Your Only Plame L - Oh, Who Am I Kidding? - Ted Barlow lays it out so clearly that even a "confused" warblogger can understand it. Short, sweet and grammatical.

Also, via Atrios, former CIA employee Larry Johnson, who among other things is listed as a Fox News contributor, tells the NewsHour that Valerie Plame "has been under cover for three decades."

But I still can't square the plain facts of this story with my dearly-held illusions about the White House! Sorry, Mr. Confused Warblogger. As JFK said, life's not fair.

Oh by the way, confused warblogger guys? Bill Clinton was guilty of perjury and should have been impeached. Just thought I'd mention.

UPDATE: Doh! I mean convicted by the Senate. It's been awhile.

Nutshell Guide - From Juan Cole:

And that is the greatest irony of all. Ms. Plame, who really was working to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, has been ruined by persons who only pretended to do so for political gain, and whose invasion of Iraq did nothing to make the US one whit safer.

Your Only Plame Game Link of the Day - Okay, that's almost certainly a lie - but it's the only one you need. (Via Crooked Timber.)

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? - Plame Game apologists have been linking to a Clifford May article on NRO in which he claims, basically, that "everybody knew" that Valerie Plame "worked for the CIA."

That wasn't news to me. I had been told that — but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.

Oh, no biggie then. Here's the thing, though. The context of May's article makes it overwhelmingly likely just when May learned this - either while researching a July 11 NRO article attacking Wilson and other critics of the Administrations WMD case, or between the publication of that article and Novak's column. As May notes, Novak's column ran on July 14. May published a second column about Wilson on July 18.

In other words, it's entirely possible that May's informant "who formerly worked in the government" doesn't refute the existence of the smear operation; rather, he was part of it. (Hesiod thinks he knows who the someone is.)

You gotta love: He said it in an offhand manner! No former government official who is connected enough to know whose wives work for the CIA and who had information relevant to my article on a hot, breaking issue would ever try to pique my interest by mentioning something in "an offhand manner!"

Say this for May, though: he didn't use the information, even if he didn't quite realise why he was getting it. Naive, but not especially vile, is how I promise to think of him.

Further Reading - Transcript of today's Crossfire, from which Matt Drudge pulled Robert Novak's opening statement. (See a couple of items below.)

But Wait! There's More! - Come to think of it, a fun Washington fact I learned years ago from my buddy Toiler, who really is an analyst for the CIA. If someone asks him where he works, he has to tell them he works for the CIA. He is not to lie or dodge the question. Why? So he won't ruin it for the people that do have to lie or dodge the question.

This is about the millionth reason to believe that Valerie Plame really was employed in the Agency's clandestine services division: in all the times that Wilson, who surely knows the rules, and spokesmen for the White House and CIA have been asked about Plame's employment, they have not said, "She's an analyst." But if she were indeed an analyst, that's what they would say. So, can we please retire the Administration apologist defense "we don't know whether Plame was really a 'covert' employee or not"?

Thanks, guys. Go back to complaining about Iraqi media coverage or something.

Leave Me My Illusions! - Until recently I could believe that ressentiment was a malady unique to the Left. Damn the Bush Administration for stealing that, too. Glenn Reynolds in a long, Pooh-Bearlike item on Plame Game:

This seems like a case of manufactured outrage to me. I rather doubt that most of the people who are so exercised here were condemning that hero of the antiwar left, Philip Agee, who really did put lives in danger.

How. weird. My big concern is less what happened here than what some leftie may not have said thirty years ago, assuming said leftie was born or out of training pants back then, which is unlikely in the case of, oh, Hesiod, though Kevin Drum doesn't look all that fresh-faced. Anyway, my point is, before we can decide what we think about anything, we have to ask ourselves if that decision will make some liberal, somewhere, happy. That must be resisted at any cost.

Annals of Big Government - Jessica Mathews in the Post today:

At CPA planners are deep into nearly every crevice of national government, from the postal service to tax policy, from finance to telling Iraqi teachers how they could teach better. A lot of this could be and should be left to Iraqis to decide eventually, even if we're convinced that we know better. Our delegation was told of the need for "unified command and control at the political/economic level." We should know better.

When I think that this war numbers among its supporters people who have read, admire and claim to understand Friedrich Hayek - well, if I had a webcam you could see me shake my head.

Condign Punishment - In his actual column today, Robert Novak reports on the current, less optimistic mood at the Bush White House re the 2004 elections. Now some Repubs are wondering not How can Bush lose? but How can Bush win? Some stuff about electoral maps. But the big concern is fundraising:

Dramatic deterioration in the outlook over the last two weeks is reflected in the experience by a Republican businessman in Milwaukee trying to sell $2,000 tickets for Bush's only appearance this year in Wisconsin Oct. 3. In contrast to money flowing easily into the Bush war chest everywhere until now, he encountered stiff resistance. Well-heeled conservative businessmen offered to write a check for $100 or $200, but not $2,000. They gave one reason: Iraq.

The clamp on their wallets, they said, derived from their feeling that Iraq was "an albatross," and that "there is no end in sight." The performance by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld particularly came under fire. The U.N. speech made matters worse, in the eyes of these non-contributors, with the president going "hat in hand" to the General Assembly.

In fact, Bush was not begging at the U.N., but this mistaken impression reflects a breakdown in the White House propaganda machine.

Two cheers for Main Street Republicanism, which is maybe not dead yet! Okay, one cheer. And keep in mind that there are many news cycles to turn over between now and November 2004. But if conservatives continue to notice that there's nothing conservative about this administration's national "security" policy and not much that's conservative about its economic policy either (tariffs, prescription drug entitlements), then GWB's electoral apple may not fall far from the GHWB tree.

A Fanboy's Labor-Saving Device - I would have written exactly the same demolition Sean Collins wrote of that comic-book equivalent of stadium rock, the recently concluded "Hush" storyline in Batman, except that

o I'm just not that gonzo funny;
o I had the sense to bail on the series several months ago.

The good news is, even if you were even more sensible than I was, and never started it in the first place, you can still enjoy Sean's . . . valediction.

Parse of a Hole - Fun with English Grammar. Compare this sentence

Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this.

with this one:

Nobody in the Bush administration leaked this to me.

Different, huh? Naturally, the first is what Matt Drudge reports Robert Novak as saying. (Hat tip to Atrios.)

The Drudge link will decay. The text attributed to Novak runs

Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing. As a professional journalist with 46 years experience in Washington I do not reveal confidential sources. When I called the CIA in July to confirm Mrs. Wilson's involvement in the mission for her husband -- he is a former Clinton administration official -- they asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else. According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives...

Strange that Novak called her an "operative" in his July column that begat the whole Plame Game scandal:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report.

I should say that I like Robert Novak. (This was not always true.) He does reporting, unlike a lot of columnists, and he was one of the few national pundits in the 1990s who expressed any concern whatsoever about the increasing militarization of federal law enforcement. He's wrongheaded about drugs, but scarcely worse than the rest of the media.

Fair and Balanced - Bits of news this antiwar, pro-market weblog briefly acknowledges with the intention of coming back to later:

US poverty rate increases over last year.

Polls show most Iraqis think the invasion was worth it to get rid of Saddam.

(Re the latter, Newsday's analysis will also be worth going into.)

Cry Me a River - From Middle East Newsline:

LONDON [MENL] -- Al Qaida has warned its agents that the Islamic insurgency movement has been infiltrated by the United States.

An unidentified Al Qaida spokesman has warned that Al Qaida forces in Iraq appear to have been infiltrated by the United States in cooperation with unspecified Arab intelligence services. The spokesman, in a statement relayed by the London-based Center for Islamic Research and Studies, urged followers to identify and kill suspected infiltrators.

Well neener neener neener! This is great news even if it isn't true - what matters is that al Qaeda leaders think it's true. (Extra layer of intrigue: the statement itself may be a US plant - reports on the sourcing are rather vague. But if a planted statement sows doubt in al Qaeda minds, then it has worked.)

Theory that must be considered: the statement is authentic, but al Qaeda is kidding - that is, they want the US to think it's infiltration attempts have been successful when in fact our various assets have been brought under al Qaeda control. Reason to just about dismiss this theory: the statement will tend to promote a witch hunt atmosphere within the organization's ranks. That's an awfully high, and foreseeable, price to pay forslightly confusing US intelligence.

More important is to infiltrate al Qaeda outside Iraq. Hopefully the US is either on that case or is prepared to be patient with any infiltration sucesses they've had within Iraq - to let an undercover operative work his way slowly through the organization. The temptation to stick to rolling up networks in Iraq will be great.

Plame On - Hey, what's that wine-dark cloud roiling the political waters? Why - I do believe it's blood.

I also believe that, when this story initially surfaced during the summer, among the few hawks that acknowledged it, one explanation advanced was that Plame probably wasn't really a CIA officer, a low-level asset at best, if that.

This isn't a current events blog - it's a politics blog, which is something else entirely - so I'll direct you to Daniel Drezner, Tom Maguire, Mark A. Kleiman, Josh Marshall and humorist Roger Simon.

UPDATE: Bruce Baugh e-mails

It should be an impeachable offense to act in any way which makes it at all likely that any senior member of the administration can be found in circumstances under which it would make sense to say "And I would have got away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids!"

Liberty and Union! And - Outfits! - As mentioned in the fitness blog item below, I have been inveigled into "experimenting" with civil war reenactment. As I am not quite 43 yet, I will later claim this for a youthful indiscretion. My big day is October 18 at Cedar Creek in the Shenandoah Valley, when I join the Brady Sharpshooters (of some Connecticut regiment or other) at the behest of my buddy the author, Michael Schaffner. (Poetry? Prose? He's got you covered.)

