delaney on cameras is Delaney on fire).

As far as openers go, allusions to the future enslavement of the human race by their televisions/dishwashers/MacBooks don't make for novel comic-book epigrams. While I could only come up with two examples off the top of my head–the Divine Right mini-series, which features a pizza boy who gains God's powers by chatting up a BDSM goddess through the InterWebz, and The Ultimates Three, in which Hank Pym's "Ultron robot drugs him and leaks a sex tape of [Tony "I Am Iron Man"] Stark and the Black Widow to the Internet"–everything in comics has been done before, including luddite-inspired creation anxiety. The question is, Does Nanoman do it better?

Turns out, the threat of a machine uprising in Nanoman is peripheral–at least in this first issue–to the emphasis on conflicting ideas about national security. Nanoman's stock Pentagon characters are loyal to the mission and believe that they're doing good by designing ever-more invasive mechanisms for homeland protection. Lt. Col. John Burden, one of the story's principle characters (Nanoman has a limited ensemble cast instead of a main protagonist), is one such character. An urban antiterrorism pioneer and a strong believer in good ole' fashion crime cameras and phone-taps, Burden is fighting obsolescence as the Pentagon invests more resources in surveillance-capable Nanospiders. The first issue's climax occurs when Burden and company find out (using an old-fashioned phone tap with a human monitoring it) about an impending terrorist attack on a New York shopping mall. The final scene of the issue, in which Burden is tasked with recruiting a nano-tech wunderkind to work for the Pentagon, suggests that Burden's ambivalence about new technology will be the prevailing conflict of the graphic novel.

In addition to mirroring a real-world struggle between civil liberties advocates and statists, Nanoman also jabs at consumer culture. In the "Mall of Manhattan," large-screen billboards feature U.S. troops endorsing "True Patriot Cola," the "only cola that supports our troops." The mall also contains a "sanctuary," which basically serves as an electronic personal buyer. To enter the sanctuary (which looks like a steampunk'd Stargate portal), shoppers have to "speak with a credit counselor at a hospitality kiosk."

Nanoman's plot is engaging and easy to follow, and Jon Reed's drawing is very fine: gray-scale Neo-noir pen lines played against City-of-the-Future scenery (made famous by early Judge Dredd comics). The first issue's weaknesses–confusing panel placement in some scenes, arbitrarily emphasized words that don't replicate real speech patterns, and the pedantic (and frequent) Arabic exchanges between the story's Muslim terrorists (I suppose it was only a matter of time before everyday phrases like "salamalaikum" and "Allahu Akbar" made their way from stock CNN footage into the fictional terrorist's character profile)–are easy to overlook, especially since the end of the first issue left me wanting to know what happens next. Cliffhangers used to be a regularity in the comic book world, as they were one of very guaranteed ways to get pre-Internet nerds back in the comic book shop month after month, or–in the case of publishing houses who can't manage their artists–every six months. (My first letter to a celebrity, written when I was 12 years old, began: "Dear Joe Madureira, please go fuck yourself for ruining Battle Chasers...") But Delaney and crew are putting out a graphic novel, which means fewer installments and a definitive end to the storyline; and as of right now, the comic is only available online.

Is now a good time to launch a graphic novel? Delaney swears up and down that Nanoman can't lose, not with Jon Reed drawing; not with Delaney's brother-in-law Luigi Cicala writing a storyline that's equal parts The Siege and I Am Robot ; and certainly not with Delaney editing. And it helps that the sales of graphic novels increased by $20 million from 2007 to 2008.

In short, Delaney says, Nanoman "is too big to fail."

City Paper Contributor Arthur Delaney did some fine work on this week's cover story, "In Loco Parentis," which investigates how one 19-year-old who's about to "age-out" got stuck in D.C.'s foster system. She's the second in three generations of Child and Family Services: Her mother and her daughters are all part of the cycle.

Shawntaye Debrew has had placement after placement. She has two kids—Paris and London—who are no longer with her. Her sister wound up dead. She has had some trouble with weed and no GED.

The system didn't put Debrew in a case file and forget about her; it's been the one constant in her life. Who's to blame for this sad story? Delaney's been working at the answer for about six months. The results are complicated and, we think, pretty well-told.

(City Paper illustration by Doug Boehm)

Don't be fooled by the blazer, folks. Arthur Delaney may look like your typical District politico, but he drinks his beers one at a time. Just like the rest of us.

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version.

Photograph by Darrow Montgomery

Delaney Projections Done Right:

I thought of all my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing about.

—Jack Kerouac, On the Road

ANC 6B08 is one of the District of Columbia's great bellwether jurisdictions. Long known as Barney Circle or east Capitol Hill or just plain "D.C., man," 6B08 is the land of low-slung town homes, down-to-earth political activists, and well-kept front lawns, not to mention the occasional astro-turfed front stoop. Sandwiched among RFK Stadium, the campus of the now-defunct D.C. General Hospital, and the more prosperous western Capitol Hill, 6B08 is a proving ground for politicians across the city–a dynamic that makes it a particularly critical ANC race in 2008.

What Delaney has going for him:

• Youth
• The element of surprise
• Clean pants

What Delaney doesn't have going for him:

• Nothing

— Will Atwood Mitchell, Ted Scheinman, Erik Wemple