The Issues of the Day - I pretty much endorse what Jane Galt has to say about overreactions one way or the other to news from the Middle East. The depressing side of this view is that, at least in theory, no one need ever change their mind because they can hope that events will eventually bear out their existing opinions. I changed my own mind once in response to subsequent evidence - I was a huge contemporaneous booster of Gulf War Phase I, a New Republic liberal through and through. And I remember feeling pretty triumphal in the immediate aftermath when Nothing Bad Happened like the pessimists said. Then came our decade-long enmeshment in the sanctions and no-fly regimes (Gulf War Phase II), followed by the September 11 atrocities, then Iraq War Phases III (conquest) and IV (occupation), all flowing pretty straightforwardly from the original decision to roll back the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. When you want to start tallying up "positive results of the Gulf War," the cost side of the ledger shows not just the hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American and Iraqi lives in the last two years, but hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives (or more) in the dozen years prior to that.

I should say right out that before the invasion I said what would matter was not how the war looked the next month, but how it looked a year from then, and two years, and five and ten. I have no hesitation in saying that after one year it looked a lot more like my predictions than like those of any hawks. It will clearly look rosier come the second anniversary in a couple of weeks.

And after that? It depends.

Bringing Up Blackboards - Following up on last week's Mommy Trap blogging, Leonard Dickens suggests that Jennifer Warner and her class are prisoners of ideology.

Although it is clear that Warner and her suffering co-affluents do very much want their kids to "get ahead", I think one part of their problem is they don't know why they want this. They see that they are paying a price for it; thus they fear they are irrational. One thing that might help is simply to know that it is natural for them to want to advance their kids. It's an evolved aspect of human nature.

It may also help them to know that in general in primates, females are much more social than males. Thus there's a reason why their husbands are not similarly busting their butts molding the kids: hubby just ain't that into it. Knowing this might help these women live more peaceably with their family.

I don't have the aversion to all explanations sociobiological that others have, but as to the second paragraph, there's an alternate explanation that fits the facts, insofar as the facts fit Warner's potted statistics. Warner mentions at one point that the average mother works 41 hours a week, the average father 51. That's ten extra hours in the office, and ten fewer hours available for parenting. Proportionally, the relevant comparison is not "an extra 20% at work" but Remaining waking hours minus (minus net commuting time difference) minus ten. It's to Warner's credit that her article, while free with its condemnations of society, was lighter on the husband-bashing than many works of her genre - apparently she thought through the implications of the numbers.

24 Blogging - Oh, fuck it.

See, They Never Left in the First Place - The one, the only, the awesome, eminence . . . uh, purple, dean of the comics blogosphere, Neilalien himself, turned Five yesterday (in blog years). My hat's off to you, sir!

See, They Return, One, and by One - Tacitus is at least theoretically restarting today after an intermission, with a minor site redesign. There may well be a lot of changes under the hood too. Apparently the diary system, which I'm old enough to not quite grasp, survives, though the main page will theoretically be All Tacitus, All the Time.

Follow-Ups - Loose ends from yesterday. Anent the torture "reality show" Eve writes, "I mean, people volunteer for sex all the time, and that tells you less than nothing about rape." Also, did I ever get around to saying explicitly that Battlestar Galactica, and the Lear revisit it inspired, helped me understand how much of America's embrace of torture is driven by anger? It did. In college, when someone would come back from what they said was "a good movie," I had a roomate who would ask, "Did it change the way you look at life?" Well there you go. (I've been focused almost exclusively on the country's fear, missing its rage.) Also, Mrs. Offering used to get on me for overusing "anent," but I think I laid off it long enough to get away with this one.

UPDATE: Meant to mention. Andrew Olmsted didn't like Friday's BSG nearly as much as I did. I think he's wrong at just about every turn, but not provably so. I think the show's creators are largely in control of the seeming loose ends; he doubts they are. Time will tell, but it does set one to musing how literary and paraliterary works acquire authority (let's gloss it for now as confidence that the creator knows what he or she is doing). I will say I don't think there's any "telepathy" going on necessarily, though I could be wrong. I do suspect that the Cylons, as artificial intelligences, probably have access to the material in an awful lot of computer databases. Were there background check records somewhere covering Starbuck's horrid upbringing? Seems plausible.

Of course, the other possibility is that God knows all and the Cylons know God.

Oh by the Way - Matt's absolutely right about the distinction between anti-Left and anti-State. And it explains most everything. I meant to get around to writing something about it for awhile, but quick brown foxes jump over lazy dogs, you know? There's a similar schism on the left, BTW, but I've never quite formulated it to my satisfaction. It's between sincerely loving "the little guy" and really despising the rich, I think. But that may not quite be it.

Now, I'm doubt that this specifically is true

Meanwhile, if you look at Jim Henley, very little of his considerable distaste for the administration stems from any specifically libertarian (as opposed to social conservative) views.

but who can say. I'm pro-choice but a pro-life symp; I'm pro-gay marriage and individual rights for gays, but a small-government social conservative who felt the same way would believe that homosexuality was a regrettable, even sinful practice that the State nevertheless had no standing to prohibit. That's how I feel about homophobia, not homosexuality. But I may be missing some subtle distinction Matt intends.

Fear and Vaunting on a Little Screen - Drama, fiction are tricky. The file cabinets of Burbank, California bulge with letters from people complaining that some studio has, by portraying some outrage, endorsed it. But context is all. And context can be . . . tricky. When Cornwall bursts the jellid eyes of Gloucester we should not conclude that Shakespeare is pro-blinding. We should conclude, rather, that Shakespeare wants us to understand something about when impotent rage and absolute power collide.

Which brings us to Friday's episode of Battlestar Galactica. Oh, I should have given you a spoiler warning about King Lear: at some point Cornwall blinds Gloucester. There will be more spoilers as we go, and not about King Lear.

Context. When I decry (over and freaking over again) the portrayal of torture in 24, I think it is with an adequate attention to context. The context seems to be that it's simply one more thing the relative good guys do to stop the absolute bad guys, like car chases, shootouts or, most grotesquely from a dramatic standpoint, staging a gas station holdup. The least we can say is that the show offers no comprehensive critique of the practice. The current season is an incomplete work. Perhaps tomorrow's episode, when Jack Bauer is scheduled to torture his girlfriend's estranged husband in front of her, will alter our understanding of the show's stance on torture completely. I hope so, really.

In the meantime, let's talk Battlestar Galactica. In Friday's episode, the government catches a humanoid Cylon and Commander Adama dispatches his surrogate daughter, Starbuck, played by Katee Sackhoff, to interrogate him. She goes into it knowing that he'll try to get into your head. When he tells her he's secreted a nuclear bomb on one of the ships, she breaks out the truncheons. It starts with "a little smacky-face" and proceeds to submersion in water. Starbuck herself never raises a finger against the subject. She has people for that. The very fact that she has people for that is itself disquieting. The helmeted security guards in black battledress look menacing and, I think, are meant to. They respond with alacrity to Starbuck's direction. There is no moment of refusal or even surprise.

Good science fiction is always building the world of its story, and good drama is always showing us more than the words alone convey. What makes the episode so horrifyingly effective is Sackhoff, the show's best actor. Edward James Olmos has a bigger rep and resume - see his IMDB listing vs. hers - but in terms of contributions to the current series she has realised the most textured character.

And what she gives us in this episode is . . . rage. Fiercely controlled rage. It's in the glint of her eye, the curl of her lip and the sour sigh that replaces the character's trademark giggle. When the Cylon, writhing on the floor and still trying to get into her head, tells Starbuck that she has always wanted to believe that she is a cause of other's harm because that would mean the WORLD was a right place at the cost of herself being a wrong thing in it, we instantly believe him (it?) because we've been watching her live that belief for most of an hour. Seeing Sackhoff's portrayal of Starbuck as torturer opened my eyes retrospectively to hints of the character's self-hatred and anger in previous episodes. I now understand her great guilt, over her responsibility for the death of her lover, Adama's younger son, is an aspect of a prior, larger hurt.

This isn't just another car chase. It is symptom and cause of deep corruption in the perpetrator, as well as unconscionable pain in the victim.

What the show hints is that the corruption extends beyond Starbuck. We know that humans created the Cylons. We know that the Cylons are fervent monotheists and convinced that humanity is irredemably sinful. The Cylons claim to believe that God so came to abominate humankind that He had humans create the Cylons as their more righteous successors. Having seen the Cylons in action, I think they fail to see their own corruption - we see a lot of it in this very episode - but the show certainly hasn't troubled to demonstrate that the Cylons are wrong about humanity.

BSG problematizes torture to a degree far beyond the mild difficulties 24 attributes to the practice. It's an interesting contrast because both shows are, at different levels, about post-9/11 America. BSG is the superior show because 24 merely exemplifies the national mindset (We're the Greatest and Most Powerful Nation Ever! And We're Besieged on All Sides!) while BSG uses it. (We must not say "interrogate.") In Starbuck's tormenting of the Cylon we see bigotry (you're just a toaster), disparity of power (equivocated because of the Cylon's superhuman prowess), and impotent, Cornwallesque rage. We have a ticking bomb scenario with, it turns out, no bomb. On the other hand, we have a Good Cop in President Roslin who breaks a solemn vow and is right to do so. We have, after all, a genuine menace, programmatic religious zealots who really are trying to exterminate mankind (so far as we can tell), and who really may be automatons at a level humans are not. (If Adama is not a Cylon, as the Cylon Loeben claims, then his whispering it to President Roslin at the moment of his deliverance looks uncannily like a software looping error.)

I don't have a grand conclusion for you after all that wind-up. It's entirely possible that, television being television, BSG is writing checks it won't be able to cash. It could get to the point where the money people don't want to harm the salability of their product. By holding a funhouse mirror, as opposed to a makeup compact, to 21st Century America, science fiction can reflect things that might otherwise inspire us to smash the glass. But truth is like an eclipse, dangerous even when viewed indirectly. It has always made TV people in particular nervous. You can put your eye out with that thing.

