Harbinger - Robins. Not just the first robin of the year - they all came back at once and set themselves up in my backyard.

Took You Long Enough - I left out the actual link to Leonard Dickens' rebuke of Tacitus in this morning's item on that subject. I just added it, though.

Questions You Weren't Really Asking, Answered - Why I don't do all that much breaking news-blogging.

More reasons: It looks like I was completely wrong on the authorship of the Zarqawi memo. The real story was that the complete missive signified pretty much the opposite of what casual browsers imagined.

I Am So There - Justin Logan made my list for me. (Via Cal Ulmann.)

Meanwhile, the inverse war for my vote continues, as The Nation magazine avows that "Progressives Should Vote Edwards." (Via the Sideshow.)

Right Here Right Now - Seeing the pictures and the poem on Electrolite, seeing that the couples continue to come to the city offices, seeing that it's spreading - New Mexico today, maybe Chicago on Monday - I found myself thinking two words: Berlin Wall.

It can happen very, very quickly, very, very peacefully and with the gravest joy, when the barriers fall.

Quickie Comics Blogging - On the political comics for college course front, Julian Sanchez writes in to say "The most obvious omission is the Robert-Anton-Wilsonian series 'The Invisibles' (Grant Morrison). Also, Persepolis." Meanwhile, Forager 23 rewrites the syllabus. I largely concur with his reasoning, though I think the High Society volume of Cerebus stands on its own in a way that Church and State does not.

Grand Compr-um, Never Mind - From Julian Sanchez through Max Sawicky to Kevin B. O'Reilly, with the briefest of stops for me: everything you need to know about the possibility of a left-libertarian alliance on the budget. Julian, by the way, clarified in an e-mail to me, Max and others that he wasn't proposing an alliance with the left Left to close the deficit but with the center-left. For all the reasons Max cites, there can't be any permanent alliance between libertarians and the left. My view is that libertarians need to be ready to work with any faction on any issue where goals dovetail. That means working with the Congressional Black Caucus types on drug war issues and against the same people on affirmative action, for example. And I'm not settled on it yet, but I incline to the view that libertarians should try to get John Kerry elected and then try to thwart him at every turn.

The Little Terrorist Platoons - Speaking of Gene Callahan, he was one of a couple people to e-mail re the vexed question of why there have been no further attacks by al Qaeda on US territory since that other one. Gene writes

Isn't it a lot simpler than any of these theories? The last major, purportedly al Qaeda attack on US soil was the WTC bombing in 93. So, I'd say al Qaeda has the resources to stage a major attack in the US about once a decade. If we don't hear from them for 20 years or so, then we might say the Bush strategy is "working."

Two data points don't make a trend, but there's something to this. Not sure if it's a known unknown or an unknown unknown, though.

Loyal Reader Herman Yam writes

[UO wrote] "It offends my libertarian sensibilities to think that an ill-bred NGO like Al Qaeda needs active support of a government to accomplish a specific attack."

I suppose I am confused by your use of "ill-bred."

If your mean it along the lines of Al Qaeda being stupid, inefficient, in disarray or something, then why should it be surprising they needed government help? I have never researched the topic in detail, but there are probably many incompetent NGOs out there that would be doomed without some kind of government support in the form of contracts or institutional legitimacy. As a fellow metro DC resident, you probably know of or even worked at a for profit corporation that would otherwise be killed in the marketplace.

If you mean "ill-bred" like evil and destructive, well then take heart. The ELF/ALF in this country are destructive, though not at the volumes Al Qaeda would seek, and receive no government help that I can fathom except that some of the Green NGOs sympathetic to them have 501c3 status. Ditto for my abortion clinic booming coreligionists.

Well I feel better now.

Zizka's e-mail picks up more from Alan Sullivan's item than mine, but I don't suppose Zizka and Alan would make such great correspondents

"Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, Libya".

Sounds like a grab-bag and a warrant for war against whomever.

Start off with Saudi Arabia, where al Qaeda has been tolerated and bought off for over a decade. Count the Sudan and Yemen as Saudi puppets.