Yesterday we did a five-mile conditioning hike along the W&OD trail in Herndon. My new comrades were able to fit me out with everything except pants and a pack - including period shoes and an Enfield rifle. I'm here to tell you: we have better shoes now. I'm pretty sure we have better guns too.

What did I learn on my hike, besides the authorized positions in which to carry your rifle and the authorized ways to move it from one to the other? That reenactors are, fundamentally, women. As Michael and the guys, who have a great sense of humor about their hobby, for all that they clearly love it, put it:

We talk about clothes. We shop for clothes. We talk about shopping. We talk about what other people are wearing. We gossip.

How much are you wearing, I asked Captain Bill before we set out?

"You mean, how much weight?"

"No," I said. "How much money?"

The answer appeared to be, in the low thousands of dollars. Uniform components about a grand, of which the shoes were, IIRC, the single biggest expense; "kit" about another grand, with a rifle accounting for about half that expense and the rest going to the backpack, ancillary bags, canteen etc. Because the Brady Sharpshooters are Union reenactors, they get off cheap. Confederate reenactors have to buy a complete Union outfit to participate in the hobby - there are many more confederate reenactors than union ones, so many events can take place only if a certain number of rebels are "galvanized" into yankee units. A Union reenactor doesn't have to buy Confederate gear unless he wants to occasionally swing that way.

I'll tell you what, though. After you've been marching for 45 minutes, water tastes really good coming out of one of those canteens.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Weight 165 pounds, waist just over 33". Stalled, basically. I'd love to lose five more pounds of fat, but they ain't coming off so far. This was Bad Boy Week too - I skipped all my aerobics sessions except one, imagining to make it all up with

The Andersonville Diet - Actually, this overstates the privation I experienced Saturday morning. I didn't miss any meals. But I did go on a five-mile hike with my friend Michael Schaffner's civil war reenactment buddies, and I did wear Union bluecoat and blouse, canteens, bags, belts and period shoes, and I toted an Enfield rifle. Next time you get into an argument about the Causes of the American Civil War, consider the possibility that everyone was just really hot and sweaty and it made them short-tempered.

Here's a useful article on how to keep your office workspace diet-friendly.

Fitness Blog of the Soul - I admire author, editor and game designer Bruce Baugh a lot, likely more than he admires himself. His perspective on his life and health is the impetus behind his new weblog. This very personal blog takes off from Dante's famous opening of the Inferno, about having travelled half of our life's way. It will cover diet, work, health, emotion and more.

In other fitness blogs - Actually, it's getting kind of lonely. People either aren't posting at all or aren't posting about their regimens.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive - Thanks to the kindness of Mr. Bruce Baugh, I'm now a paid-up member of Rock Scissors Blog - at least, I assume the others paid the same as I did (nothin'). Bruce has invited me and unspecified others to help liven the place up, so if it's hot abstruse RPG theory you're looking for, stop on by. My inaugural post is up and others will follow. Ironists may find some amusement that not only does this mean I'm back on blogger - on a blogspot blog yet - but with a blog that uses the blogger template I've made fun of repeatedly.

On the other hand, no one has stepped forward to bankroll my national chain of comic book stores yet. But it's the weekend.

We're Here, We're Queer Marriage Bloggers, Get Used to It - Joining the discussion are actual gay guy Alan Sullivan of Fresh Bilge and straight married woman Sappho of Nole Irritare Leones - also a disquisition on gender roles and bullying by Camassia. Every one of them is worth reading. Brief responses:

I'll pretty much sign on to every word of Camassia's item (which does not address the issue(s) of same-sex marriage itself).

Alan writes, "Ecclesiastical law is none of my business. Disapproval is not discrimination." I completely agree. I'd be against any attempt to get the government to force churches to marry gay couples regardless of doctrine, even if that were constitutional. But as it stands now, a church that wants to marry gay couples - and they exist - finds that those particular sacraments don't have the force of law that their joining of straight couples does. So in addition to everything else, the prohibition of SSM limits freedom of religion. I'm probably more in tune with the remarks of Tim Hulsey in his comments section than with Alan's argument itself, but I liked this part: "I really don't care whether some yahoo fundamentalist dislikes gays. If he throws a rock through the window over my desk, however, he may get shot."

Sappho just about squares the liberal circle on gender roles. She also - yikes! - drops some actual data into the discussion. (No, I haven't studied the study yet.)

It Never Hurts to Ask - I'd like to join a group RPG-oriented blog, one with an emphasis on theory. (Not computer RPGs but the tabletop kind.) Alas, the only one I know of has a membership of high-powered professionals and is dormant. If you run one I can join, please let me know.

Also, if you'd like to bankroll the nationwide chain of comic-book retailers that Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada says the industry needs, drop me a line. I've got years of retail management behind me, additional background in accounting analysis and a vision that I'm convinced can make money.

For the Troops - Via Gjovaag and others: Operation Comix Relief aims to donate comics to wounded and ill US soldiers in Iraq. No fair dumping all your copies of 1602 and Batman: Hush on our fighting men and women, though - they've got enough problems.

I can not personally vouch for this particular charity, so donate at your own risk. I like the idea though.

Actually, if Diamond Distributors and the various comics publishers had any brains at all, they'd figure out a way to ship some of their overstock directly to the forces in theater. These folks will get home eventually - most of them anyway - and if some of them came home with a taste for comics, that would be a boon to the industry. (All I Need to Know I Learned from my Crack Dealer.)

Speaking of charities, don't forget blogger Chief Wiggles' program to distribute toys to Iraqi kids.

Some News Just Makes Your Day - Via Laura "Tegan" Gjovaag, this report that cartoonist Lynn Johnston "plans on ending her strip 'For Better Or For Worse' in a few years." Better would be a report that Lynn Johnston will use arcane rituals to blot the memory of For Better or for Worse from the minds of man," but sometimes you take what you can get.

Straight Eye on the Queer Tie II - Eve wonders what a hardcore libertarian like me is doing arguing the details of same-sex marriage rather than simply insisting that marriage be treated as just another contract, outside the purview of the state entirely. It's a fair question. I do think of marriage as, among other things, a contract, and as something that implicates all sorts of other contractual arrangements. Pretty much all of my section two treats the prohibition on SSM as a right-of-contract problem - in present circumstances, the state refuses to enforce various types of contracts that a gay couple in love may wish to enter into - contracts that it will enforce for straight people.

Second, apart from the question of whether the state should be in the business of endorsing and forbidding types of marriage is the social question of gay marriage as a phenomenon. The social question is itself interesting, and doesn't disappear with the state's role in my utopia. Gay marriage, legal or not, is still a good or bad idea that takes one or more forms and has whatever impacts.

Third is the familiar libertarian necessity of arguing in terms chosen by others. The United States is not a libertarian society and won't be in my lifetime. But it may, in some ways, become a freer society. Sometimes pushing it in that direction means meeting people on their field rather than mine.

Moira Breen pipes up to agree with Eve that, childless couples or no, marriage is about rearing children and that trumps "fairness" concerns. (She also says that same-sex marriage opponents have not yet demonstrated that legalized SSM will "work against the interests of children.")

I clearly need to address the issue of gay marriage and child-rearing in more detail as I take in more of the opponents' arguments purporting to show the harm. Right now they are hazy in my mind and, I think, in much of the writing of gay marriage opponents. My major concern in yesterday's item was to deal with the separate "harm to straight marriage" argument.

But I would note for the time being that gay couples are raising children already. Well okay, rearing children. Sorry, Mrs. Conrad from Third Grade. The link is strictly from Lazy Google, for which I apologize, but while the census numbers may be inflated somewhat, I'd be surprised if anyone argued that the phenomenon wasn't real.

Absent a draconian program of keeping kids out of the homes of gays, the question is not whether it's better for for gay people or straight people to raise kids, it's whether it's better for gay people to raise kids inside marriage or outside marriage. I strongly suspect the answer is: inside marriage.

I'd also argue that the very phenomenon of the "gay-by boom" is more evidence that, as the queer activists fear, the real influence trend is gays emulating straight behavior rather than straights emulating gay behavior.

I've probably got more to say about gender roles later, but a brief thought for now: From what I can tell, gays love their kids too. So if it becomes widely accepted that straight children of gay parents have special gender-model needs, particularly straight children opposite in gender to their parents, I would expect actual gay parents will invest a fair amount of thought and ingenuity in finding ways to meet those needs. Magazine articles, advice books, Yahoo groups, pediatrician's office classes, the playgrounds of parks in gay neighborhoods, coffee klatches - all the places that parents try to figure out what the hell they're doing before they ruin their children. I promise to blather about all the healthy and unhealthy places gender models come from later; for now my argument is simply that gay parents will be motivated to find solutions to the problem, to the extent that it is a problem.

There will be a minority of politically-stubborn gay couples who reject any developing consensus, just as some deaf couples regret having borne children who can hear. Some gay parents will screw up their children for political reasons. You don't have to be gay to do that, though. Hell, David Horowitz never did recover. Most gay parents will just be schmucks like us, getting on with their schmuck-y lives and doing the best they can. Heather may have two mommies, in other words, but neither of Heather's mommies will have two heads.

All Tinfoil Hats Look the Same in the Dark - Dr. Manhattan tips me to Gregg Easterbrook's series of imprecations against DC/Maryland utility PepCo for the quality of their post-Isabel power-restoration efforts. His thesis is that PepCo has deliberately dragged their feet because a long outage suits them: they want a sustained blackout fresh in the minds of the utility commission when they press for rate increases later this year. To that end, argues Easterbrook, they've actually gotten around to restoring power in the area's wealthiest areas last, so elite opinion will be especially receptive.