UPDATE: Franklin Harris corrected my earlier misstatement that Starbuck's sweetie was Adama's elder son. Unqualified Offerings regrets the error. However, as Franklin must understand, he is not eligible for a no-prize because he didn't resolve the continuity error for me by explaining how I could have been right after all.

She's Back - Obernews returns.

The Political is Personal for Radley Balko.

I am of course against gun control. But it's never been much of a hot-button issue for me. Until now. I want a gun. Tonight. I should be able to go to Wal-Mart and by a goddamned handgun to defend myself. I doubt the two buffoons who threatened us tonight were serious. But what if they were? Why in the hell should I have to wait five days to be able to defend myself? Anybody think that if they were serious, they'd have any trouble finding a gun in about eight minutes? Who's served by a federal law making me wait five days?

Find out why at the link.

Reality TV - Interesting. Set your (British) TV to Channel 4:

LONDON - A British TV channel is preparing “Guantanamo Guidebook,” a show that will test the effectiveness of interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation which freed inmates say were used by the U.S. military at its camp in Cuba.

Channel Four, which brought the world reality TV hit “Big Brother,” will film seven British volunteers as they are subjected to extreme temperatures and mild physical contact while being kept awake for long periods.

The techniques are based on information from declassified U.S. government documents, and will be carried out by expert interrogators from the United States, a Channel Four spokesman said, declining to provide additional details.

He said the volunteers were rigorously screened prior to their participation and received intensive medical and psychological attention during and after the taping of the show.

One man was forced by doctors to withdraw after he contracted hypothermia.

Hm. a socially-useful reality show. What will they think of next.

The risk with such a show is that the precautions the producers must take probably end up understating the devastation the techniques cause in real life. We don't torture "volunteers," nor are they "rigorously screened" for psychological and physical stamina. I suppose it's inevitable that torture apologists will say, "See! If you can make a reality show about it it can't be so bad!"

But then our torture apologists will say anything. There's an irony there somewhere, now that I think about it.

Via a pointer from a discussion of torture and TV at Moonage_Daydream's Livejournal, to which I was tipped by Eve Tushnet. There's an evolving BSG discussion in the thread which is quite good.

Meta - I confess it. I'm sitting there tonight watching Battlestar Galactica, and it did occur to me that there were a couple of dozen folks around the world thinking, Man, Henley must be flipping right now.

More after I stop flipping.

Who Killed Cock Robin? - So. Anyone interested in who actually killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri? Didn't think so. Discussion seems to moved directly to the politics of the Syrian occupation with barely a pause to consider what may have actually happened. The Lebanese, with the help of the Swiss, are planning an investigation, bless their hearts, but everyone else is focused on the Great Democratic Transformation that is or isn't happening. But isn't there at least a chance that what actually happened will end up affecting the politics of the story, even a little? No? Okay, you're probably right. So let's just speculate for fun. I will tell you who killed Rafiq Hariri and why, with every bit as much chance of being right as the Big Brains, but more chance of admitting in advance that I can't really say for sure. As a bonus, a suddenly prominent political figure makes a crucial appearance.

Before we begin, there is one objection that must be ruled out of bounds: You're engaging in conspiracy theories. When a thousand pound car bomb kills eighteen people, the "lone nut" hypothesis is the crazy option. Any theory that purports to fit the facts, mine or Michael Young's, must be a conspiracy theory. Are we together so far? Good.

The official conspiracy theory is "Syria did it." The fact that the upshot of the assassination has been very bad news for Syria - and predictably bad news - is the most important obstacle. Daniel Pipes' gets around this objection by arguing that Syria is stupid, Charles Paul Freund that it's mere "corruption and recklessness." In other words, Syria was "carrying the idiot ball that week."

Life is stupider than fiction or Paul Wolfowitz would never have told Congress before Gulf War Phase III that Iraq had no history of sectarian strife like there was in the Balkans, and Congress wouldn't have let him get away with it. And as a libertarian, I'm loath to suggest that there is a depth of dumbness governments can not plumb, and as governments go, Syria is worse than most. Still, you can't exactly call the Pipes/Freund argument a slam dunk.

The other argument for the offiicial theory is that Syria's control of Lebanon is so total that no one could have killed Hariri without the Syrians knowing. I'm sorry, I flat don't believe this. Very few authoritarian states have ever attained that level of control. Even Saddam's grip on Iraq was decaying as the 21st century rolled on. Months before the war, the US had special forces roaming the Western Desert, holed up in Baghdad hi-rises and taking meetings with the tribal leaders and Army commanders we ended up successfully buying off in advance of the invasion. Mediterranean culture being what it is, Lebanon's history being so anarchical and Syria in such decay, the notion that not a sparrow falls there without Damascus marking it is implausible. I'm sure Syrian security is officious, overbearing and menacing. I'm sure it's not omnicompetent.

Crap! Out of time! We'll pick up our investigations this evening. In the meantime, please make sure that no one leaves this room.

The Best Idea Ever for combatting the "broken window fallacy."

Take Two - That was fun, but there's a less snarky point to make about Warner's article. Quindlen may actually be "wrong." Warner et al's careerist approach to mothering may be "necessary," to the extent that Warner is showing us how 21st Century American meritocracy reproduces. Warner and her cohort represent the elite of Robert Reich's class of "symbolic analysts." The nice thing about American meritocracy is that you rise in it by dint of intelligence, education and hard work. (Plus social connections, of course. But you rise everywhere partly through social connections. The question is what else the elite brings to the table.) But all those things are broadly heritable, in nature or nurture terms. If you're a meritocrat, you have a real if imperfect chance of passing on your status to your offspring. And just as TVs get bigger and clearer and computers get faster and cheaper, we can expect succeeding generations of symbolic analysts to be smarter, better educated and harder-working than their ancestors. But how do they get that way? Perhaps by dint of inhuman efforts toward that end by their mothers. Essentially, the entry fee into the meritocracy keeps rising and parents have to work harder and harder to ensure their kids can pay it. Their efforts can easily become markers of shared experience that bind tomorrow's class in psychic solidarity - all those kids sitting around Seven Sister and Little Ivy dorm rooms saying "You took elite ballet too? So did I!"

That means that Warner's desired government subsidies can't solve her real problem, which is ensuring that her children have relatively higher status than the bulk of their generational cohort. You can offer tax-funded ballet classes to every Jacob and Caitlin in the country, but there will still be only one "best" ballet class in a given town. Meritocrat moms will still "need" to get into that class, not the ones for the hoi-polloi. Rank Hath Its Privileges, but its duties too.

There's also the fact that, as a country, having your socioeconomic elite marked by brains, education and hard work offers real benefits, even to those of us who aren't in it.

It Gives Me Absolutely No Pleasure to Say This given that she's been one of my bete noires for years, but thank God for Anna Quindlen. Her Newsweek essay, "The Good Enough Mother," is the perfect antidote to the twaddle peddled in its more-discussed companion piece, the excerpt from Judith Warner's Perfect Madness. The obvious point to make about at least the excerpted portion of Warner's book is that, in classic American fashion, she mistakes "the middle class" for people like her. Warner is an upper-middle class striver and moves in that milieu. What she chronicles and exemplifies is simply American workaholism applied to child-rearing. Given the way that journalists find vox pop samples* when writing such articles, you can be sure that the bulk of Warner's "150 mothers across the country" are also from her class. So the ambitious income redistribution that she imagines will solve the problems of women like her and her friends amounts to a bold if imprecisely quantified call for the redistribution of wealth from the upper-class to the upper-middle class. To the barricades, comrades!

But it's sillier than that. In the middle of her article, she explains the virtues of government subventions for the kinds of child care she'd like to see:

I lived in France before moving to Washington, and there, my elder daughter attended two wonderful, affordable, top-quality part-time pre-schools, which were essentially meant to give stay-at-home moms a helping hand. One was run by a neighborhood co-op and the other by a Catholic organization. Government subsidies kept tuition rates low. A sliding scale of fees brought some diversity. Government standards meant that the staffers were all trained in the proper care of young children. My then 18-month-old daughter painted and heard stories and ate cookies for the sum total in fees of about $150 a month. (This solution may be French—but do we have to bash it?)

Pause to suggest that Warner's obsession with "quality" child care is an insistence that child-care facilities are only worthy if they provide an outsourced version of the same non-stop, thoroughgoing "enrichment activities" that Warner and her friends can't forebear. We've had our two children, at various periods, in the care of: each parent at home; two outlets of one corporate center; two different church-based facilities and two neighborhood moms. Some were "better" and some were "worse," but none of them could be fairly called detrimental to our kids, though none of them - and I suspect this is Warner's stumbling block - shortened the path from here to Harvard.

But, remember: Warner's thesis. Political solutions, aka copious piles of other people's money, can salve the psychic wounds of American mothers. So let's cut to the end of her article, where she writes

And I was reminded of the words of a French doctor I'd once seen. I'd come to him about headaches. They were violent. They were constant. And they would prove, over the next few years, to be chronic. He wrote me a prescription for a painkiller. But he looked skeptical as to whether it would really do me much good. "If you keep banging your head against the wall," he said, "you're going to have headaches."

What? You mean despite all that subsidized top-quality pre-school (with "some diversity" - and surely no more was desired), Warner was still unhappy? Still "banging [her] head against the wall?" You don't say.

The print version of the article is especially instructive, with its photo insets of anchorwomen and editors, their plight captions reminding one of a National Geographic photo essay from a refugee camp. And perhaps Geographic should send an anthropologist/photographer team to capture this tribe that confuses class neurosis with political neglect. In the meantime, Warner and her 150 friends should, while waiting in line for a spot in "the right ballet class . . . the best camps, the best coaches and the best piano teachers" carry the hardcopy of Quindlen's essay to read. Excerpt:

So much has been written about how the young people of America seem to stay young longer now, well into the years when their grandparents owned houses and had families. But their grandparents never had a mother calling the teacher to complain about a bad grade. And hair-trigger attention spans may be less a function of PlayStation and more a function of kids who never have a moment's peace. I passed on the weekend roundelay of kiddie-league sports so our three could hang out with one another. I told people I hoped it would cement a bond among them, and it did. But I really wanted to be reading rather than standing on the sidelines pretending my kids were soccer prodigies. Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.