Scratch Libya. Not only is Qaddafi trying to change his image, but Osama tried to kill him once. Not all bad guys are friends.

Pakistan's complicity with the Taliban was enormous and with al Qaeda was considerable, and the ex-Taliban and al-Qaeda still operate in Pakistan (in a border area that's never been controlled, though).

Egypt is like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as an authoritarian government which is actually very weak, fragile, and tenuous. So in part they tolerate al Qaeda because they have no choice.

Iraq, Syria -- like Libya these are bad guys, but probably least likely to play much with al Qaeda because they understand that Osama (or whoever the new leader is) wants to overthrow them. Two secular states with big ambitions. "We will never agree because we both want the same thing -- Paris". Not likely to invite another stallion into their harem.

Iran isn't secular but they have their own program which for many reasons doesn't fit Osama's.

My guess is that Osama's tacit support comes mostly from America's authoritarian but weak allies. Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia are less successfully authoritarian than the ones I excluded, and all seem to survive by a mix of repression and cutting deals. These governments aren't "worse" than Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Iran -- they might be better in many respects -- but they seem more likely to turn a blind eye to al-Qaeda's outside activities just to avoid having to deal with them.

Another Tac - It's been a busy week around here, which is one of the things that has kept me from getting back to various aspects of the issue with Tacitus. The other problem is that it strikes me as one of those situations where someone is so wrong you hardly know where to start. During my period of sloth, Gene Callahan devoted his most recent column to one part of Tac's original item, his characterization of libertarian foreign policy as "Kitty Genovese syndrome." Gene's argument seems to work best for hard core anarcho-capitalists and goodness knows, I am not one. A minor aside to Gene, Tacitus reports that he has volunteered to rejoin the army since September 11, which speaks well of him if not Jonah Goldberg.

Leonard Dickens came at the argument from roughly the same perspective Tuesday, but despite the fact that Leonard says that I "made the fundamental mistake of accepting Tacitus' worldview" there's a lot in Leonard's item that I can grab onto, especially his conclusion:

You'd think that the idea of using the state to achieve secular salvation would have died with the Soviet Union - but no, only the idea of domestic socialism was discredited. War socialism is alive and well in the American Right.

That strikes me as entirely correct, and it's a point I've meant to come back to. But like I said in Monday's item (or was it Tuesday?), once you get past the question of whether any specific group has "targetted Americans" where, and get into questions of why we shouldn't necessarily use American military force to fix all the Bad Things at the end of Tacitus' second item, you're getting into very basic issues. Among other things, you have to navigate the zone where principle and pragmatism collapse into each other. Topic Sentence: Do you believe in Hayek, and if you do, does Hayek stop at the water's edge? My short answers are "Absolutely" and "Absolutely not." Long answers forthcoming.

UPDATE: Doh! Just added the link to Leonard. I always screw stuff up like that during morning blogging.

War and Epistemology - Post headline today: "Forces' Return From Iraq Unknown." Ah, but is that a known unknown or an unknown unknown? I'm thinking the former: we know we don't know it, right? Or should there also be a category for "former knowns," since I believe that at one point before the war the Administration "knew" that the troops would be home within a few months.

Quickie Fanboy's Note on the Bookstore Biz - Shawn and Sean: Those endcaps? The publisher pays for them. It's called a Retail Display Allowance and is standard across retail sectors. (Waldenbooks brought the concept from grocery stores to the book business during the Harry Hoffman era in the 1980s. Ask me how I know.)

Let's be clear: The fact that the publisher pays for the endcap space doesn't mean that the bookstore has no faith in manga. RDAs are, in the ideal world, a win-win for publisher and bookstore. At the very least, a manga endcap means that Tokyopop or Viz or whoever bought the display believe they can sell well if prominently featured in bookstores. And often the chain marketers will actually make the first approach - a "Why don't you do this?" thing. Of course, that's a sales function, and no guarantee that the endcap really will succeed on terms either party recognizes as success. (Believe me: there are unsuccessful endcap displays out there.)

Standard disclaimer: Not saying that manga popularity is a mirage. Just getting a fact straight.