It could be. One thing that Easterbrook is certainly right about is the changed relationship between the Washington Post and those elites - these days the Post is all for 'em. It lives to get its publishers and executives invited to the best parties and break bread with said elite at the best restaurants. (This had everything to do with the editorial page's favorable Winter and Spring attitude toward the war that the Post, the poobahs and Easterbrook all favored.)

He may, despite this item's cutesy title, be right about the rest too. (Easterbrook describes PepCo as existing in a partially deregulated and partially regulated environment, which is to say a regulated environment. That is, they are rent-seekers.)

See Easterbrook's items from Day 6, Day 7.

Hunh - So Edward Said is dead. I never liked him. In my neoliberal days I actively disliked him. (It got me a discount on my New Republic subscription.) Even after going completely off the reservation on foreign policy issues, I still didn't like Said because he blathered. He was an unusually bad writer even for a contemporary academic.

For all that, and notwithstanding his long history of apologetics for terrorism, I wonder these days, with Jesse Walker, whether Said may have been right about one thing: that the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is not viable, and a unitary democratic state really is the only arrangement that can work. My immediate reaction is, the Israelis would be nuts to try it under present conditions. My next reaction is, all the hopeful paths forward in the middle east are nuts. And back and forth like that.

But then Diana Moon dropped another possibility on me:

Three-state solution. Palestine for the Arab nationalists, Israel for the Jewish nationalists, and the Free State of Haifa, for secular non-nationalists. No taxes, and no vote, either. A revolving citizens council. No army, naturally. You'd have to sign an affidavit saying you are a functional atheist.

Only the last sentence is a joke. I'm dead serious on the rest of it.

And hey, why the hell not? (I'd keep an army: in that neighborhood you need one.) I could imagine the Free State becoming the Singapore of the Med, but funkier.

Oh by the way, yes I am long familiar with the argument that Palestinians who call for a "unitary, democratic state" only want that long enough to vote the Jews into oblivion. I don't dismiss the possibility, and it factors into my reluctance to embrace the one-state idea. (That and the fact that it's only my business insofar as my country is the chief underwriter of Israeli policy.)

The Rats of NIMD - Noah Shachtman reports that the "BRIDE OF 'TIA' LIVES."

"Pursued with a minimal public profile and lacking a polarizing figure like Adm. Poindexter to galvanize opposition, NIMD has proceeded quietly even as TIA imploded," Aftergood writes.

Excuse me a second while I am not surprised.

Comics Blogwatch - Lean Left, of all sites, picks up and runs with my item about comics stores.

Speaking of that item, Sean Collins amplifies the basic retail principle of putting your staples where people who know you have them will have to pass other things. There are some exceptions to the principle that are worth noting even though I don't think they apply. If you're in a competitive industry, you'll stick the "hot" items and categories toward the front hoping to trigger the impulse to buy it now, from you rather than your competition. When I was running bookstores, my mall-based chain made sure to stick the bestseller sections and anticipated bestseller sections out front. After all, chances were you had a competitor in the same mall - you had to grab the walker's eye right this instant and get her across your lease line rather than down the hall where the other store had the same book. And since hundreds of new titles come out every week, not dozens, and casual readers don't memorize shipping schedules, not even necessarily for their favorite authors, you need to stick hot new releases in the public face, so the public face knows the book even exists.

This has approximately nothing to do with the situation of the typical comics shop.

Speaking of Sean Collins, he praises the new issue of Captain America, which reminds me that last week he went into an odd rant about my equivocal reaction to the prior issue. "Jim Henley . . . gets the most recent issue of Captain America completely wrong," he wrote. This despite the fact that I said that the previous stories in the run - the ones Sean didn't like - were bad, and that the premise of the current story - which Sean calls the right way to do Captain America - was a good one. My complaints pertained strictly to the execution of said premise. I can't help but think that Sean assumed, based on my prominent membership in the anti-American conspiracy, that I meant something completely other than what I said.

Eve Tushnet has a whole bunch of new comics reviews. I squinted during the reviews of the Finder books I haven't gotten to yet.

Before lending me his copy of Sandman: Endless Nights, Nate Bruinooge posted a substantial review to Polytropos. I squinted through it too, but you don't have to.

Alan David Doane is giving up his Comic Book Galaxy site, which is a drag. Worse, he implies that he's giving up the attached ADD weblog too. Dammit Alan, if you haven't heard, running a weblog isn't all that hard. In the immortal words of maniacal artificial intelligences and bizarre alien lifeforms everywhere, "Don't! . . . Leave! . . . Me! Don't! . . . Leave! . . . Me!"

Straight Eye on the Queer Tie - I haven't been persuaded by any of the arguments against gay marriage I've seen. I prefer to deal with Eve Tushnet's, because one knows that her arguments aren't animated by anti-gay animus.

But that doesn't make the arguments persuasive. Let's break the case against down into a couple of elements, taking Eve's report of an AFF debate and her Jewish World Review article as our texts. (And this one and this one too.) And, oh yes! there will be numbered subsections!

1) Eve: "Opponents of SSM need to work much harder on explaining what "the children!" are doing in our argument. There needs to be much more careful attention to the role of ideals and models in people's lives. Instead, we're getting bogged down in questions about infertile couples, etc., which I think are just plain irrelevant."

The discussion also "bogs down" in discussion of couples who are childless by choice. There are a lot of them and, if one is male and one is female, they are legally permitted to marry in the United States. Clearly, while marriage is a sound structure for the rearing of children - I know no better - marriage is not just that.

It ain't bogging down to note relevant facts. Legally and practically, marriage is not only about rearing children.

2) Eve is concerned about what it is not: "Advocates of SSM really need to stop talking about me and my best friend when they think they're talking about marriage." I see this as connecting to an earlier statement: "Like most of these discussions, it was framed in terms of heteros vs. homos. I think that's unnecessary and misleading; I've said before that I think this is an issue about men and women, not gays 'n' straights."

Here's my problem. I do think this is an issue about men and women. One of the ways it's about men and women has to do with sanctity of contract. Some men and some women cannot, as I can, be sure that their wish that certain important medical decisions will be made by the person they love and trust most in all the world will be honored, in the event of their incapacitation. Some men and some women cannot bequeath their estates to their beloved without a much greater risk of having their wills torn up under challenge from the aggrieved, the greedy or the simply bigoted than I face. Some men and some women can be compelled to testify in court against their life partner in a way I can not. Some men and some women can not extend certain coverages and indemnities (insurance etc.) over their life partners as the woman and man at Unqualified Headquarters can. They would not face these difficulties if they were married. But they're not allowed to get married, even though they want to.

These are not nebulous, abstract harms. These are tangible nuggets of differential hardship. Leaving aside all that emotion stuff about being forbidden to formalize your union before your fellows in the way society has established - and I take that emotion stuff very seriously in itself - the legal and financial impact on gay men and women surely qualifies as a "heavy burden" when resolving the question of whether equal protection-type arguments should apply here.

Eve says, "marriage is not friendship" and "marriage is about sex," but this is only relevant if she is also saying, sotto voce, gay people who say they want to marry someone they love and sleep with are really just friends with that person. I personally have no reason to be sure that gay people who want to marry are that confused.

3) This gets to the issue of the extent to which "gay marriage" will or won't be like "straight marriage." Same-sex marriage advocates note that vocal queer theorists abhor the idea of gay men taming themselves into monogamous married relations. Where's the transgression in that? In response, gay advocates of gay marriage such as Andrew Sullivan have denied that that is their intent - essentially, professing that, married or not, boys will still be boys, wink wink, nudge nudge.

Same-sex marriage opponents foresee this as the causal mechanism by which legalizing gay marriage weakens the institution for heterosexuals: gays get married. Gays flout the concept of marital fidelity. Straights, especially straight men, see this going on and decide, "I want some of that concept flouting too!" And now marriage is ruined for everyone.

Let's break this down.

The first thing to note is the differential sexual behaviors of mature gay men and lesbians. Promiscuity is a gay male value, or stereotype. Since SSM opponents reject the applicability of equal-protection arguments regarding marriage rights, why don't they adopt a "Yes to gay female, no to gay male marriage" position?

I accept, by the way, the belief that men and women have different sexual priorities and that heterosexual marriage is a way to tame male sexual behavior. I'm convinced that gay men have been as promiscuous as they are because they can be - they don't have to get permission to have sex from women the way straight men do!

The next problem may strike some as minor: the causation argument depends on straight men (in marriages) observing the behavior of gay men (in marriages) and wanting to emulate gay men. That is, the theory assumes that in this matter straight men will adopt a completely different stance toward gay men than they do in almost every other aspect of life: "don't be so gay."

But here's my big demurral: the "institution-weakening" argument may be entirely wrong about the direction of influence. It takes the prospective professions of activists today for the actual behavior of rank and file gays tomorrow - Sullivan said it, I believe it and that's that. It assumes that straights will observe gays and be swayed.

But why mightn't the influence go in opposite direction? Why shouldn't we believe that the queer theorists are right, and the gay "moderates" shining them up about all that we'll still be party animals stuff? The queer theorist fear, after all, is that, gay marriage will tame gay sexuality - that the institution will be stronger than the impulses, that the drive for gay marriage represents a desire to be more like those straights with their mortgages and monogamy.