Then they should get out of line and get some ice cream.

*Fun fact re this early Offering. I later met someone quoted in the article. He confirmed that the writer had indeed been talking to friends and friends of friends, and that some of the wives' comments did lead to a measure of domestic friction.

I am Walid Jumblatt - It hit me: Jumblatt's sudden love for liberal revolution and American interventionism

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

reminds me of nothing so much as my tasteless April Fool's Joke of last year.

Memory Hole - How long does it take to go from raving menace to statesman? A couple of months, apparently. Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt managed that trick anyway. Just in December, the New York Sun found, to its horror, that Jumblatt was the sort of person accorded respect by - and I am sorry to upset you - France. They're just the sort of people to set up a state visit by a man who

On November, 19, 2003, it was reported that the state department cancelled Mr. Jumblatt's diplomatic visa following revelations that he expressed regret that the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, was not killed in a missile attack during a visit to Baghdad.

More recently, Mr. Jumblatt gave an interview to Al-Sharq Al-Awsat on February 12, 2004, in which he said: "We are all happy when U.S. soldiers are killed [in Iraq] week in and week out. The killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is legitimate and obligatory." The Progressive Socialist Party leader has also said he felt "great joy" at the 2002 destruction of the U.S. Space Shuttle Columbia, because it carried an Israeli astronaut.

The Lebanese MP is also known for espousing conspiracy theories against America. On April 28, 2004, he gave an interview to Al Arabiyya TV, in which he detailed how America was really behind September 11: "Who invented Osama bin Laden?! The Americans, the CIA invented him so they could fight the Soviets in Afghanistan together with some of the Arab regimes. Osama bin Laden is like a ghost, popping up when needed. This is my opinion."

This week, Jumblatt is aces. David Ignatius reports that

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

and his accusations of Syrian guilt in the assassination of Rafiq Hariri are taken as probative.

Simply start saying things useful to the Bush White House and you too can take on gravitas with Gannonite speed. Only spoilsports would pause to wonder if your insights into the murder of Rafiq Hariri or your enthusiasm for democracy were more credible than your shrewd deductions regarding the massacres of September 2001. And the only people who would suggest that, as a politician, anything that comes out of your mouth is calculated to maintain and increase your own power would be people who are just on the other side.

(Via Antiwar.com blog.)

Cockfight - World O'Crap and Tom Maguire go at it over Jeff Gannon and James Guckert. I feel obligated to say more on the topic without annoying hypocrisy, but I think the story has hit a stage where blogs have very little useful to say. The interesting questions now have to do with just how odd Gannon's access was, what involvement he had in the burning of Valerie Plame and whether his job was implicated in sexual blackmail from any direction. Answering those questions involves acquiring facts we don't seem to have. Republican bias will educate your guesses in one direction and Democratic bias in another. Gannon's own testimony seems insufficiently reliable to settle the matter, for all that Howard Kurtz declines to go beyond it. The Gannon news cycle now runs at the speed of FOIA requests and special prosecutor subpoenas.

One of the things I've been wondering is, "If I found out a call girl had managed to get a job as a tame White House correspondent, how differently would I view things?" There are escort bloggers who write at least as well as a lot of journalists (if that's not damning with faint praise), and there's the passage in Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun where Horn/Silk explains to an unhappy young girl that it is only appropriate that everyone use whatever talents they have to get through life. If Gannon simply leveraged some affection or gratitude from a satisfied client into a new, less strenuous line of work, I don't fault him for it. If said client wanted merely to do him a good turn I can't get too worked up about it. It's not morally uncomplicated, because the flip side of that thing is sexual harrassment - the ex(?)-escort is getting jumped ahead of all sorts of people who did not bugger the gatekeeper for cash. The civil law looks askance enough on that kind of thing for many companies to institute fairly strict anti-fraternization policies, or at least get nervous about it. If you and I are sleeping together and you give me a promotion, even though there's no quid pro quo either of us will acknowledge even to ourselves, the less attractive men in the company (that is, the rest of them . . . ) can make the case that they missed out because they weren't loving you up like I was. No company wants to fight that suit.

I don't approve of taking sexual harrassment law that far myself, so I'm not outraged if something like that happened in Gannon's case. Most liberals probably do approve of taking sexual harrassment law that far, though, so unlike Monicagate, they aren't being hypocritical for taking the stances they've taken.

Meanwhile, the Party in Power trades on sexual moralism, especially when it comes to icky man-man stuff. The hypocrisy of functionaries for an anti-gay, sex-dubious party playing Pygmalion with an aging working boy matters, if indeed that's how it happened. That's the kind of thing it will take actual journalism to tell us. Maguire may be right that "sometimes, where there is smoke there are only people throwing smoke grenades." Sometimes. We don't know yet if this is one of those times or not.

Book Notes - Our sole booknote is I'm not going to blog much tonight because I'm deep into the delightful memoir, Swimming to Antarctica, by legendary distance swimmer Lynne Cox. So far she's set two crossing records for the English Channel and one for California's Catalina Channel and nearly died from dysentary trying to complete a Nile River race under repulsive conditions. And soon I'll get to the part where she graduates high school. Nice clean writing. I got the book for my 12-year-old niece, the competitive swimmer in the family, for Christmas and finally was able to borrow it back.

The New Yorker Online offers a 2003 interview with Cox about her most recent achievement, a one-mile Antarctic swim without wetsuit or greasing.

Mandalaspherics! - Radley's got a good column about how blogs aren't really all that and a bag of chips, in which he reiterates his point about how independent the political blogosphere isn't. But I find myself wanting something more meta. We know about blogospheric triumphalism. Radley's column belongs to the growing genre of blogospheric anti-triumphalsim. But the next level, which I hope we will reach soon, is triumphal blogospheric anti-triumphalism, in which a legion of anti-Jarvises proclaim blogospheric anti-triumphalism the most important development in media since the stele. Surely this very item represents a small contribution to that end, but I suppose the phenomenon will have arrived when an outcry of blogospheric anti-triumphalists (BATs?) forces the Emm Ess Emm to restore some legacy media poobah or politician to the phoney-baloney job other bloggers hounded him from.

Or something.

Oh by the Way - Not me. Weird, because Henley is damned uncommon in the US for a proper English name. I've never met a Henley I wasn't related to, and I've never seen the name used fictionally before. My middle initial is "L," if anybody's wondering.

Little Oral Anarchist - Interesting consideration of the relationships among radical feminism, libertarianism and pornography by Micha Ghertner. I don't agree that pornography as such is oppression of women, and I think that Catherine MacKinnon ends up plumping for totalitarian solutions to gender issues because she brings a totalizing mindset to analyzing gender relations. I'm fascinated by Micha's quotation from Johnson and Long that "the state sees and treats everybody—though not in equal degree—the way men see and treat women," but one of its fascinations is that it cuts both ways. If "men" and "women" are less unitary in praxis than in feminist theory, then perhaps "the state" and "everybody" are as well. In other words, the analogy is a kind of anarcho-capitalist doubling down of its original bet on the nature and valence of the state.

Meanwhile, Alina Stefanescu muses on pregnancy as an aggravating factor in murder risk. She quotes, without judgment, NOW President Kim Gandy to the effect that

"Violence in intimate relationships is all about power...There are fewer times when you can have power over a woman than when she's pregnant. She's vulnerable. It's an easier time to threaten her."

which manages to have a good deal of fatuity to it (just what does it mean to say something is "all about power" anyway?) and only a partial account of the problem. The rest of the problem is that pregnancy raises the financial, legal and emotional stakes in any relationship. It's a stressful time for a solid relationship. In the case of a bad one, the only question is How horribly things will go wrong? One of those ways is certainly the man killing the woman.

One of the good things that might come out of the libertarian-conservative divorce is freeing some (mostly male) libertarians to look at feminism with fresh eyes and a less reflexive rejection of feminist theory and scholarship than a lot of us were prone to aforetimes. Feminist prescription may, insofar as it calls for increased state power, be anti-libertarian. Feminist diagnosis need not be.

Sorry Kevin - At some point today I realized that 24 is no more subtly suggesting that torture is unreliable so we shouldn't torture than it is suggesting that car chases and gun battles are unreliable so we shouldn't engage in them. It's just another thing "we" do that sometimes works and sometimes (especially during rising action) doesn't. It's a shame when it doesn't work out, but what does? (Note that Jack's shooting off the kneecap of the mook in Episode One successfully yields information. It's not in time because CTU has committed the unpardonable folly of not having Baueresque gusto.

Meanwhile, Raznor has uncovered several genuine lessons from the show, including

3) Any terrorist plot will be stopped in a few hours, only to have the much bigger plot initiated. This is my theory for the intelligence failure on 9/11. They actually stopped some minor terrorist threat only to find out the real plan involved airplanes. That part probably hasn't been declassified yet.

Obviously, there are more.

Scheming Bitch Blogging - No, not 24 this time. Kevin Drum (who walks right up to the line of violating the sacred oath he had to swear to never link to this site when Washington Monthly hired him to blog) has your 24-blogging today. Kevin thinks that the show is a sly morality play on the "torture doesn't work" theme. It's either that or, taking the show as a fantasia on America's self-image, an object lesson in how the complex of "fear and vaunting" Garet Garrett identified as the characteristic of Empire degenerates into sadomasochistic ritual. The question of which it is makes me genuinely interested in where the show goes next. In addition to wondering how the promised scene of Jack torturing his girlfriend's estranged husband in front of her plays out, I want to see how the character of torture-victim Sarah develops. She was unpleasant before her victimhood and she's unpleasant now, which is dramatically appropriate. I may be imagining it, but the actress who plays her seemed to convey a barely repressed rage as she observed not one but two different terror suspects, against whom there is far stronger evidence, being treated better than her.