But the murder of Danny was like a hijacked plane sent to explode in the heart of your company - Marianne Pearl accuses the Wall Street Journal of indifference to whether justice will be done to the kidnappers and murderers of her husband, their employee.

Where is the Other Shoe? Redux - Alan Sullivan considers the same Charles Krauthammer column that I did. His own variant:

No, I think there is another explanation altogether for the reprieve from further attack. I suspect the assistance of governments was essential for al Qaeda to mount major operations. In addition to Afghanistan, I imagine that some or all of the following countries were directly complicitous: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, Libya. For various reasons, leaders of these countries tried to use al Qaeda, but the djinn escaped the magicians. All those sheiks, generals, and presidents-for-life have been holding their breaths since 9/11, as American troops trashed the regimes of Afghanistan and Iraq like rotten fruit. Al Qaeda has no friends now, and it is throwing its remaining assets into Iraq, where they will be destroyed.

I'd go along with this part way. It offends my libertarian sensibilities to think that an ill-bred NGO like Al Qaeda needs active support of a government to accomplish a specific attack. But there can be no doubt that passive acquiescence by some number of governments makes things a lot easier on an underground organization, and there's a lot less of that for AQ these days.

Passive Aggressive - Julian Sanchez makes an excellent point about the use of the word "alleged" in journalism.

That's What I Meant - Below I said that having Fidel Castro show up at the end of Captain America #23 might have worked "if [author Robert] Morales had established that this storyline was to be zany," but "zany" probably wasn't the best possible description of the required tone. This Forager 23 passage makes it clear that Castro could have shown up in The Dark Knight Strikes Again and nobody would have thought twice about it:

DK2 represents everything Miller loves about super-hero comics--the garish circus -like atmosphere, the exaggerated moral struggles, the love of both meaningless and purposeful action . . .

Yes, that's it. You don't have to write superhero comics that way, but all the thrashing about clears plenty of space for outre drop-ins.

Comics Reviews - A few things I've read lately, but not Paul Hornschemeier's Mother, Come Home, which deserves its own entry.

Pop Gun War, by Farel Dalrymple. In some ways, this black and white fantasia about a city kid named Sinclair who finds an angel's discarded wings is like a Vertigo comic with less disembowelling. The action takes place in some Brooklyn of the mind. The supernatural is fully present, at least to the main characters, and largely accepted. Some characters, like the teen who torments the homeless Addison, seem to be real person, supernatural being and someone else's mental state all at the same time. The art style we might call grunge. For instance, Dalrymple seems to draw a lot of things freehand - e.g. curb lines - where many other artists would use straight edges. (Say, more freehand at least.) And he uses some deliberately scratchy inks. But he cleans it up right quick in an Addison dream sequence - he's an artist in complete control of his medium. And I daresay that Chapter 5, "Bicycle Messenger," offers the same mix of Silver Age superhero and 50s horror comic sensibilities that Bruce Baugh rightly found in early 1960s Marvels. Pop Gun Wars is not a superhero comic. It just has, among other things, a superhero story in it .

I liked this book a lot the other night when I read it. I like it even more now telling you about it. Go buy it. It's only $14. And you can actually read Chapter 5 by going to Beguiling.com's Dalrymple art sales page, by viewing all the pages of Pop Gun War #5 in sequence. OTOH, that's the ending, and you maybe ought to save it.

Sleeper: Out in the Cold, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Collects the first six issues of the ongoing series about a super-powered deep cover agent, Holden Carver, inside a globe-spanning conspiracy. The man who sent Holden undercover, the only man who knows Holden is really working for what passes for the Good Guys, lies in a coma. Holden has to do awful things to maintain his cover. This being a "mature readers" book, some of them are awful indeed. (Plus, more nipples than a Super Bowl halftime!) A dark book. "Dark and deep?" we always ask, mindful that Mr. Frost pointed out that one is not necessarily the other. Nah. Uncompromising treatments of the dilemmas of the double agent are new to superhero/supervillain comics, but have been well-mined in novels and, very occasionally, film. Because the "Wildstorm Universe" comes pre-darkened for us - it seems like a hundred different globe-spanning conspiracies secretly control the place, like a timeshare - it's not as if Carver has a whole lot of lights out there somewhere throwing his greys and gloss blacks into relief. We're dealing with a protagonist who doubtless wasn't such a nice guy to begin with - a lifelong covert operative before he ever became a pretend supervillain, working for one of those agencies that grows fat in the shadows while the sensitive types in its employ assure themselves that worrying about the morality of their actions is itself, somehow, morality.