When you come down to it, the queer theorists may have more faith in the power of marriage than their strange bedfellows in the conservative opposition. And they may be right. At the very least, it's an open question. I can identify as well-defined a causal mechanism my way: gays actually start marrying. Some of them do try the catting around anyway thing. But in more and more couples, one of them puts his foot down. It occurs to him that in all those sessions laughing over the bridal magazines with his fruit fly girlfriends, that it really was "the whole package" that he wanted. (At the AFF debate, says Eve, the participants were asked to define marriage: '[The great Jonathan] Rauch, in a clipped and passionate tone, simply said, "To have and to hold, to love and to cherish, for richer and for poorer, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, 'til death do you part." ') Perhaps the quiet revolution in gay marriage will be led by the, ahem, less butch. (Perhaps not.) Marriage will turn out to be even better at taming male sexuality than we thought.

Like I said, it's at least an open question: which way is the influence more likely to run - a (let's face it) small population of gays pulling a large population of straights over to the dark side, or a large population of straights bewitching a small population of gays? I'd say the early returns actually favor my argument. Because what is the gay drive for marriage rights but a movement to be more like straight people - indeed, a demand to be allowed to be more like straight people? I used to believe merely that there was nothing gay people could do to straight marriage, that straight people would or wouldn't do it themselves. Now I suspect that there's quite a lot that straight marriage can do to - and for - gay people.

4) A brief coda on gender roles and Eve's question of what effect gay couples might have on the gender roles available to their children. Here we already have some history, and not just with gay couples. (See this amusing plaint by Jeanne d'Arc.) Because conservatives are largely right that gender roles are not just social construction, gender roles are surprisingly durable. In my own family (by marriage) I have lesbian relatives rearing a son - he strikes me as not any more screwed up about sex and gender than any other teenager. (Nor more nor less sullen.)

Eureka! - Jesse Walker sent around a link to a Corner inanity this morning so I read through a half day's entries, and I think I get it now. A lot of magazines have group weblogs. National Review publishes its Instant Messenger logs instead.

Comics Blogwatch - Two new draftees join Team Comics and Team Semi-Comics:

Grotesque Anatomy by John Jakala has started very strongly.

Worlds within Worlds by Sean Fumo is even newer - like, two days old. But the author has a substantial track record of comments and e-mails to existing comics blogs, so there's no reason to think he'll give it up after a couple of days. He's particularly strong on Things Manga.

Not by any means a new blogger, but Dirk Deppey has a substantial article about the death spiral of the direct market. He makes a good case that the market is terminal. Sometimes I feel an evidentiary disconnect between some of his criticisms of comics shops and my actual experiences. For instance, of the half dozen shops I've spent the most time in since returning to regular comics readership, all of them have substantial manga sections, prominently displayed, four of them have impressive displays of non-superhero books in both "floppy" and book form and, um, two of them are even tidy and well-merchandised. Three of the four with strong independent sections display them toward the storefront. These virtues hold true for Jim Hanley's Universe in Manhattan, too.

And yet. I "fired" the most convenient shop to my office (Alliance Comics in Bowie) because their selection of Independents was so poor, and avoid their shop closest to my house because it's generally drab. There's a shop in Rockville I ignore because it is dark, has a slim selection of most everything and - on Free Comic Book Day yet - a staff best described as "inert." Most horrifying of all is Comic Classics in Frostburg, MD (a small college town in the western end of the state). This gloomy storefront had hardly any books from the last two years when I visited it this summer. No graphic novels. Almost no manga. On the bright side, they had a 2000 DC reprint of Showcase #4 on the display wall that I picked up. It was kind of like that song:

And all the time she laughs at those who shout
her name and steal her clothes

There's a semi-famous comics/used bookstore in Wheaton where you literally can't walk to a given set of shelves on any particular day and where the owner and staff have always struck me as forbidding, and one of those appalling "comics and card" stores in Plaza del Mercado.

So, of ten or so stores with which I can claim some familiarity I would class one as superb (Big Planet Comics in Bethesda), three as excellent (Beyond Comics in Lake Forest Mall, Phoenix Comics in Herndon and Jim Hanley's), one as very good, two mediocre and three frightening.

Big Planet is the class of the lot - best fulfilling Dirk's sensible criteria for smart retailing. The window displays make some attempt to reach the culture at large. (Recently it focused on - duh! - American Splendor.) The manga is is in the front corner. The cash wrap area is tidy, boasting a big selection of kids comics. Before you get to the monthly superhero comics racks, you pass the faceout display of Tintins at the far end of the register area. A big selection of magazines and books about comics toward the back. The new books wall is in the back, and on the other side of that, a separate area for erotic comics. Independents are displayed closer to the front than the superhero backstock.

And opposite the cashwrap, running half the length of the store from just inside the front door, a better, more complete selection of trade paperbacks than you will find at the Bethesda Barnes & Noble. Everything - DC, Marvel, Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, Lightspeed Press. It's there and you can find it. The section is consciously organized to beat Barnes & Noble at the trade paperback game.

Toys and collectibles exist, and are even prominently displayed, but they don't overwhelm the space and they don't feel cluttered. The staff is knowledgeable and genial but not overbearing. There's no anti-superhero book snobbery to the display logic either - just a matter of knowing that if you're a fanboy (like me) you're going to make the walk to the back of the store, so put material that might inspire the curiousity seeker where it can catch the eye.

Some stores really know what they're doing. The question is whether they'll lift the industry up, or if the industry will disappear beneath them, so that they sink too.

Music Notes - From Deutsche Grammaphon:

"Deutsche Grammaphon presents....GET MOPEY!!! The new, not-so-fun album from Elvis Costello!

"The noted performer, praised for his chameleon-like musical abilities, releases this material after an unfortunately well-publicized controversial incident. Costello is alleged to have drunkenly said aloud to performers John Mayer and Suzanne Vega in a bar that legendary singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen was "a derelict, horny, morose Canuck". A angry scuffle nearly broke out, but everybody instead remained where they were and quietly rocked back and forth, sniffling.

"Once word of this major bum out reached the music press, Costello hastily assembled an awkward press conference to put his actions in context. 'I love depressing music,' he stammered. 'I mean, to a certain extent. Sure. But would any of you here honestly want to spent five minutes with Morrissey? He's like Bob's Big Boy constantly at a funeral. Robert Smith looks like my aunt. And Michael Stipe calls me to talk about how sad the squirrels make him. Swear to God, that's what he said. Well, that's what I could make out between the sobs. Maybe I should sing about sad squirrels. Is that what you people want from me?'

"Deutsche Grammaphon believes GET MOPEY!!! will nevertheless will prove Costello's respect for the melancholy masters. Get your copy and a box of tissues today!"

Article text by Mike Carter. (That part's for real.)

Hold That Thought - I see that Atrios is sure that, as a "good libertarian," I'll be against the new proposal for "privatizing" most Iraqi state enterprises because property rights are not possible "[i]n a country without a real system of government, a constitution, a set of laws, institutions, a court system, etc."

First off, I don't know what I think about the new proposal because (confession!) I haven't yet read much about it. It's true that, over the last decade or two, libertarians have come to recognize that many "privatization" and "deregulation" proposals don't really merit the names - they simply shift the locus of state control and at best create a favored class of politically-connected rent-seekers. At worst they are a hash of perverse incentives and conflicting impulses, such as California's bizarre scheme for energy "deregulation."

At best, though, deregulation changes whole industries for the better, as with the Carter Administration's revolutions in the trucking and airline industries. And some method of privatizing strongly socialistic political economies is vital.

I would disagree with Atrios a priori as follows. Property rights are not likely secure in "a country without a real system of government, a constitution, a set of laws, institutions, a court system, etc." They are also not necessarily secure in a country with those things. The question is which system of government, constitution, laws etc. As a historical matter, Atrios probably has the evolution backward in many cases - assertions of property rights, and informal recognition of same, often precede their formal incorporation into the legal regimen. Given a community of lobstermen, for example, you probably see first, the assertion that "Don't lay your pots where my pots are" followed by "I won't do that if you won't lay your pots next to my pots" and then "We don't lay our pots next to other people's pots" with no reference whatsoever to system of government, constitution, laws etc. Disputes will occur, which the group will initially attempt to solve by consensus, often breeding new informal procedures. ("You can't lay more pots than you can check in a week." "You can't lay pots in Spring where someone else laid pots last fall until a week has gone by.") Hard cases eventually flare into violence or court cases, but the early court cases will seek primarily to have the informal customs ratified and enforced as common law.

Consider a way that Atrios is obviously wrong in Iraq specifically. There was individual ownership in Iraq of houses, shops and firms (even if merely small ones). The system of government, constitution, laws etc. was not ideal for securing those. It was a quasi-socialist dictatorship. A Hussein could and would muscle in on your action if he wished. However, contingency aside, people clearly had houses, shops and firms that they thought of as "mine."

That government, laws, court system etc. is gone. Clearly, given what we know of Iraqi crime levels in the postwar period, the occupation regime is not doing everything it could to secure those people's rights to their property. But would we say that, the old regime having vanished, the old property rights have vanished as well - that if you owned a house, a shop or a firm in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, you now have no more right to it than anyone else? I think most Iraqis would rebel against this notion. I rebel against this notion.

Consider the reported episodes of "ethnic cleansing" in the Kurdish areas - Kurds evicting Arabs from houses in the Mosul area and putting Kurds in them. Their argument is not "We're Kurds, we won, it's ours now," but rather "These houses belonged to Kurds before Saddam's government dispossessed them and settled Arabs in their place." In other words, the argument, if not necessarily the practice, grounds itself in a sense of property rights that transcends the actual legal regime in force at the time of the original dispossession.

Property rights are actually just one more human right, like speech rights, assembly rights or worship rights. To the American way of thinking, rights precede any particular legal regime or system of government - government exists to secure reexisting rights, not to establish them in the first place.

Which is not to say that the specific proposal for privatizing Iraqi state enterprises is any good. But it's not necessarily bad either.