But this isn't about 24 and torture. It's about Battlestar Galactica and gender. Something I had to face watching Friday night's episode, which I enjoyed greatly (see Olmsted for some examples of wobbly plotting) is that, while I've lampooned 24 for its parade of "scheming bitches," Battlestar Galactica has them too. Obviously Tricia Helfer's Number Six counts here. But both versions of the Cylon Boomer are running highly sexualized cons on different servicemen. What saves it for me, and keep in mind I'm a man, is that we don't get just scheming bitches. Neither Starbuck nor President Roslin make the scheming bitch list. Diversity! I've got other gender-related thoughts running through my head, but they're not the kind I can get lined up before work.

UPDATE: Of course, BSG's scheming bitches have strange depths to them. There's Number Six's Tielhardian obsession with God, and Boomer's apparent divided loyalties. (Previews for next week suggest we're about to find out how much of that is genuine and how much red herring.)

A Fanboy's Comments on a Fanboy's Links - Speaking of the Hibbs article, this is the part that jumped out at me, for self-interested reasons:

Another observation: People who want Manga seem to only want real Manga – taking American comics and putting them in Manga format does not seem to adding sales. There are 5 manga-format American comics on the list, if I’m remembering everything right: the four Spider-Man related “Marvel Age” books and Michael Chabon’s Escapist v1. All of which, I think, would have appeared on the charts anyway, if they’d been in a more traditional format. Can’t prove it, however.

I do know that manga formatting hurts sales in at least my corner of the Direct Market. For example, I’ve yet to sell a single copy of any of the reformatted Elfquest books since they were released – despite having 2-3 people a month coming and asking for Elfquest. They simply don’t like the format. We’ve also seen underwhelming results of things ranging from My Faith in Frankie to Emma Frost and it’s my strong belief that “non standard” formatting isn’t a trick the public seems interested in falling for. It doesn’t track on BookScan either.

Self-interested because RGB Bill and I had pretty well decided to write and draw our always-in-progress graphic novel to a manga format so as not to miss the biggest, newest wave in rackability, despite the fact that I'm not all that fond of the format, myself. I don't mind large-trim manga - Uzumaki or A Contract with God dimensions - they're roughly as big as a lot of prose trade paperbacks. But to little Chobits-size books are smaller than I enjoy. You either lose a lot of detail in the art and a lot of flexibility in panel layout or you cram an unreadable amount of material heedlessly onto the page.

Format matters. Just going from "magazine-size" trim to "large-manga" dimensions means, in practical terms, stepping down from a six-panel grid to four (roughly). Slimming Shrinking down to the smallest manga package probably means two to three panels on most pages. That makes a huge difference right back to the writing stage of the project, since it's the writer's responsibility to pace the action from page to page and give the artist a fighting chance to produce attractive layouts. I've been working on an eight-page short story for Bill as a tune-up for the full graphic novel. Wanting to practice "manga scripting," I worked to describe an average of four panels worth or story per page. Consarn it, I'm gonna go back and up that to six now!

A Fanboy's Links - Brian Hibbs offers his annual analysis of Bookscan's 2004 sales figures for "graphic novels." Well-caveated and astutely considered.

The Comics Reporter finds a mysterious newspaper strip oddity - a covert outbreak of Tourette's Syndrome by The Ghost Who Walks. For what it's worth, it looks to me less like it says "FORCE IT UP YOUR @ASS" than "OR STICK IT UP YOUR @SS." ("FOR STICK IT UP YOUR @SS?") And I think the clues to the target of the cartoonist's ire are probably to be found in the nearly legible letters in the first half of the line above the naughty bits. Part of it looks like "ARHSDA," which means, I gotta say, nothing to me. Any insights?

Also, the international Fantastic Four trailer.

Big Mo and Big Brother II - But wait! There's more!

Last week Joseph Braude argued in The New Republic (motto: Giving Overbearing Paternalism a Bad Name Since 1917!) that "we" should not pressure Egypt's geriatric caudillo, Hosni Mubarak, to democratize because in a democratic Egypt the wrong people would win. Instead, the United States should pressure Mubarak to liberalize civil society now so that liberals can win free elections down the road; that is, when "we" are sure liberals will win.

To foster a semblance of political balance in Egyptian society, political and cultural pressure must first be exerted from the top--a twenty-first century Ataturk-style project to undo the country's decades-long tilt toward Islamism is needed. This means opening Egyptian broadcast media to progressive voices, not just religious clerics and the political establishment. It means advancing a secular humanist agenda through the educational system. It means opening the organs of state, from the judiciary to the executive, to the sort of exchange programs with democratic countries that bore fruit so profoundly in the Ukraine in recent months. The details of the project would best be left to Egypt's liberals themselves, who know better than outsiders what they need to gain ground. But the central question has already been well expressed by Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim, no stranger to the country's prison system himself: "What, Mr. Mubarak, have you done to preserve the popularity of non-Islamist forces in the country?"

This is stupid. It's as if Braude had never learned one of the basic laws of politics: the greatest pressure on authoritarian regimes comes after they have begun to liberalize. It is not a process you can stage-manage. Improving conditions raise expectations which spark new demands which meet new frustrations which ratchet up tensions. You either get seismic change, a great deal of blood or both. See Manila in 1986 (7?), Berlin in 1989, Moscow in 1991, Ukraine in 2004 and Beirut this week for the seismic change; Beijing 1989, the West Bank and Gaza in the late 1990s and Prague in 1968 for the great deal of blood; and Petrograd in 1917, Algeria in the 1950s, India in the 1940s and all too many other places for the both at once. Proposals to gradually liberalize are, like the vision of the "real occupation" of the Palestinian territories that Steven Postrel outlined in letters to this site a couple of years ago, only attempts to put off a day of reckoning. Indeed, I think we're swiftly returning to something very like the late-1990s juncture between Israel and the Palestinians. We will either have peace quickly or war with agonizing leisure.

What Braude offers Egypt is a faux liberalization that would have to end in revolution or repression. (See Kruschev, Nikita, "Thaw.") What excuses the paternalism of real parents is that they actually know more about the world than their offspring. Braude's own naivete is childlike. There's nothing adorable about it.

Big Mo and Big Brother - Lebanese opposition to the Syrian occupation is growing, including a major street demonstration and escalating demands from the opposition. I've been up front about my qualms here, basically the possibility that Syria's thumb has been the only thing keeping the scabs over Lebanon's internal strife from bursting. But my qualms aren't what matters. The Syrian government's views aren't the final word, either. If a critical mass of Lebanese are determined to try to make a go of their society without outside overseers, they deserve that chance. If Lebanese violence were to spill over into Syria, Syria would have legitimate reasons of self-defense to take action. That's assuming you don't believe in expansive notions of "preventive self-defense" that justify using military force against another country based on the simple probability that it could become a threat to you down the line. Absent that, Syria should defend itself from within its own borders. Good advice for everyone. Reader Tomscud writes

On the question of whether Lebanon will once again collapse into civil war if Syria goes: I doubt it. There are too many people who remember exactly what it was like. Twenty years from now, when they're all old codgers sitting around in coffee shops playing backgammon, people might be willing to listen to (and fund, and volunteer for) the hotheads who say "yes, war is bad. But I'll be damned if I let THOSE PEOPLE put one over us!" But for now, anyone who tries to restart the war will be crucified by his own community, which is a contrast from the situation in Iraq, say.

I hope he's right. There are two terrible truths that tell against it. The first is that humans are awesomely, frightfully adaptable. It's our glory and our curse. In Beirut in the 1980s and Sarejevo in the 1990s simply going to the grocery store was worth your life. But people persevered. There's some marvelous writing about this in Tom Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem, actually. It took the shortest of cease fires for someone to flip a table back onto its legs and make it a sidewalk cafe - for a little while. In Sarejevo, I have read, women risked snipers to get their hair done.

We are a damned persistent species. The downside of that is that when so little is truly intolerable, too much will be tolerated for too long.

The other terrible truth is that a lot of humans, especially men, enjoy war. This was even true of World War I, poster child for Bad Stupid Wars. I suspect it will have been true for some Lebanese as well.

Nevertheless, there is such a thing as war-weariness. It may finally be setting in to Lebanon's south. Perhaps it is in Lebanon too. I hope so. And there's a universal desire for self-rule too. The Syrians would be unwise to flout it. I wouldn't spend one American life to drive them out, but I wouldn't advise them to overstay their welcome either. And I hope the Lebanese make a go of it. The country has, for periods of its history, been the jewel of the Mediterranean. With luck and a lot of work, it may be so again.

The Most Exciting Webcast Event Since Coverville came along. Bruce Dene Fleming, photographer, graphic designer and best man at my wedding, has started his own webcast on Webjay, Radio Free Chauncey. Self-consciously eclectic, all-music and no talk, with a new song or two added every day, RFC runs the gamut from country to hip-hop. The two downsides are that Webjay bandwidth can be inconsistent (I had a lot of drops last night, none tonight) and that you don't get whole new shows swapped in, just a gradual accretion of new material. But it's yet another great source of good stuff you either haven't heard before or haven't had pounded into your brain a million times. Just yesterday, Offering Boy and I did a couple of hours of errands in the car. Among five radio stations we heard four different songs twice in that time. Bruce offers one more way to save yourself from such a fate.

NP on Radio Free Chauncey: "Strawberry Sex" by Ken Hirai.

A Quick Expression of my Utter Love for You All - Battlestar Galactica was back on its game tonight, I thought, but I don't feel like going into it right now. Soon I'll run a couple more e-mails I got, including the first one critical of the show. In the meantime, may I suggest people revisit or visit the fine links in the current New Crew? Tomorrow: Did James D. Guckert kill Rafiq Hariri? And does this mean I'm never going to get an answer to the e-mail I sent Hariri two years ago?