There is one passage where the Abyss opens: "the harshest origin story ever," which belongs to Carver's girlfriend. Other than that, what we have here is a really well-done action-aventure story. But it is a really well-done adventure story. The dialogue is lively hard-boiled talk, there's a lot of story in each chapter, Carver takes increasingly greater risks on behalf of something approaching decency as the story continues and the art is quite fine. And people who have read the subsequent (uncollected) issues say they're even better. I certainly plan to pick them up when I can.

Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place, by Brian Azzarrello and Joe Kubert. A beautiful hardover original set in the closing days of the war. Rock's Easy Company takes four German prisoners. Suddenly three of them are dead, one is missing and Rock suspects that one of his guys killed them. That would be a war crime, and while some of his men figure that killing Germans is what they're there for after all, Rock has not just read the manuals but internalized them, and he can't let it go.

I really liked this book. The colors are wonderful - muted winter pastels that the monthly comics of Rock's heyday could never have managed. There's a sequence involving an attempt to destroy a German Tiger that generates real tension, and another with a land mine that generates more. Azzarrello's dialogue is on and off, but in one sequence, when a new recruit recounts a New Orleans bar fight, he manages to bridge the cultural and linguistic gap between comics geekdom today and working class culture then. Rock himself is appealingly underplayed - he's no scene-chewing Nick Fury.

I wish I had the vocabulary to praise Kubert's art. (I wish I weren't typing this from the memory of two weeks ago, too. That would help.) He is most of the reason for the tension of the two scenes discussed above, and renders a death toward the beginning of the book that is gruesome in an appropriately matter-of-fact way. The one problem I had probably stems from genre - in medium-length and distant group shots, since the soldiers are all in uniform, it can be a bit hard to tell who's who. Kubert carefully gives each soldier's uniform some unique markers, but sometimes the composition renders those differences necessarily insignificant.

Kubert was (just) before my time. He was winding up his DC career while I was still a Marvel zombie, and I knew him mainly as the name on the cartoonist school. Not the least virtue of this book is it lets people like me see what was so great about him. Was? Is.

The Furies, by Mike Carey and John Bolton. Now in paperback. Okay, this one is for existing Sandman fans, with no concessions for people who don't already know the tragic story of Hippolyta Hall, her stolen, somewhat murdered child and the awful revenge she sets in motion. But there are a lot of Sandman fans out there, and this aftershock is worth experiencing.

It's a comedy. In the classical sense. (Not farce.) But if you're a Sandman reader, this book gives you the pleasure of watching Lyta go sane. Lyta gets mixed up in a plot by the Titan Cronus (Carey's spelling, don't blame me) to better his station. Along the way, Carey rubs some very nice people's faces in the uncompromising stance on "blood guilt" the Eumenides embodied. The book is sort of like Pop Gun War with more disembowelling. Okay, not really. But as someone who loved Sandman but feels that Vertigo could stand to lighten up once in awhile, I really enjoyed this book. John Bolton paints rather than draws. I like the look of it, particularly the sun-washed Greek scenes. There are a couple of closeups with word balloons coming out of someone's mouth that just don't work. This seems to happen to me with painted comics generally - what I accept without question when drawn sticks out when painted.

Final art bonus: Lyta is painted as a perfectly attractive woman, but not one constantly at risk of tipping forward, if you get my drift. Dignity, always dignity.