Lookee! - Basic lesson in free market economics from, of all people, conservative bete noire Paul Krugman, disposing of William Greider's new book. See also Daniel Drezner's related item on income inequality and whether and how it does and doesn't matter. Me, I could care less about income inequality as such, because income inequality simply measures relative position on the wealth scale. Imagine a country where half the people make $10,000/year, half the people make $20,000/year and an absolute measure of "poverty level" comes in at $13,000 - that is, below $13,000 a family can't feed, clothe and house itself. Now imagine another country where the poverty level is $13,000, half the people make $20,000 and the other half make $60,000. Income inequality is greater in the second country, but everybody is better off.

So I wouldn't get worked up about income inequality as such, but only by data showing increased absolute, rather than relative, privation. The long term economic trends in the US are contra privation. This is true almost anywhere outside the socialist and kleptocratic worlds.

I suspect that relative income inequality is necessary - that "a perfect world, where everyone was equal" is too analogous to the heat death of the universe: maximum entropy, no useful energy. Someone's got to have capital to spare to fund anything new and promising, which perforce means someone's got to have more money than they need, which means more money than someone else.

Return to the Wilderness of Mirrors - Newsweek's excerpt of Marianne Pearl's new memoir of her kidnapped and murdered husband contains the text of three e-mails from the kidnappers. Each e-mail comes across, in the account, as authentic. Each also reads like it was written by a different person. We go from this kind of sentence structure

Unfortunately, he is at present being kept in very inhuman circumstances quite similar in fact to the way that Pakistanis and nationals of other sovereign countries are being kept in Cuba by the American Army.

to this

We have interrogated mr.D.Parl and we have come to the conclusion that contrary to what we thought earlier he is not working for the cia. in fact he is working for Mossaad. Therefore we will execute him within 24 hours unless Amreeka flfils our demands.

to this

AMRIKANS WILL GET THE TASTE OF DATH AND DESTRUCTIONS WHAT WE HAD GOT IN AFG AND PAK.

In addition to the decreasing grasp on the structure of English grammar, the initial letter writer never contracts or misspells "Americans." He also doesn't do all caps. He's your unctious, sarcastic bastard, succeeded, by turns, by a raving paranoid bastard and a slavering, apocalyptic one.

Is there a clue here to the internal politics of the conspiracy that culminated in Pearl's murder? And what about these demands from the first e-mail?

The Pakistani prisoners in Cuba must be returned to Pakistan and they will be tried in a Pakistani court. After all Pakistan was a full member of the international coalition against terror and it deserves the right to try its own citizens. And Send Afghanistan’s Embassador Mulla Zaeef back to Pakistan and if there is any accusition Pakistani Government should handle it.

What a weird argument for an al-Qaeda-connected kidnapper to make, huh? "Pakistan was a full member of the international coalition against terror - "? And Mrs. Pearl has more:

Another message is attached. It is in Urdu, and it is much the same as the English version, except for one additional demand: the release of a shipment of F-16 fighter jets that Pakistan bought from the United States in the 1980s, which was stopped after Congress cut off military sales to Pakistan in 1990. “These planes should be provided to Pakistan or money should be refunded with a 15% interest rate.”

?!?!?! That's an even stranger demand from the representative of a bad-tempered NGO. So, what was going on here? Possibilities:

o The kidnappers were actually representatives of Pakistani intelligence rather than al Qaeda (to the extent there's a difference)
o The kidnappers were making outrageous demands for the sheer sport
o The kidnappers aren't presently the Pakistani government but expect to be
o The kidnappers were trying to make it look like they had connections with the Pakistani government, to strain its ties with the US.
o The kidnappers' true target market was the average Pakistani - the "ransom note" was just an opportunity to remind same of various reasons to resent the United States.

The problem with the first explanation is that it would be a really stupid plan (not that government agencies don't come up with those). The second is the one that, according to Marianne Pearl, the investigators accepted at the time. I don't like it because it simply waves away what it should be explaining. The third and fourth fit so well with my longstanding "It's always been about Pakistan" theory that they must be resisted. The last one I think I like best, because it strikes me as the closest fit between desire and attainability (from the perspective of the kidnapping murderers).

But it doesn't do to be too sure about these things. Cf. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who says there was no link between the Saudi government and the September 2001 massacre plot, and Abu Zubaydah, who says there was.

Back - Power returned last night at 8:30, cable internet and TV this morning. Still got a lot of wood to split, and one downed branch to cut up. Look on the bright side dept: our refrigerator, refrigerator-freezer and standup freezer are sparkling clean inside!

Polish Joke - Little to add to this article by Adam Reed about why the Iraqi reconstruction looks like it does and doesn't look like the one the Polish government proposed. Stray thought: the Polish angle shares tantalizing similarities with my April suggestion that Vaclav Havel manage the reconstruction. See the discussion following the original article and on Light of Reason for questions and responses about the facticity of Reed's reportage.

Stop the Presses - US government praises Syria for its contributions to the war effort: Syria allows militants into Iraq, official says.

As all loyal Americans know, allowing militants into Iraq is a central requirement of the government's "flypaper strategy." Bashar Assad's invitation to the Crawford ranch is in the bag.

Comics Blogging - A couple of months ago, Alan David Doane and Big Sunny D were going on about the virtues of Eightball #22, by Dan Clowes. I picked up a copy last week. Listen people: they were neither kidding nor wrong.

This is one hell of a book. Doane says "it belongs in the libraries of every comics reader," but that understates. Even if you don't read comics - even if you skim or skip the comics items on this site - you should buy and read Eightball #22.

What is it? At six bucks and 36 saddle-stapled color pages, it more justly merits the term "graphic novel" than many thicker softcovers. Imagine: a sequence of mostly one and two-page chapters modeled on Sunday comics strips (especially in the sorts of tabloid papers where the typical strip is taller than it is wise), each carrying forward a braided narrative; Borges with an attention span; a David Lynch movie with a soul. All three of those things at once gets you Eightball #22.

Among other things, the book manages to be consciously metafictional without being arid, which is rare enough in prose, let alone comics.

I also bought Finder: King of the Cats. I enjoyed it. It's not the revelation that Sin-Eater, the first Finder story, is. At about one third the length of Sin-Eater, King of the Cats inevitably has less scope. Our hero, Jaeger, has less at stake here; in important ways, the adventure is an elective for him. The story foregrounds the cultural anthropology that Speed McNeil does so well, but it's not enmeshed in the same tangle of love, duty, family and gender as in the earlier story. (Duty, family and gender are there, but at one remove from Jaeger. The feline Nyima are interesting studies, but not as achingly enthralling as Sin-Eater's Grosvenor family.)

But let me be clear: fun story! Substantially a satire of Disneyworld, setting for a sequence of fortunate cultural misunderstandings between Jaeger and his people, the Ascians, on one side and Queen Marrich and the Nyima on the other. Worth reading after Sin-Eater.

Political-economy thought for the day. As Speed McNeil makes clear, Munkytown evinces the worst qualities of the "company town" system. It's tacky as hell, and as sincere as two starlets kissing hello on Oscar night. It's also the first new city built on Jaeger's world in living memory, the art of city-building having been largely lost. Discuss.

Anarchy Park - So how are we doing, spontaneous order-wise in this area? Not too badly. The police are directing traffic at certain "major intersections," with "major" construed rather narrowly. All intersections with dead traffic lights are to be treated as four-way stops. This includes some intersections where six-lane roads cross other six-lane roads.

On my trips today, drivers were remarkably and universally considerate. Things moved pretty well, which is to say, slower than if there were lights, but there were fewer snarls than you'll find downtown every weekday during rush hour. It's especially impressive when you consider that the "four-way intersection system" breaks down if there are always cars approaching all directions at once - everyone is on someone's right.

Everyone is driving slower, of course. And it is the weekend - we haven't had to endure a rush hour with major signal malfunctions yet. Traffic signals exist for a reason. I don't imagine things can last, but so far things are better than one might fear.

An' Dark, and Nowhere Starlights - Ginger Stampley writes

All the DC-based bloggers I read seem to think Isabel was a bust.

Well, here's a message for all the DC-based bloggers Ginger reads: Screw you, people!

Unqualified Headquarters can best be described as "dry, but dark." Good if you're a red wine, probably, bad for a house. We've lacked power since Thursday at 6pm, with none promised before the coming Thursday. As to the storm itself, we lost a tree when the ground let go of the roots, but sideways into a neighbor's tree, not into anyone's house. Today the neighbor and I felled the thing, a forty foot larch. It took down his scraggly old pine too. On the bright side, my neighbor has no fireplace. That's right, Loyal Reader - it's all mine!

Minor siding damage too, but that's the extent of our infrastructure losses.

On the other hand, no power. I'm down the road at the internet/PC games place I blogged from when my PC power supply was on the fritz, listening to the flower of Korean-American youth frag each other. (Game is either Counterstrike or Red Spear.) There are neighborhoods around us with power, and many shopping centers too - you can buy almost anything that's not a "C" cell or a bag of ice, so it's not exactly My Side of the Mountain. Just don't cook so much food you have leftovers is all - got to eat it all at once. (We have a gas stove - I would never buy an electric stove for just this reason - and potable water, unlike much of Northern Virginia.)

These kinds of things are valuable reminders of certain core truths, among them:

o Kids hate canned, evaporated milk.
o This is because canned, evaporated milk sucks.
o It gets dark earlier in September.
o Darkness is boring.
o It takes a long time to cut up two trees.

But on the bright side . . .

It's a time of year when you won't really miss air conditioning or heat.

My office was out of power too. Free day!