Lazy Warblogger Night - Matthew Yglesias has the hopeful sign; Spencer Ackerman the disquieting portent; Porter Goss the admission of the obvious and James Joyner the latest example of neocon mau-mauing. (He's against it.) And now, to bed.

Lazy Fanboy Night - Two more lists for Mike Sterling to add to his master list of 100-item love: Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas; and Steven Vincent who falls, admittedly, a few items short of a full hundred. It's all good stuff, though.

To Coin a Phrase - Back when I was a kid there was a popular bumper sticker that read YOUR GOD IS TOO SMALL, taken from the title of a then-popular book. Thinking about the suicide paper title business and so much more, I think it's time for a new bumper sticker:

YOUR GOD IS TOO PETTY.

Lazy Blogger Night - Turning in early. Things that caught my eye today:

Per Salon and elsewhere, it appears that Jeff Gannon/James Guckert was attending White House press briefings shortly before "Talon News" even got going. Meanwhile Maureen Dowd, who has been a White House correspondent, says that the procedures by which he was cleared were decidedly non-standard. There's an awful lot of smoke around the whole affair. I'm still betting that there's a fire generating it. Two stray thoughts: 1. I'm certainly not down with THIS passage from the Salon article:

Critics have charged that while Talon News may publish regularly, it boasts a nearly all-volunteer news team that includes not a single person with actual journalism experience. (The team does, though, have quite a bit of experience working on Republican campaigns.) In other words, the outfit is not legitimate or independent, two criteria often used in Washington to receive press credentials.

Get over yourself, Eric Boehlert. Also, how rich is it that the linchpin of the story has become the comments section at what Loyal Readers know is my favorite weblog, Winds of Change. My old pal Armed Liberal suggests

So as a thought experiment, can I suggest that some enterprising blogger with more time on his hands than I have file a FOIA request and ask who got white house press passes allowing them to come to press conferences and what their affiliation was for the date range from, say June of 04 to December of 04??

Sure, it might be instructive. I think there's another tack, though, that could be just as productive. Look at February 2003, when "Jeff Gannon" sprung full-blown from the brow of - well, maybe not the brow. Anyway, see what was going on in the news at that time. If I weren't making an early night of it, I'd do it myself.

Many bloggers are blogging from this year's CPAC convention, though under near-intolerable conditions owing to the failure of the blogger-proletariat to rise up and smash the data access oligarchs. Radley Balko takes the occasion to wonder

whether or not there's any room left on the "right" for libertarians and "leave us alone" conservatives. My sense is that there isn't.

Mine too, and not just because of the big, obvious stuff, and not just because of the Bush Administration, but its supporters, and not just the mouth-breathers and spittle-spewers. Take Robert Tagorda, who speweth not, on the recent "gay suicide title flap." Tagorda devotes an entire item to it in which he laments the nasty language used in some of the complaint messages to the bureaucrat who insisted that the words "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual" and "transgendered" be dropped from the title of the panel on suicide among the, um, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered. He opines that he personally doesn't see the requested title wording change "would marginalize the constituents as much as the activists claim." He suggests that it's "rather paranoid to believe that the White House has much interest in the title of a relatively obscure bureaucratic event."

But does he have any opinion on whether the bureaucrat's decision in this case wise wise, just and necessary as opposed to picayune and officious? If he does, it's not important enough to share with us. Only the unofficial behavior here - those unpleasant e-mailers and "paranoid" activists - is worth his comment.

Other business: In case you missed three hundred other pointers, let me commend to you the live chat with reporter Rod Nordland of Newsweek from Groundhog Day. Fun. Ny. One single excerpt:

Grand Rapids, MI: If WMDs don't exist in Iraq, where are the destroyed ones? Rod Nordland: I think they're in Atlantis.

Here's what I take from Michael Young's Daily Star editorial on the murder of Hariri and the question of Syrian complicity. It's interesting that various Lebanese politicians are holding up placards that say "Syria Did It." Like I said the other day, maybe Syria did. But since they are politicians lining up, it's probably more about sensing which way the wind is blowing and sizing up the best approach to the buffet line. Syria's hold on Lebanon may indeed be crumbling. It's far from clear to me that that will be an unmixed blessing. I'm old enough to remember the 1980s very well, which means I remember what Lebanon was like before Syria succeeded in bashing a critical mass of heads together. A lot of Republican hawks are fairly salivating at the prospect of undoing what some blog commenter called "Ronald Reagan's greatest failure." I fear they may simply lead to us - and, moreso, the Lebanese - reliving Ronald Reagan's greatest nightmare.

But maybe it will all be swell.

Cheap Transmutation of Matter - Henry Farrell offers to lend me a book, which is generous and, hey, I love free reading. This particular book, by Jared Diamond, will be starting from behind, though, thanks to Henry's item, which describes Diamond's account of Julian Simon's famous bet with Paul Ehrlich:

But what I suspect Jim doesn’t know (and what I didn’t know until I read it yesterday in Jared Diamond’s Collapse), is why Simon was quite so confident that metal shortages weren’t a problem. Over to Diamond:

There is an abundance of errors of the latter sort (anti-environmentalist predictions that have proved wrong): e.g. overly optimistic predictions that the Green Revolution would already have solved the world’s hunger problems; the prediction of the economist Julian Simon that we could feed the world’s population as it continues to grow for the next 7 billion years; and Simon’s prediction “Copper can be made from other elements” and thus there is no risk of a copper shortage.

Wow, I thought. Simon really said we could make Copper from other elements? Immediate reactions: Gulp; Really? and Why was I not informed? Henry goes on rather a tear about it.

Problem is, as links and accounts of the original interview make clear, Simon's alleged claim was not only less dire than presented, but not really dire at all. I came away from Henry's item thinking that Simon believed he would win his bet with Ehrlich because "we could make more Copper out of other metals," which we couldn't practically do in the 1970s and can't do now. In fact, context makes it clear that Simon believed no such thing. His comments about making copper from other metals were plainly far-future speculation, essentially an answer to similar far-future speculation on the part of environmentalists that "In the long run there's a finite supply of everything." Simon's remarks about the ultimate limit being "the weight of the universe" are a bit of a tip-off here. The "earthlings of the future" reference is also a tip-off. It's separate from Simon's near-term optimism about resources.

Which leaves us a question: Are we dealing with a good-faith misreading of Diamond by Henry or a bad-faith misreading of Simon by Diamond. Henry has the excuse of not having seen the original quotes from Simon. He simply made the same leap of credulity to which we are all prey: believing something about our political opponents that's too good to be true. Diamond presumably has seen Simon's original statements, so a mistake on his part would be less forgiveable.

It's Always Something - Republican activist groups have begun booming what we might call "The Anti-Gannon." You'll be hearing all about him in the coming days. I checked the February 1 briefing transcript at Whitehouse.gov and the guy really does exist. His questions are genuinely trollish in an anti-Gannon way - they are gotchas designed to leave the press briefer with no good answers.

Here is anti-Gannon's, aka Russell Mokhiber's homepage. Biased? You betcha. An offender against our absurd laws against victimless crime, like Gannon? Who can say. Maybe he does drugs. He doesn't seem to have websites where he offers to do drugs with you for money. And he seems to have taken up the journalism business more than five days before getting his White House press pass.

The Gannon story remains interesting because Gannon is a one-man nexus between prostitution and national security. He is a prostitute turned instant journalist at the heart of the mystery surrounding the betrayal of Valerie Plame's identity to the media and our enemies. It's also fun. Russell Mokhiber seems mostly tedious. Nevertheless, it's interesting to see that pressroom trolls are, as a class, ambidextrous.

Links for the Coming Campaign - Here are a few:

Syria Comment
The Arabist Network (both via Yglesias)
The Daily Star (Lebanon)
Amarji - A Heretic's Blog

Second Verse, Same as the First - Does anyone really believe the US government has the faintest idea whether the Syrian government was behind the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri or not? One day later?

I was afraid of that. I'm reminded of an epigram from Samuel R. Delany's Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand:

Ignorance is a condition. Stupidity is a strategy.

At least there's some humor value in the case, however bitter. CNN reports

Meanwhile, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States has "made it clear" it wants Syria, which maintains some 16,000 troops in Lebanon, to use its influence to prevent attacks such as Monday's massive bombing.

We have around 150,000 troops in Iraq and can't prevent people from shelling the Green Zone. But we feel free to insist that Syria's 16,000 soldiers in Lebanon prevent all political violence. Rich.

Look, Syria may really be behind the murder of Hariri. But neither Condi Rice nor Scott McLellan nor Richard Boucher has any idea. The US reaction to the murder is the sheerest opportunism. Our rulers are practically pissing themselves with joy over this man's death. It's like a valentine from their one true love, War. The Administration's brain trust (please throw scare quotes around each of the two preceding words) took a good long look at Iran, decided it wasn't so appetizing after all, and cast about for a seemingly more digestible meal. As usual, they get to eat and we get what comes out the other end. Grab your nose plugs and a shovel, folks. As the poet said, "We must suffer them all again."

A Hustle Here and a Hustle There - Major Olmsted believes "the Left" et al have hit rock bottom in our coverage of male prostitute/journalist (apologies for the redundancy) Jeff Gannon/James Guckert. (See last night's item.) So does John Cole. White House Press Secretary Scott McLellan says Gannon got his clearance under his real name and only used his pen name for the reporting. (McLellan himself uses "Jeff" repeatedly when calling on Gannon, which he seems to have done a lot, per the WMV clip that Tex offers.)

But I'm still curious. Alexa says Talon News was established March 29, 2003. Gannon/Guckert was credentialled almost simultaneously with the "news" site's foudning. Is that typical, that an unknown reporter for a brand new news service can get immediate credentials? How did Gannon/Guckert come to the attention of GOPUSA's Bobby Eberle? Maybe these kinds of things do happen routinely, in which case we can all go home. But I don't think it's been established yet.