Captain America #22 and 23, by Robert Morales and Chris Bachalo. Dammit dammit dammit. This sequence started out so damn well. Issue 21 excited me at the prospect that Morales actually knew what to do with the character. And right through the first couple of pages of 22 I was fully on board - Morales actually inserts a manifesto during a scene when Cap and his girlfriend attend a gallery opening. It takes balls to stick a manifesto right into your work. The early indicator of trouble was that the art gallery scene dialogue wasn't quite as good as it needed to be. And it's been all downhill from there. For one thing, the story feels padded in what has become the stereotypical manner. For another, Morales just can't seem to get a handle on either his plot or his characters. He's brought a bunch of army officers over from Central Casting to populate his internment camp mess hall, and their dialogue just isn't quite as good as it needs to be either. And nothing but nothing is getting explained so far - what relation the guys who shot at Cap's car in Issue 21 bear to the prisoners escaping from Camp X-Ray in Issue 23, how said prisoners escaped etc. The ending of 23, when Fidel Castro shows up, might have worked if Morales had established that this storyline was to be zany, but he did no such thing.

And the art! I am sure there is a genre out there that suits Bachalo's talents, maybe even a character. But it isn't Captain America. Bachalo's male figures are lumpen and bereft of grace. (Contrariwise, he draws fine slim women of Asian descent. Go figure.) They are bottom-heavy, lead-footed claymation creatures who could not possibly be capable of anything more fluid than stop motion, and not with a high frame speed either.

Will this character defeat everyone who tries to write him? Maybe he will. Maybe Morales is just getting his Cap legs under him still. There have been flashes of real promise in his first three issues. I'm willing to give him one more storyline to figure it out - if Marvel gives him that time. Bachalo is a disaster for this series, though. But at least we know that Cap can be drawn well, if not necessarily so written. Get a new artist; give Morales some more practice. That's the Unqualified Offerings Prescription.

Weaker Fitness Blog Item - I've got a toothache and an early meeting tomorrow, so Dr. Atkins, Tacitus and everyone else is going to have to wait. I leave you with two items that came to me via Diana Moon. First, a War Nerd column from the eXile on Muammar Qadafi, wimp. It's entertaining in a gonzo-standard way. And it contains this rather important aside, considering all the other discussion going on around here:

First thing to realize is that Reagan was a closet peacenik, a real disappointment to guys like me who thought he'd release the dogs of war that Carter'd been keeping penned up.

When you think about it, it's true. The Reagan Administration was actually quite chary about committing American power. Would that subsequent Republican Administrations had its discretion.

Second, an awful Pat Buchanan column from Antiwar.com. I realize there are many out there who consider the previous sentence to be an example of the purest redundancy, but I think Buchanan has written some much better columns in the last two years. This one reads like a sixth-grade history book for Republican loyalists - the President, a good man, gets "captured" by neoconservative zealots and so on.

I am none too fond of neoconservative foreign policy, nor neoconservative domestic policy neither. But, um, if the President decides to take all his advice from one set of Republican Party insiders and not another, whose fault is that? It's not as if the Lugars and Hagels and Bakers and, far more important, all the people who have staffed their offices over the years weren't around and willing to tell the President what they thought. Yes, the National Greatness Conservatives are the Sugar Industry Group of interventionist foreign policy - your highly-motivated lobby with all the political advantages political theory leads us to expect.

But if you're the President, you're the boss. And who you listen to is your responsibility.

Teaching the Literature of Ethics - Abu Aardvark is putting out an APB on behalf of "a friend":

I'm going to be teaching a short course at my college next winter called "Comic Book Politics." The idea is to have the students read the best comics published since the mid 1980s which raise - either directly or indirectly - challenging political issues. I define this pretty broadly - anything from The Authority as a way of discussing the ethics of intervention to Maus as a route for discussing the Holocaust. I can't do things not collected into trades - just too hard to get enough copies to 15-20 students otherwise. So here's the problem: I only got back into comics over the last year after not reading them for a decade or so. I've been doing my best to catch up, but I'm sure that there are great authors, series, or TPB's that I've missed or else haven't fully appreciated. Here's a tentative list of what I want to include: Cerebus (High Society, Church and State, maybe Mothers and Daughters); The Authority (Ellis, maybe Millar versions); Transmetropolitan (Ellis); Watchmen and V for Vendetta (Moore); Dark Knight Returns (Miller); Palestine (Sacco); Maus (Spiegelman); Kingdom Come (Waid/Ross); Uncle Sam (Ross). So, oh comics blogosphere: tell me what you think I should include in the syllabus, and why. Thanks!!