Weightlifting in a darkening room at dusk has a certain "Twilight of the Gods" grandeur to it.

Well, not grandeur exactly.

More as time permits.

Like a Hurricane - It developed that some of my coworkers had never heard about the hurricane that drove a straw into a telephone pole. I got to thinking, that would be a great super power - the ability to drive a straw into a telephone pole! Then let's say you faced a villain who got his powers by drinking a specially-formulated shake. Fwoosh! goes his straw and now what's he going to do, huh? Stupid villain!

Poor Bush Administration Planning Update - TV news at lunchtime said that President Bush had left Washington a day early for Camp David, in the Catoctin Mountains, because of the approach of Isabel. The forecasts I saw predict more rain for the piedmont regions of Maryland and Virginia (such as Camp David) than the lowland regions (such as the White House).

Back for the Moment - Jeepers, have I not blogged since Monday? Not intentional. And Isabel may not let me stay on very long now. Currently listening to the Fresh Air interview with Salam Pax that Diana Moon tipped me to. Work let out at 1:30. Currently moderate rains and winds, with the big show supposedly coming tonight.

Instant Blogfest Gonna Get You - Mr. Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles is coming to River City this weekend. (Hm. Maybe calling it River City is tempting fate . . . )

Anyway, I want to get a DC blogfest together in his honor, Saturday night. He'll be attending a conference in Crystal City, so would anyone with an idea for a good blogfest location close to Crystal City please e-mail me? I'll post a venue by tomorrow night.

Quote of the Day comes from Alan David Doane:

Honestly, doing a weblog is not as hard as the folks at Four Color Hell [which has delayed its ballyhooed relaunch again] apparently want you to think it is.

UPDATE: Changed parens to brackets to make clear which part of the above was my interpolation.

Comics Blogging - I don't like romance novels. Not my thing. But when non-writers baldly assert that "I could do better than that," or muse that they should knock off a romance or two to make some easy money, I'm always skeptical. Firstly, the sheer endurance required to finish writing even a bad novel is rare and impressive. Anyone who actually gets that 50,000th or 100,000th word down on the page has my respect, even if every one of those words suck. Secondly, I suspect that, almost without exception, to produce a romance that romance fans will like, you have to have a certain affection for the genre yourself - to sustain your interest and theirs.

The application of this principle to superhero comics should be obvious. Now see if you can guess which of this week's purchases occasioned these thoughts:

1602 #2, Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert and Richard Isanove. We can now definitively say, this book is no good. I like Gaiman's Sandman as much as anyone. I enjoyed American Gods. 1602 offers pretty much none of Gaiman's virtues as a writer. The dialog is clumsy. There are outright howlers. ("Javier" introduces the 17th-century Iceman to Nicholas Fury by saying, "This is Roberto, who knows much about ice.") As for such plot as has been revealed, whatever. The attempt to beat Count Otto Von Doom! to the macguffin lacks urgency. I've figured out, I think, that the Captain America figure is the real Captain America, and will be key to tying the miniseries into the regular continuity (there's supposed to be a tie-in), but I don't care. Visually, everything is rendered and colored with a stained-glass reverence that, it has to be said, at least befits the lifelessness of the story. But that's not a good thing.

Is the problem that Gaiman considers himself above the material? I don't know. But he doesn't seem to have any particular feel for it. Gaiman is brilliant at telling the stories of ordinary people in the grip of the uncanny, and extraordinary characters enmeshed with the mundane. (With extraordinary characters in the grip of the uncanny he can have problems - the final confrontation between the Old and the New at the end of American Gods fizzles, not in a good subverting-the-expectations way, but as simple anticlimax.) 1602 doesn't play to his strengths.

Captain America #17, Dave Gibbons, Lee Weeks and Tom Palmer. It's hard to beat the cover of Issue 16 for sheer fanboy satisfaction: "Ice, Part 5 of 5," it read, promising the merciful death of the unfortunate Chuch Austen/Jae Lee era. The new storyline, Cap Lives, turns as sharply away as possible - going so far as to switch universes. Captain America thaws out in 1964, in a world where the Germans won World War II, New York is now New Berlin and a Famous Nazi Villain runs the Reich. Not a bad idea for a story, really - a better idea than The Marvel Universe starts happening in Elizabethan England anyway. I wish I liked it more. Dave Gibbons writes dialogue like people used to write superhero dialogue, which is to say, not very well. All the Germans talk like, well, like comic book Nazis. Artist Lee Weeks likes to draw people with their mouths hanging open, like some lost Buscema brother. I like his page layouts though. I'll give part two a try.

Supreme Power #2, J. Michael Straczynski, Gary Frank and John Sibal. Since DC does a prestige-format miniseries every quarter recasting the origin of their major characters in some new setting or perspective, you might wonder why Marvel has to. So far the results aren't bad, though. Straczynski offers us a darkly anti-government take on Marvel's Justice League analogues, the Squadron Supreme. There's enough anti-bureaucratic paranoia in the first two issues to give them a head start on my libertarian affections. But it does seem to tie back somehow. The Superman figure, Hyperion, crash-lands as an infant, is found by a childless couple who take him home and - have the baby confiscated by the military that very night. The government tries to set up the safest (and fakest) possible environment for the kid. We can see it all going wrong, and it makes one appreciate the real origin of Superman anew - maybe simple sincere love really is the only thing that keeps kids from turning into monsters. I don't know if Hyperion will go bad, but I'm interested in finding out.

Problems? Yeah, something Johanna Draper Carlson said at SPX: If someone really did have fabulous powers - the ability to fly, to bend bars, outrun gazelles, stuff like that - shouldn't it be fun for them, at least some of the time? So far, we've seen at least cameos by the Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Flash and Wonder Woman figures (and probably Aquaman too), and only the boy who will grow to be the Whizzer (read, Flash) seems like he ever gets to enjoy himself. Be interesting to see if that changes.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume Two Issue 6, by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. The wrapup to the second miniseries. How did they do? Here's the thing: I really enjoyed LOEG Volume One. But I'm damned if I remember precisely how it ends. I don't think I'm going to have that problem with this volume. An impressively delicate leavetaking between Mr. Hyde and Mina Murray, impressively visceral smashing of martian tripods and more. We are all but promised a Volume Three. Prepare to wait dog years for it to start, then finish.

Blogwatch - Foreigners Are Mean! is dedicated to noting every cross word uttered about the United States by foreign leaders or journalists, plus a smattering of other topics.

Return of the Anthraxblog Item - Bruce Rolston of Flit(ting between our two incompatible personae) summarizes a dead-tree Vanity Fair article making the case that Steven J. Hatfill really was the perpetrator of the Fall 2001 anthrax attacks. Some of what he calls new information is actually old information, that goes way back to the Hartford Courant reports of Summer 2002. But there are a couple of bits that are new, at least to me:

*Hatfill got his job as one of the U.S.'s top 5 bioweapons experts by forging a Ph.D.

*Hatfill was in Washington the day of a 1997 hoax bioattack on the B'nai Brith offices in that city. He was in London the day a second, hoax anthrax letter was sent to Tom Daschle from London. He was in Louisiana when a later series of hoax anthrax letters were sent from Louisiana.

*Hatfill mentor Bill Patrick's 1999 report "Risk Assessment" is apparently the only document known that identified super-fine anthrax sent through the mail could be a real threat, before it actually happened.

*Patrick was involved in "simulated bioattacks," supposedly using inert bacilli instead of anthrax, in 1950 and 1952, that appear to have accidentally killed Americans.

Just because you forge your PhD doesn't mean you'll also launch biological war. The information about Hatfill's mentor is intriguing but not dispositive - guilt by association. But the geographical ties to the hoax attacks certainly make one stand up and take notice, assuming the truth of the reports.

Against that set the following:

o Hatfill was a virus expert, not a germ expert, per reports.

o If he faked his PhD, doesn't that make him less qualified to have pulled off the anthrax attacks?

o Searches of the area around Hatfill's residence, including draining a couple of ponds, seem not to have turned up any physical evidence against him.

Time, Gentlemen - Hello, Mid-September. Time for the "September Surprise" report of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons. Or, as Josh Marshall notes, maybe not.

Why it matters: the case against the war never depended on Saddam's lack of Weapons of Some Destruction. But the case for war absolutely did depend on Iraq's possession of same, regardless of what the hawks are saying now.

Lord, Give Me Arab Nationalism, But Not Yet - From an AJC article on the attitudes of Iraqi youth:

"My friends tell me we have development now and they brag about having satellites and cell phones," said Ali Abdel Karim, 18, lounging at a Baghdad pool hall. "This is not the development we need. Those things will just take away our culture and traditions."

Dude, you're in a pool hall!

(Link via Arthur Silber.)

Sticky Situations - Colin Powell says it's a problem that "[Iraq's] porous borders are attracting saboteurs intent on undermining" progress toward self-rule. But this isn't really a problem at all, according to proponents of the famous "flypaper thesis." It's supposed to be good for you. All the Islamist terrorists in the world flock to Iraq to fight the Great Satan, leaving the American, um, homeland unmolested and, in some versions, Israel too.

There are only about a million problems with what its advocates call the flypaper "strategy." (A "strategy" is apparently an explanation you come up with to explain why what you did turns out to have been a brilliant idea even though it didn't work out like you said it would.) These problems range from the factual to the practical to the moral.

First off, Powell offers "a rough estimate of 100 such infiltrators." Either this number is a woeful underestimate or flypaper simply isn't attracting all the world's Islamist nutcases, Osama Bin LadenAyman al-Zawahiri's injunctions notwithstanding.