Lovey-Dovey - Comics-bloggers have been posting 100 things they love about comics for Valentine's Day. Fred Hembeck started it off and Alan David Doane went nuclear. Here's my own list, explanatory links to be added at my leisure:

1. The last page of Ghost World.

2. Swapping books with Nate, Bill and Mark.

3. Eve Tushnet's reviews.

4. The diner scene in Planetary #1.

5. The snowscapes in the recent Conan adaptation of "The Frost Giant's Daughter."

6. Inset panels.

7. Avengers 113.

8. The issue of Jonny Quest narrated by Bandit.

9. Reading trade paperback collections in a comfy Borders chair.

10. Buying DC's Cartoon Network titles with my children.

11. The change of Mrs. O's expression from contemptuous to captivated as she deigned to read the first issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

12. The conclusion of the Defenders' Sons of the Serpent storyline where the guy in the crows says, "But that don't mean ya gotta go around burning them to death either."

13. Rorschach.

14. The recent She-Hulk story with the Ghost.

15. Peter Parker telling Mary Jane his secret identity in Ultimate Spider-Man.

16. The All-Chaykin issues of American Flagg.

17. The Regency Elf.

18. Finder: Sin-Eater I and II.

19. The Beat.

20. Eightball 22.

21. Mother Come Home.

22. Plucking the first printing of the first issue of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns off the shelf.

23. "The Death of Speedy."

24. Daredevil: Born Again.

25. Sandman: A Game of You.

26. Jack Kirby's The Hunger Dogs graphic novel.

27. Understanding Comics.

28. The two-track narration in Spiders issue 2.

29. Copious softcover reprints.

30. The Gotham City issues of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing.

31. We3.

32. Mayfair's DC Heroes Roleplaying Game.

33. Marvel's Marvel Universe RPG.

34. Earth II.

35. The Trial of the Flash.

36. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

37. What They Did to Princess Paragon.

38. The last story in A Contract with God.

39. Gil Kane's wiry figures, especially someone who just got punched.

40. Joe Staton drawing Guy Gardner.

41. Reed talking to Galactus/Franklin Richards in Earth X.

42. "How do you get to Bahia?"

43. Vertigo, notwithstanding.

44. Bendis, notwithstanding.

45. Gene Colan drawing Daredevil.

46. George Tuska drawing Iron Man.

47. Herb Trimpe drawing Hulk.

48. Neal Adams drawing Batman.

49. "The Night Gwen Stacy Died."

50. The giant crashing through the wall in Pop Gun War.

51. The car up on blocks in Pop Gun War.

52. William Messner-Loebs' Journey.

53. The panel backgrounds in Church & State Vol. II.

54. Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth.

55. My script-formatting macros in OpenOffice.org Writer.

56. Subscription box pickup day!

57. Joel at Big Planet Comics in Bethesda.

58. John at Beyond Comics in Gaithersburg.

59. Watching Justice League Unlimited with Offering Boy.

60. Comics blogs in general.

61. Spider-Man movies.

62. Small Press Expo.

63. "I did it thirty minutes ago."

64. Jim Starlin's 70s panel layouts.

65. Jim Steranko's 60s panel layouts.

66. Irv Novick drawing the Flash.

67. Yes, Todd McFarlane drawing Spider-Man.

68. Hopey.

69. NuMarvel's recap pages.

70. For the Man Who Has Everything.

71. A certain Zot splash page.

72. Reading most of the Bruce Jones-Mike Deodato Hulk run in a week.

73. The larger-trim manga format.

74. Walking into the Million Year Picnic in Harvard Square the first time in 1978.

75. The storytelling skills of Dan Clowes.

76. Reading Frank Miller's Daredevil run as it appeared.

77. Journalista! (Oh well.)

78. The Comics Reporter.

79. Franklin's Findings.

80. Steve Englehart's Captain America.

81. Gerry Conway's Spider-Man.

82. Marvel's 1970s reprint comics.

83. Marvel's 1970s black and white magazines.

84. Figuring out that Mezzrow from Nexus got his name from a ticket stub.

85. Everyone else's Top 100 lists.

86. Waid, Weiringo, Fantastic Four.

87. Batroc Zee Leapair!

88. John Romita drawing Spider-Man.

89. The star-crossed lovers chapter of Uzumaki.

90. People who can write about how art works.

91. Getting comics-related e-mails.

92. Realizing eventually that this will be a life-long love.

93. Saving the most-anticipated title in the stack for last.

94. Reading the most-anticipated title first.

95. Learning that Iris Allen knew her husband was the Flash because he talked in her sleep.

96. Getting to borrow the O'Neil/Adams Batman issues from a high school teacher.

97. Making up Legion of Substitute Heroes identities for ourselves with my fraternity brothers.

98. Carla Speed McNeil's art in Frank Ironwine.

99. Daredevil: Underboss.

100. John Cassaday.

Freaky Deaky - The "Jeff Gannon" story gets weirder. The liberal Americablog does the digging. The Poor Man adds

Think about it: what are the chances that a media whore like Gannon would turn out to be an actual whore? It's impossible. It boggles the mind how infinitely unlikely this is. It's like if you found someone pirating CDs, and it turns out he actually had a peg leg and a parrot on his shoulder and sailed around the Caribbean saying "arrrrrr!" and plundering booty.

Ind - uh, sorry.

It's possible that Gannon decided to make a life change in Spring 2003. One hits the wrong side of 40, reassesses what one wants out of life and, like so many of us who switch careers in midlife, becomes a fully accredited White House correspondent pretty much instantly while forgetting to take down stray online ads offering sexual services for cash.

Or, and I'll grant this is much much less likely, it could be the blackmail.

24 More - Whee! We finally found someone CTU won't torture! An actual terrorist! The actress playing Mrs. Araz has been the best thing about the show, though the dragon-lady bit threatens constantly to fall into camp. The ending seems a bit of complcation-for-the-sake-of-complication, though. You would think, them being married, that Mr. Araz would be able to guess the thought processes that Mrs. Araz explains to Jack Bauer in the parking garage, so he has no reason not to waste the kid. (When he first grabs Fayrouz, he has the hope of using the boy to find Mom. Once you're trapped with no way out, the kid's continued existence is pointless, isn't it?) Speaking of actresses whose names I don't feel like looking up, I thought the woman playing Edgar's mom did a nice job.

But let's think about that passage for a minute. In my continuing act of driving John Cole batty by reading too much into the show, I must state my displeasure at the evacuation-related scenes. Mrs. Styles is stuck in the radiation zone because her usual driver is nowhere to be found and by the time she maneuvered her wheelchair outside "all the neighbors were gone." Why does Fox hate America? I have neighbors, and I am one. Had we a wheelchair-bound invalid on this block, No, we would not all of us drive off without checking to see if she needed help in the face of a disaster. I don't believe Mrs. Styles neighbors would either. We have evidence in this direction, the conduct of New Yorkers during the atrocities of September 11, 2001. If only they had filmed my own 24 story instead!

We also have Daughter Heller complaining that a quarter of the people in the evac zone are ignoring directions on where to go, and another quarter don't even realize that they're in the evac zone. Meantime the state police and National Guard don't cooperate effectively until Daughter Heller makes them, from her improvised command post at CTU. Moral: The American people are a bunch of boobs! Only the stern but loving direction of our masters, taking what time they can spare from the pressing business of torturing innocents, can save us. Bleat! Bleeeeeat!

Stray thought: Did the background data relayed to Jack about Mrs. Araz make it sound like she and Mr. Araz got married in the United States within the last couple of years? Whose kid is Fayrouz then? I probably misunderstood that part.

Way-Delayed Mailbag - Way back last September I was talking about Rwanda, which generated two critical e-mails I meant to run before, as so often, I was distracted by shiny things. First, from Tacitus:

Regarding Rwanda, I ought to point out a few things:

1) Getting there, militarily, would not have been terrifically difficult. All those staging areas in Kenya we used for Somalia? Just as good for hitting Kigali. Heck, you could have flown some heavy-lift craft direct from Europe to eastern Congo, and then marched in -- France did it. Speaking of which, France's mini-invasion on behalf of the Hutu genocidaires sort of disproves the notion that there were barley-surmountable logistical challenges to getting there. The French military is not what I would characterize as significantly mobile.

2) We could have taken the country much faster than the 100 days it took the RPF to overrun it. Maybe 30 days, is my guess -- especially with the RPF's assistance. Why? Helicopters. Lives saved? Countless.

3) Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Only a corner of the northwest is trackless jungle. The rest of it is under heavy cultivation and habitation. That means lots of roads. And where there are roads, there are maps.

4) The war in and around Rwanda and Burundi continues mostly because the United Nations, led by France, stepped in to create safe zones for the genocidaires who fled to the Congo. So, a movement that was on the verge of total collapse was given a reprieve, allowed to reconstitute, and carried on its war. This led, more or less directly, to the ongoing slaughter in the Congo, which is a long story in itself. There was, however, nothing inevitably quagmire-ish about a Rwandan intervention in 1994.

Rwanda was about as clear-cut a case for intervention you can get. My perception is that the opposition to engagement there rested mostly on a feeling that central Africa was a murky, unknown place unsusceptible to our feeble powers to change it. These assumptions are all false.

Second, from Peter Caress:

Some points you should consider in your analysis of Kosovo and Rwanda.

First, Kosovo. Yes, the Clinton crew dishonestly made wild estimates about how bad things were in Kosovo -- shades of the Bush team making crazy claims about Saddam to whip up support for invading Iraq. But you treat Kosovo like it was a hermetically sealed conflict, totally unrelated to Bosnia. We saw what happened in Srebrenica; it's plausible that similar massacres would have eventually happened in Kosovo had NATO not intevened.

You also seem to wonder why we intervened in Kosovo but haven't intervened in Sri Lanka or Nigeria. The answers: (a) Kosovo borders NATO countries, and (b) the perceived consequences of inaction in Bosnia had shocked many people's consciences.

Next, Rwanda. If I understand you correctly, Rwanda made you an isolationist mostly because the Belgian peacekeeper troops turned tail. You wrote, "How many Tutsis died because of the false security Belgium's pantomime of concern engendered?" My guess is not many. Back in 1959, Belgium backed a revolt against the Tutsi monarchy that touched off a mini-genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus. This was merely the first of many spates of anti-Tutsi violence. Given this history of anti-Tutsi violence and past Belgian perfidy, I doubt that many Tutsis truly believed the Belgian troops would protect them.

You then wrote, "Absent Belgium's 'humanitarian' intervention, the Tutsi would have known ahead of time what was true anyway: they were on their own and needed to look to their own defense." But as a practical matter, what could they have done to defend themselves? Although the genocide was widely abetted by the Hutu populace, the principal perpetrators were militia bands organized in advance by the Hutu faction of the government. Even the machetes were part of the plan: the plotters of the massacre stockpiled the machetes and distributed them to the militias and Hutu civilians. The Tutsis really had no chance against these government sponsored irregulars: the only way the Tutsis could have defended themselves was to flee the country altogether.

Finally, you question whether America would have stopped the genocide any faster than the RPF, the Tutsi resistance group. My own feeling is that the genocide stopped no so much when the RPF won militarily, but when they won _politically_: the genocide stopped when it became obvious that the RPF was in control and that the previous Rwandan government was no longer around to support and protect the genocidaires. If America had begun a major military intervention, I suspect we would have won politically almost immediately, thereby stopping the genocide even before we controlled the country militarily. Unlike the fight between the Rwandan army and the RPF, there would have been no doubt that America would have quickly prevailed: the Rwandan government might have folded overnight, once American troops started arriving in force.

However, you're right about the moral hazard of wading into the Rwandan quagmire. Once foreign troops were in Rwanda, they would have had to stay there for years, even decades. A quick pullout of troops could easily have ignited another genocide, just as the rapid British pullout from India ignited horrendous violence there.

I think Tacitus' offers a plausible best-case scenario. It might indeed have gone that well. And I agree with him that the French role in the aftermath of the slaughter and Tutsi reconquest was contemptible. I also think that Peter Caress' last remarks highlight all the uncertainties of the aftermath of Tac's best-case scenario. Among Burundi, the Congo and Rwanda itself, there were going to be a lot of corners to tuck in no matter who intervened when. If we take Hutu thugs for serious people - at least as serious as Somali warlords, they'd have had a strong motivation to keep free and troublesome in any scenario, and a number of opportunities to do so. We'd have been responsible for setting up some kind of "permanent" solution to Rwanda's governance problems. We would incidentally, though no one was thinking this way at the time, have provided al Qaeda with one more set of exposed targets.

It might have worked. But I think Iraq offers a useful caution re best-case scenarios.

Light a Single Candle - Now we have a Syrian dissident blogger. Go, Dude!

Being a liberal in this imploding part of the world, means that I am more of a heretic than a dissident really. Other than to the small and seemingly marginal group that shares in the heresy, one way or another, I can belong to nothing over here. I can believe in nothing that seems too indigenous. Indeed, I sing a totally different tune, one that will not be appreciated any time soon. I am forever off-key around here. I am a heretic. If anything I have to say today is ever going to be appreciated widely by people here, this will not going to happen for a hundred some years. And though I am always willing to be surprised, I have long reconciled myself to that. Being solely recognized by my fellow heretic suffices me. Well, it will have to suffice.

As such, those who doubt the ability of “me and my ilk” to change things hereabout do seem to have a legitimate point, but that’s only because they misunderstand the nature of our intended role.

There's only one post so far. May there be many more.

A Humdrum Decade - Drizz at Magnifisyncopathological marks the ten-year anniversary of Texas' concealed carry law. Upshot: Nothing happened. There has been no bloodbath of hot-tempered citizens turning their everyday frustrations into duels or drive-bys. Life goes on. Crime has gone down - murder troughed in 2000, rising slightly since then to a level well below the high in 1992 - but crime went down everywhere in the mid-to-late 1990s. Further evidence for my own hypothesis, formed during the height of the John Lott-Tim Lambert battles, that gun laws have no effect on crime rates to speak of. Any effect they do have is swamped by other factors, typically economic fluctuations and demographic shifts. (Deplete the pool of young men, lower crime.) Or, as Drizz puts it:

It just emphasizes that relatively educated humans who at least have rudimentary concepts of personal responsibility and respect for individual rights won't go on killing sprees at the drop of a whim if they are allowed (with several nontrivial restrictions, mind you) to carry handguns in public.

Self-defense is about as basic a right as one can conceive. The argument for abridging it via gun control was pragmatic - gun controllers promised that restricting effective self-defense by limiting civilian gun ownership would increase public safety. It doesn't. It's not enough that it doesn't measurably decrease public safety, because gun control is itself a harm in principle. If it provided a compelling practical benefit we could have an interesting debate over whether principle or praxis should tell. But it doesn't even have the excuse of working.

On Spec(ulations) - Thomas Nephew has found some material that may explain the famous Bush Bulge photos from the Presidential debates. And rounding out this site's Talon News coverage, Rigorous Intuition considers the possibility that, It's not the sex. It's the blackmail.

UPDATE: NAME NOT USABLE writes

Sometime about the winter 2001-2002 I was eating in that New Orleans restaurant in Rosslyn Va. near the Metro and Key Bridge by myself when very near me came a young man who was an intern or some low-level guy in the White House and who was having dinner with a charming young lady he was clearly trying to impress. Naturally, being a man of honor, I did my best to conceal my intense eavesdropping. At one point the guy had the nerve to actually think I was eavesdropping, or someone might be, because he lowered his voice and said something like "You know Bush has a [or wears a ]..." and it was clear he was referring to something sensitive and possibly health-related. The woman's voice was louder and said "Oh, people probably know that and ..." words to the effect of no one would make a big deal about it. For awhile I've suspected thereafter he wore a hearing aid; by process of elimination of the fact that it was something not too visible or obvious, nor was it a greatly shocking thing but no photo showed it. When the bulge was an issue, I saw no confirmation of that. Looks like that blogger did his homework. I've google hearing aid and Bush but nothing definitive came up, or at least I saw nothing.

Are You Sure WONKETTE Started This Way? - Correspondence suggests that you can't even write about blowing sailors on your blog without being banned as "mature content" by the wifi networks at places like Panera Bread. This saddens me greatly. How are we to fully debate the policy ramifications of blowing sailors if whole swaths of the citizenry are unable to take part because of a bunch of net-nannies? Take part in the debate, I mean. Not in the blowing of sailors. Necessarily. Particularly in a time when we all need to be thinking about how best to "support the troops," I can only decry such filtering as unpatriotic.

Unless it was the erotic toner cartridges item.

Teach Me to do Morning Websurfing without my Glasses - For a moment, I could have sworn I had referrer spam from erotictonercartridges.com.

The Useful Distraction of Sex - Over in Olmstedville, Andrew, Avedon Carol and I have been in a bit of a discussion about the "Jeff Gannon" matter, about which I've written nothing here because of a towering lack of interest. But the notion in Republican/right circles that the real scandal is that the Administration's opponents dug into Gannon's private life does interest me. It seems untrue. Blowing sailors is "private life." Hiring sailors out to to get blown is a business. Whatever starting a website to pimp servicemembers is, it ain't "private." You'd never get any customers if it were.

Let's say a crusading journalist from an anti-drug paper had business interests in a urinalysis company or a smuggling ring. We'd consider that pretty relevant. Anyway, in comments over on Andrew's site I argue that the response to the "Gannon" scandal and the Bill Clinton impeachment process show certain parallels.

Culture Corner - Brett Peters offers a passel of Old English links. Scroll up for more. On his site, I mean. Not this one.

Homer Nods? - Some quibbles with tonight's BSG, maybe. Or maybe not. My first thought was that, while Adama was undoubtedly correct that the tribunal would become a witch hunt, I didn't think that the action we actually saw had demonstrated its witch-huntness dramatically. Then I wondered if the story's point wasn't subtler: the tribunal may or may not become a witch hunt, but as soon as it stepped on Commander Adama's toes, he shut it down. The ambiguities of power! Then I wondered if the story hadn't sufficiently demonstrated that the inquiry was going astray - the Sergeant and the tribunal get within sniffing distance of the real story but aren't good enough to get the rest of the way. Their zeal leads them off the scent entirely. Then I wondered if the show had shown us enough of the Sergeant's transformation onscreen to make her hubris convincing. The Sarge puts herself in the role of sitting in political judgment of Adama's command decisions. That's some serious hubris! I could see such an inquest coming to that point, but so quickly? Would it have been a better episode if the Caprica action have been ignored for a week, leaving more time to flesh out the shipboard inquisition? I realize they were playing with parallels and divergences between the shipboard Boomer and planetside Boomer's use of love to coopt a human ally, but that lovely architecture came at some dramatic cost.

Not to say the show was bad, just that it has raised my expectations high enough that it can fall short.

One More Time - It's simple. Never, ever ever blog about your job. The only exceptions I can think of are if you're a tenured academic or you own the place. Even in the latter case you have endless opportunities to piss off clients, vendors and essential employees, so think twice.

Speaking of the Farm Dole Virginia Postrel has a couple of useful items. First, she longs for the sort of anti-subsidy coalition we were never somehow able to put together against torture - maybe we'll have better luck this time. It helps that, since the Bush administration is nominally behind it, people like Glenn Reynolds won't dissipate their energies worrying that speaking out on the issue might, somehow some way, constitute opposing the President or, god forbid "hating" him. Her second item despairs at the LAT's press coverage, and points to Fritz Schrank's analysis of the available subsidy data for Delaware. ("The Environmental Working Group's subsidy pages for Delaware show that in 2003, over $17 million in USDA payments went to over 1500 recipients, and that about 26% of all Delaware farms received some kind of federal payment." That's an average of 11.3K per recipient, with at least one entity getting over $250,000.)