Second, just because some number of al Qaeda operatives and sympathizers flock to Iraq to attack US troops and sympathetic Iraqi leaders doesn't mean that's all al Qaeda is doing or can do. Apparently the US government which allegedly conceived this marvelous "flypaper" "strategy" doesn't think so:

The al-Qaeda terrorist network may be planning attacks more devastating than those of Sept. 11, 2001, possibly involving chemical or biological agents, the U.S. government said in a worldwide advisory to its citizens.

``With the second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks upon us, we are seeing increasing indications that al-Qaeda is preparing to strike U.S. interests abroad,'' the government said in an e-mailed statement released through the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong. ``The U.S. government remains deeply concerned about the security of U.S. citizens overseas,'' it said.

The Bloomberg story from which this excerpt comes ran three days ago, and quotes an additional warning: "We also cannot rule out the potential for al-Qaeda to attempt a second catastrophic attack within the United States."

To see al Qaeda activity in Iraq and chortle, "See! They're tied down there." would be akin to observing the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud on September 10, 2001 and chortling, "Silly al Qaeda dolts! All they do is mess around in Afghan politics. What a bunch of losers!"

Never trust a plan that assumes the incurable stupidity of your enemy. "Flypaper" only works if al Qaeda's leadership is so stupid as to forget the central insight that led to the September 11, 2001 massacres in the first place - that anti-US forces should not waste all their time messing around on the periphery of American influence.

Andrew Sullivan among others expresses satisfaction that, "The extra beauty of this strategy is that it creates a target for Islamist terrorists that is not Israel." I can't begin to say how appalling it is that Sullivan thinks it appropriate to make American troops into targets for another country's enemies, given that the other country has its own government and military already charged with safeguarding its citizens and interests, and given that the Administration did not exactly put this motivation out there for acceptance or rejection during the debate on the war. Indeed, if you argued that war proponents like Sullivan conflated Israeli and American interests, said proponents called you a nutcase or a bigot. Glad we cleared that up. But there's also the minor practical problem that it doesn't seem to be working. Iraqis and (some number of infiltrators) can attack Americans in Iraq at the same time as Palestinians attack Israelis in Israel and Palestine.

Also apparently not working: Saddam's checks to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers have presumably stopped. Suicide bombings themselves have not.

Then there's the question of whether violent anti-American extremists are a non-renewable resource. For Flypaper to work, there has to be a fixed quantity of muslims sufficiently motivated to attack the United States, all of whom flock to Iraq to die. We've already dealt with the question of whether they'll all flock to Iraq. That leaves the question of whether there is a fixed quantity of violent anti-American extremists. There's no reason to think this is necessarily so. It's entirely possible that the very fact of the Iraq war will generate terrorist recruits at a higher rate than it dispatches them. We just don't know.

There's an outside chance that Flypaper could be true but backfire - that is, that Islamist terrorists flocking to Iraq actually could drive American troops out of the country, or take credit for an American withdrawal they didn't cause.

Finally, there's a minor matter of morality. Remember all that stuff about how we weren't at war with the Iraqi people but with Saddam Hussein, or the Ba'ath Party apparatus? Flypaper theory exists to posit and justify a messy war between the US military and non-Iraqi enemies of America and Israel - those infiltrators, remember? Let's state it again, clearly: the presence of American troops in Iraq draws anti-American and anti-Israeli terrorists to Iraq, where we wipe them out. That is, Flypaper supposedly represents a decision by the US to turn Iraq, a place full of the Iraqi People With Whom We Have No Quarrel, into a theater of war between non-Iraqi forces. The dead, wounded, frightened and humiliated will not, of course, be restricted to non-Iraqis. The stuff that gets broke will not just be non-Iraqi stuff. And we wonder why some Iraqis are so sullen.

(Note: investigate feasibility of spending the $87 billion on book deals for every Iraqi man, woman and child. Fly them to London for publicity events for duration of war.)

So, Flypaper phooey. It is neither moral, feasible nor even actual.

According to the Latest Studies . . . - Aaron Haspel issues an important health warning firmly grounded in bogus drug research:

There is a still larger lesson for my vast juvenile readership, who are possibly capable of learning something. Kids, this is very important: don't do meth thinking it's Ecstasy.

Sunday Funnies - Begging to Differ has a comic strip page today. I like the one where the two talking animals discuss sex.

And He Came So CLOSE Too! - Gregg Easterbrook is a smart liberal. You can see him coming up against the limits of smart liberalism here:

California is on the verge of requiring all employers with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance. But with health policies now priced on average at $4,000 per year, this means the marginal cost for an employer with 50 employees, to bring on worker number 51, will be $200,000.

That's a problem all right. And it's worse even than that - just watch companies currently employing 51 or 52 or 55 people dump workers to get under the limit when the law goes into effect. That such a law gets as far as it does hints at how California got into the political and economic mess it's in. But Easterbrook won't get them out of it:

Either government must provide universal health insurance in some way; or enforceably mandate the individual purchase of coverage, the way auto insurance is enforceably mandated but privately obtained; or all employers of all sizes must provide insurance, to avoid penalizing small business for growing.

How about simply decoupling health ensurance from the current employer-based model? It's an artifact of WWII wage and price controls. (Cue standard libertarian lecture about the pernicious economic effects of wars.) It disfavors the self-employed and does nothing for the unemployed. And, like ineffective government measures always do, it inspires calls for further ineffective government measures to patch the initial ones - calls like Easterbrook's.

Even Easterbrook's least awful proposal - mandate individual purchases, which at least theoretically falls on all citizens equally - is pretty bad. Easterbrook compares it to auto insurance, but I actually do have the option not to buy auto insurance, by not driving. Presumably the only way I can get out of buying health insurance is by not living. That's some exit option.

And you still have unavoidable margin problems, just at the individual rather than the employer level. What if I can't afford to buy coverage? Do I have to take the exit option discussed above? I assume not. Since Easterbrook is a liberal, he probably wants to cover me with Medicaid or some other government program. But then there has to be a level of income at which I get tossed off the Medicaid rolls and into the posse of those deputed to buy their own insurance. The cost differential between the insurance dole and the insurance mandate is going to price me out of a range of improvements in my employment situation that ought to betoken measurable improvements in my situation, but which I can't take because the cost of paying insurance rather than getting it for free leaves me worse off than staying where I am.

It also means that, when the individual mandate goes into effect, it exerts downward pressure on the low-wage employed - suddenly a lot of them are a) worse off than they were the day before the law went into effect; and b) better off unemployed than working.

In other words, Easterbrook would have California shift from a policy where certain companies can't afford to hire me to a policy where I can't afford to take their jobs anyway. All because of another New Deal gift that keeps on giving.

Over the Hills and Far Away - A moving set of valedictory items by moja_vera at Turning Tables. He's coming home from duty in Iraq. May a long train follow in his wake. Don't miss his photo blog.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Weight 165, Waist 32.75". As always, waist measurements are for entertainment purposes only. Up a pound from last week, down 51 pounds from Thanksgiving Day.

For the second week in a row, I only managed two weight sessions. I also got off my cardio schedule. Blame some combination of weather, schedule and sheer laziness. (It's become easy to hit the snooze button rather than get up and ambulate or lift. That pushes workouts to the evenings and it's easy for things to get away in the evening.) In my defense I got in six miles of walking on my lunch hours and did a double run/walk session today.

In other fitness blogs, Diana Moon turns savagely against SuperSlow, the weight training regimen I followed this spring after learning of it from her. Okay, turns savagely against rather overstates. "After a while I began to find Superslow a bother," is what she actually says. That means that, of the four people I know who have followed that particular program - Diana, my mother, my sister, me - all of us have stopped it for one reason or another. F, as they say, WIW.

Not that SuperSlow is the only program people have trouble following. In addition to my recent BFL slacking, Avram Grumer says he had a period of skipping BFL workouts too. (He's lost everything he gained back.) Unlike SuperSlow, BFL requires action six days out of seven, and the weight workouts are long - 45+ minutes. So it's easy to find some excuse to get derailed.

Heavyhands links for Zack of Procrastination:

Clarence Bass' introduction/review.

A refutation of a Heavyhands myth by Dana W. Carpender. Nevertheless contains a warning I do not endorse against ever exercising with weights above 5-6 pounds.

An introductory program by Marty Gallagher.

A Heavyhands Yahoo group with, um, seven messages since April.

An illustrated beginning routine from Lean Lifestyle.

Used Heavyhands books from Abebooks. I recommend both Heavyhands: The Ultimate Exercise and The Heavyhands Walking Book. All the fun math is in the first book.

Labor-Saving Device - I meant to quote a particular passage from Lincoln the other day. Andrew Olmsted actually did. In addition to his points about our enemies and their failures, I'd like to amplify Lincoln's warning that the true threat remains national suicide. We can only defeat ourselves. Let's not.

Decent Interval - Okay, we stopped paying attention. Time to go back to shooting down civilian planes in Peru! See Walter in Denver and especially Dislogue, whose proprietor, Dan Scheltema, used to fly on those civilian missionary flights.

Crap and I should have included both these guys in the New Crew update. Next month, dammit. But you don't have to wait to start reading them.

RIP - Anything I might say about the deaths of Warren Zevon and Johnny Cash has been better said elsewhere. Go to Jesse Walker for a fine Cash tribute, and read critic Tommy Tomlinson's appreciation in the Charlotte Observer.

Cash was unquestionably of greater cultural moment, but for generational reasons, Zevon bulked much larger in my life. His friend Brian Linse has a personal remembrance that I would not want to have missed.

UPDATE: If you're as reliably late to parties as I am, you can see the video for Cash's Nine-Inch Nails cover, "Hurt," at the NME site.