A couple of days ago, Matthew Yglesias worried about anti-farm dole advocacy in light of "general detachment of the left-of-center intelligentsia from rural life." Because nothing cures detachment from someone or a group of someones quite like giving them money you took from a different set of someones entirely. He also seems to think we don't already pay farmers not to grow crops - in some cases we do. He wants to pay farmers "contingent on managing the land in an environmentally responsible way." Right now, environmental law disincents farmers from letting more land go fallow: there's a risk that regulators will declare land that has gone wild enough "wilderness," preventing the farmer from reclaiming it should he decide he needs to. Just as we pay Big Sugar to destroy the Everglades and then pay to restore them, this seems like about twice as much as the government needs to be doing, if sound outcomes are your goal. But it's TV time, so I gotta stop now.

Blogging is Just a Way to Pass the Time Between Episodes of Battlestar Galactica but it's nice to sit here listening to the latest Coverville show in the meantime. Let's run some Battlestar Galactica mail, eh?

Eric McErlain writes

I don't know about you, but I've watched Enterprise from the beginning, and didn't think it was so bad. Now, I usually watch both it and BSG back to back late on Friday nights on my TiVo, and ST:E can't help but suffer by comparison. BSG is so much better it isn't even close. So much of the backstory that once made Star Trek seem rich, now just feels like a dramatic straightjacket.

Can you imagine what it must be like to be a writer on that show? You probably spend half your time worrying about violating series canon . . .

If the folks at Paramount are smart, they'll let the franchise rest for about a decade, and then bring it back with a re-imagining just like BSG.

Hm. "Ultimate Star Trek" doesn't sound like a bad idea, really. For the record, I didn't watch Enterprise. I saw the first half dozen episodes of Voyager, which meant I saw the polarity reversed five times. At that point I figured I was being cheated and tuned out. This means I never got in on the whole Jeri Ryan thing. But when you've got Tricia Helfer that doesn't really matter. Friends of mine did sell a script to ST: Next Generation once - the well-regarded "Tin Man" episode. Their names got squished together to comply with the show's no more than two names on a script rule, but they threw a big party for the broadcast premiere and we had a good time. I watched that season and the next, partly out of loyalty and partly because the fourth season was pretty good, the show's best year if you ask me. Never got into Deep Space Nine because I couldn't figure out why the Ferengi wasn't the good guy. And speaking of Ferengi, may we take the occasion of his retirement to commend Reggie Miller for his decades of basketball excellence.

Hm. That appears to be ALL of my extant BSG mail. So let's move on to 24 mail. Charles from Magnifisyncopathological finds yet another reason to hope the show is a dreamworks rather than a subcreation. I'm torn between thinking he's being a bit . . . well, anal with this one, and accepting his point as one more reason why I prefer my thrillers smaller-scale rather than large. If there's a Season Four, what are they going to come up with for a threat, terrorists who want to extinguish the Sun? That's what happens when you feel compelled to up the danger scale with each new story.

digamma is nonplussed:

Uh, you can't possibly thing "the woman who orders the torment", i.e. CTU director Erin Driscoll, is a sympathetic character. She fired Kiefer because he used heroin to infiltrate a drug gang with terrorist ties. As bad as she is, she's not even on her game, because of her crazy daughter.

I would say that Driscoll has been presented more sympathetically as the show has gone on, largely because she's paid more heed to Our Hero. And the schizophrenic daughter subplot is clearly intended to tug our heartstrings on her behalf. But even if she's not someone we're supposed to love unreservedly, that's not the same thing as the show portraying her decision to torture her employee on momentary evidence as blameworthy.

Mind you, I've calmed down a bit on that since the other day, as I suspected I would. Ben Nunn-Miller writes

Regarding your post about 24 from Feb. 9th, I saw the torture incident from that episode differently than you did.

I don't think anyone is going to think that this is a normal activity, partly because 24 is unrealistic as a whole (I say this with 24 being my favorite show on TV right now), and also because it seemed to me like the others involved in it didn't really want to go along with it like Driscoll did.

I also disagree with your assesment that they are making the blame fall on the black woman or that they are trivializing or endorsing torture. I felt the show conveyed the incident as an advertisement for why torture is wrong and doesn't work (wrong woman, didn't examine the evidence, torture did not gain any pertinent information, etc.) Perhaps I am being naive, but I could see Driscoll being reprimanded for ordering the torture after the events of the day are over.

Ben and digamma may be right. I do wonder who will reprimand Driscoll, though, when Secretary Heller is standing right next to her watching Sarah get shocked insensate. And I don't think it helps that Sarah is, let's face it, a bitch. The danger with 24, and Battlestar Galactica too, even though it's a much better show, is that the diegesis encourages the viewer to identify with those who do unto others, not those unto whom it is done. But I'll cop to hypersensitivity on this point.

Rounding out our television coverage, Miniver Cheevy responded to my thoughts on the most recent Justice League Unlimited cartoon:

Since Henley is a libertarian, he doesn't see the obvious implication of this thinking, that people with super-powers should be pensioned off by the government, like farm subsidies.

Snarf, I say! Snarf indeed! And it would simplify Eve Tushnet's life, since her comics-blogging and "farm dole" opposition could collapse into a single, efficient preoccupation.

The Biggest Bully Around - Radley Balko has a lengthy excerpt from a drug bust in Tennessee, one that is likely unremarkable except for the fact that the wife of the victim (the only word that does justice, though "survivor" is oddly appropriate too, as in illness advocacy) left a tape recorder running before the assault (also the only appropriate word, though "torture" will do in a pinch) began. Radley reprints an account of the transcript.

Read the whole goddam thing. I mean it. You voted for this shit. I'm offering just the tiniest excerpt here:

Amid the threats, Siler is again beaten, but he still refuses to sign. Siler pleads with the officers as Franklin threatens to burn him with a lighter after giving him a cigarette.

From the Knoxville News Sentinel.

A Fanboy's Links - Steven at Peiratikos has a terrific consideration of how the panel layouts in Grant Morrison's recently concluded We3 miniseries ("Disney with claws," as writer Grant Morrison puts it) contribute to the story. I'm a sucker for good writing on how the art in a comic book works. Excerpt:

When I try to read the overlay panels and the big image at the same time—an activity the layout actively encourages—I get three different temporal representations of the same narrative sequence, and the way the conflict between them disjoints my reading only enhances the other perceptual representations I’ve mentioned.

Comes complete with page reproductions to guide reading. He also links to a half-dozen other blog items about the miniseries.

Welcome Welcome - I should formally welcome the latest New Crew links, since they've been up for a week now. We wish the previous New Crew members much enjoyment of their new permanent homes somewhere on the blogroll. We pat ourselves on the back for actually rotating our links in not too much more than the month we intend any New Crew edition to last. We further resolve to stop referring to ourselves in the plural. At some point. And lastly, we remind Loyal Readers that the New Crew is our attempt to make linkage worth something. Blogrolls have gotten huge - even this one - and links can easily get lost. Thus Unqualified Offerings adds exactly twelve links at a time - no more, no less - to better present them to their new audience.

So what do we have for you this time? Very few comics bloggers (more next month), a hawk, a diarist and a whole bunch of libertarians.

Thomas L. Knapp - Easily the most exciting blog discovery for me since Justin Logan's blog, Knappster is the home of libertarian Democrat and FreeMarket News Network columnist Thomas L. Knapp. Writing style falls on the good side of Gonzo. Subject matter ranges from war to economics.

Mutualist Blog - "Free-market anti-capitalist" Kevin Carson's Mutualist site has long been one of the web's great repositories of materal and linkage on anarchism in the tradition of Proudhon. His blog is usefully provocative for more orthodox libertarians like me.

John and Belle Have a Blog - I admit it. When John Holbo and Belle Waring joined Crooked Timber, I figured they must be mirroring content between their joint blog and the group site. Not true! J&BHAB is still full of interesting material you can't find elsewhere. Culture-blogging from a liberal perspective is what you get.

Drug War Rant is where Pete Guither does the job I should be doing: chronicling the endless depredations against liberty that constitute our viciously stupid attempts at drug prohibition. Easily one of the most important blogs out there.

Clark Stooksbury is a longtime libertarian journalist. I knew him mostly for his contributions to Liberty Magazine.

Unfogged is run by heterodox liberal Ogged, though he has gone the group-blog route. More equipose than you'll find among big-name partisan bloggers.

Bob Barr - Ex-Congressman and right-wing civil libertarian. Barr holds views on social issues that chagrin me, but he's one of the few people to come out the other side of public service at least as dedicated to preserving ordinary citizens from official snoopery as he went in.

War and Piece - Top-notch journalism by liberal reporter Laura Rozen. Excellent coverage of national security issues. Softer on "humanitarian interventionism" than I'd like, but good reporting and generally shrewd analysis.

Mimi Smartypants - Favorite diarist of teh internets. Funny as hell. The more or less weekly epistles of a Mom with a free-ranging and incidentally dirty mind. Drop six political blogs and add this.

Steven Vincent - barking-mad neocon author, but does great reporting, and actually tries to provide the "full story" the happy-talk blogs only say they'd like to see.

X-Ray Spex - One of only two comics blogs on the list this time, X-Ray Spex is the home of Will Pfeifer, whose recently concluded H-E-R-O series for DC I enjoyed.

Comic Book Commentary - group comics blog with a multicultural slant. Impresario LeCharles Gonzalez orchestrates an intriguing mixture of reviews, interviews and musings.

And there you have it. Read them all. I do. Next month: More comics blogs and fewer libertarians.

Note: Also added Bookslut to the Not Blogs section.

Cane the Wogs AGAIN! - Kicking Michael Totten while he's down (your lips can't reach Christopher Hitchens' ass when you're up), Josh Buermann and Kieran Healy have a go. Buermann picks up Totten's remark that "we differ from the colonialists and imperialists of the past" and suggests that that "is why they put that 'neo' in front of it:"

Meanwhile Kieran Healy sets me wondering when he writes

Read the whole thing if you like. It’s full of small moments of whatever the opposite of an epiphany is.

In itself it's delicious phrasing. But hey, what is the opposite of an epiphany? We're looking at Definition 3 in the American Heritage