Mission Accomplished? - The other side's mission, I mean. Short answer: no, not accomplished by any stretch of the imagination. But maybe they're not doing so bad. Consider the news that India won't be sending troops to Iraq even with a UN resolution - or even to Liberia:

"It's for the same reason that we turned down the (US) request to send troops to Liberia. We said we're in no position to spare troops because of the situation in our north-west sector and the kind of terrorist activity that happens in Kashmir on a daily basis," the sources said.

The point here is not so much that my good buddy Don "Keep it elevated" Rumsfeld and I were right about the unlikelihood of the UN leading to substantial manpower commitments from other countries, though of course I can't let this item go by without mentioning that. The point is this: if you imagine yourself leading a worldwide Islamist jihad against the unbelievers, you probably take heart in the reasons for India's refusal:

We said we're in no position to spare troops because of the situation in our north-west sector . . .

Your two richest and most powerful enemies, the US and India, are tied down in their respective theaters and can't hook up. This is a far cry from establishing the Caliphate, but - assymetrical warfare cliche numero uno! - you win by not losing. Against this you have to set the real damage the US and its allies have managed to inflict on the leadership of al Qaeda in the last two years.

I also suspect that India, which has long resented what it considers US favoritism toward Pakistan, gets a certain satisfaction out of blaming their non-participation on "the situation in our north-west sector."

Via Letter from Gotham, a Jay Bookman column on giving Bin Laden what he wants.

Housekeeping - Home from work today, which means time to work on the blog, which means I'm finally getting around to updating the sidebar. Much change in the links sections:

O.G. - Okay, not here. The O.G. list is frozen for all time.

New Crew - The entire old New Crew has been swapped out to other sections of the links list. The new New Crew comprises blogs that I haven't blogrolled before. These are not necessarily bloggers who like me or even know I exist, but they're blogs I feel are worth your time. My intention is to start flushing the New Crew list through regularly, so that any given month there will be a dozen fresh blogs. This is by no means all the blogs I haven't previously linked that I'd like to link. The idea is to introduce new sites in bite-sized chunks so they don't get lost in the shuffle.

Mi Hermanos - My libertarian confreres. New section. Ideological affinity has its privileges.

Team Comics/Comix - A new list of comic and semi-comic book weblogs and news sites.

Not Blogs - Didn't really update this section. Probably should have. Oh well.

Regular Reading - Removed a couple of links to dead sites. Swapped in whatever of the old New Crew didn't land on the libertarian or comics lists. Tested and updated all links. Apologies to all those who've had dead links in this section. Things are better now!

To simplify future housekeeping, I moved the sidebar into a Movable Type module. Now I can update links in one place and it will be reflected throughout the site. The days of the main page blogroll not matching the archive page blogrolls are over.

More tweaks to come this weekend, including an updated Best Of and even (gasp) a judicious introduction of categories, depending on how ambitious I get.

Mark Your Datebooks - I agree with Donald Rumsfeld!

But, Rumsfeld said, "The expectation is that you would not get a large additional number of forces as a result of an additional U.N. resolution." The key to securing Iraq, he said, lies in empowering Iraqis to govern themselves and provide their own security.

So says the Washington Post article on Rumsfeld's National Press Club lunch yesterday. Juan Cole was still suggesting, even this week, that a UN resolution could unlock four 20,000-strong divisions from countries in South and West Asia. Much as I admire Juan Cole's Iraq analysis, this is sheer fantasy.

The Secretary and I also agree about the importance of "empowering Iraqis to govern themselves and provide their own security" - to the extent that he, you know, actually means it. May I suggest that getting into firefights with such Iraqi police as do exist is not on that particular "roadmap?" (Link via Counterspin.)

Rumsfeld also apparently clarified his remarks about domestic criticism.

Rumsfeld said his observation on Monday that terrorists "take heart" when they see that opponents of the administration might prevail was "accurate." He noted that some media did not report that he also said, "we can live with a healthy debate as long as it is as elevated as possible and as civil as possible."

Need to be as elevated as possible. A clear dig at certain pro-Administration weblogs! And

"I believe in the right of everybody to say what they want to say, and it ought not to be inhibited at all," he added yesterday.

Already on it, dude.

Gosh - Via Comics Worth Reading, a by-the-numbers New York Times story about "new comics day" at Jim HANLEY's Universe in Manhattan. It's a real nice store, though I wish they had a separate display area for the week's new titles. The article seems to exist mostly to take up space, though.

Worth noting though, that, while CWR is not a blog per se, Johanna Draper Carlson does update her RSS sidebar almost daily, which means a regular supply of new links (with very pithy glosses) to comics-related stories, most of them far more interesting than the one discussed here.

I'm Famous! - Check out this headline for the proof!

British Leader Was Told Terrorists Could Gain Arms

Who knew Tony Blair was an Unqualified Offerings rea - hang on. (Reads more of article.)

The report said a Feb. 10 assessment by the top-secret Joint Intelligence Committee -- a cabinet-level body that includes the chiefs of Britain's main intelligence agencies -- concluded that the collapse of Saddam Hussein's government "would increase the risk of chemical and biological warfare technology or agents finding their way into the hands of terrorists."

Oh. So it wasn't just me saying that stuff.

That's Easy for You to Say - I'm a Muse!

You are a muse.

What legend are you?. Take the Legendary Being Quiz by Paradox

I am? Whose muse? And pay no attention to that "blending in" stuff.

Link via fellow muse, Thymewise.

Happy Birthdays - Both to Jesse Walker. His weblog turned one year old yesterday, and he himself turned 33 late last week. Mrs. Offering and I had a fine time celebrating with him and his fiancee R. in their stately Federal Hill rowhouse Saturday night, partying with Eve Tushnet, Jeremy Lott and Eric Dickson of the fine Shrubbloggers site. Possibly at my impertinent request, Jesse made his legendary (to UO readers) chili. He's got a fascinating bunch of friends to pass an evening with, too.

I Can Relate - Al Barger talks to God. "Her voice was stern and clipped, sounding very much like Ayn Rand- though that may have simply been an affectation for my benefit." It has a lot to do with what I wrote last night.

It's a Clue! - Per the Post on the new Bin Laden tape, the CIA is sure that one voice is Ayman "I am really a total rat bastard" Zawahiri, but not that the other voice is really Osama "I still suck" Bin Laden. The video was probably created in the Spring, but the audio is fresh, referring to recent affairs in Iraq.

I assume this is causing a lot of "Bin Laden's dead!" surmises, and he may well be. However:

It would be smart of Bin Laden and Zawahiri to use older video footage. The US has gotten pretty close to nabbing Bin Laden before, based on reports, by analyzing the geographic features in his videos. I figure that, wherever this tape was shot, Bin Laden has been far from there for quite some time.

Old footage makes us, Bin Laden's enemies, skeptical. But it won't have that affect on his target audience. They're predisposed to give him the benefit of the doubt where we go the other way. There are two, not necessarily incompatible, candidate explanations for Bin Laden's increasing reclusiveness: one, he can't communicate as freely because of the damage the anti-al Qaeda coalition has done to his infrastructure and the risks of exposing himself; the other, that he doesn't need to frantically prove his continued existence and relevance to swaths of the muslim world because it's what they want to believe.

Regardless, I suspect that Bin Laden is ailing to the point of inspiring this tape's real purpose: establishing Zawahiri as Bin Laden's successor. Bin Laden may even be incapacitated to the point that Zawahiri had to put the whole thing together himself. If we're lucky, this is a sign or a portent of a succession war that could cause further damage to the organization.

Ditto - Suddenly, an irresistible urge to link Dirk Deppey's disquisition on "Team Comix" and "Team Comics," the hidden similarities. (See related SPX report by Blake Bell.)

Blankets Bitching? Bingo! - Sean Collins says Blankets should definitely be read as a memoir rather than fiction. Unfortunately, as I said in my review, such a reading makes the book worse. (See two items below.)

Via Sean, a somewhat fawning interview with author Craig Thompson. This part is just strange:

THE PULSE: This is very thought-provoking subject matter explored in Blankets. What made you want to share your personal experiences in this format?

THOMPSON: Comics are a perfect medium for such stories. They're inherently personal, since a single creator can control all aspects of the story-telling, unlike film/animation which are produced by committee and gigantic studios full of hundreds of creators. And comics are inherently intimate, since a reader usually experiences the book alone, at their own pace, quietly engaging with the text and images -- it's as if they were reading a hand-drawn letter straight from the artist

A single creator can control all aspects of the storytelling, but that isn't necessarily true for any given comic. And there are those other arts too - poetry and prose - where it's at least as true that a single creator etc. It's much more likely, actually. What's clear is that comics aren't "inherently" personal.

Mind you, authors stating personal preferences as universal principles has been going on since long before Craig Thompson. (Viz. Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams.) And Franklin Harris writes that he loved Thompson's graphic novel, Goodbye, Chunky Rice. I'm going to give that one a try on his recommendation. I suspect it could be quite good.

I Don't Have Four 50s, But I Can Give You Five 40s - Man Buys Groceries With Fake $200 Bill. Guess whose picture is on the front. (Thanks to reader Oyster Gal for the tip.)

Proportion - Soon the columns, weblogs and airwaves will be full of people instructing us that we must "never forget" what happened in New York City, Washington DC and the sky above western Pennsylvania two years ago. As if any of us could or would forget the despicable acts that took place that day, the heroism, the damage, the wasted lives. What they really mean is not "remember," but dwell. Obsess. Lingeringly finger the scab. And most of all, fall in line when assured that some grand policy, however wise or unwise, is put forth in the name of that day and the atrocities that marked it.

Don't listen to these people. You and I do not need their instruction in how to re