Send your suggested additions and I'll round them up. For that matter, explain why you want to knock something off the list. (e.g. The Authority is icky!) This will be an opportunity for one of those mixed comics-and-politics mailbags we so enjoy.

Isn't It Ironic? - Can't decide if the following report is real irony or Alanis Morrisette irony, but the saliva of vampire bats may be the key to longer life for humans.

Think of them as livestock, people. They are our cattle!

Out of the Chaos There Shall Come . . . A Comics Blogger - Friday, Tim O'Neil of The Hurting avowed that "from now on I'm going to strive every day to use this meager podium to build on the high standard 'Journalista!' has already established," and this morning, he's already on the case. Go, man, go!

One thing, though, Tim. Dirk took weekends off, yes. That doesn't mean it's okay for you to do it.

(Via ADDblog.)

But I Wasn't Done with the Last One Yet - Tacitus has a response to my responses to his response to my response to his original item, back there somewhere. You can read it now, though I had a couple of more things I wanted to say about his initial response [to etc.] first. Unfortunately the casual pace of my work has caused Tacitus to assume that "Henley focuses his energy exclusively on the Hezbollah example; I assume this constitutes an implicit concession of my points on Hamas and Lashkar." Actually, I reject his Hamas case, but find his Lashkar argument, at first blush, pretty persuasive - much the most persuasive of his three examples. More on that later. And probably more on the long, blustery section at the end where Tac indignantly lists a bunch of things I would not, in fact, have had the United States do for the most part, most of which were things that, in the event, the United States didn't do.

At that point we're getting into basic principles that are probably worth going into some detail about, one more time, and we will, but what appears to be happening is that Tacitus is basing his morality on the "wouldn't it be nice if" level of discussion, where I'm at "yeah, but how would that work out in practice."

Weakly Fitness Blog Postponement - Had to work at the day job tonight. Sad. In consequence, this week's fitness blog item will be delayed until tomorrow evening. Tune in for all sorts of stuff about Robert Atkins, post-mortem, plus whatever else.

On the Other Hand - The guerrillas may not be able or motivated to stop gradual improvement in Iraq's power-generation infrastructure, but Juan Cole suggests the recent attacks in Fallujah may indicate growing sophistication on the part of the guerrillas:

My colleague, military historian and former Green Beret Tom Collier referred to it as "Phase II, Guerrilla War." This kind of operation is beyond the ambushes, sniping and grenade and bomb attacks we have been seeing, he says.

That's if reports that forty-plus guerrillas took part in coordinated attacks on the Fallujah police station (freeing 22 prisoners) and a Civil Defense Corps position are accurate. The last report of such large-scale guerrilla action, in Samarra in November, was almost certainly spurious. If you were the Fallujah police - not exactly a zealous pro-American fighting force - and you lay down and let a handful of guerrillas walk off with their buddies, you might exaggerate the numbers of the attackers. I'm not sure that's how it went. Nor am I sure which would be worse news for us: either our enemies are getting better at what they do or our allies are a hollow shell. Take your pick.

UPDATE: If they've got the 25 bodies from yesterday's attack claimed in this report, that would tend to bear out the official version of events.

Metric System Update - As you know, every couple of weeks, this site delves into the Daily Power Production and Distribution statistics for Iraq as posted by the Coalition Provisional Authority. I got into this because, back in November, the government was claiming more than the actual statistics showed. Interestingly, now that they've stopped claiming, the numbers actually look much better. Peak daily output for Iraq as a whole is back up to October levels

1-Feb 4116
2-Feb 4126
3-Feb 4103
4-Feb 4090
5-Feb 4000
6-Feb 3919
7-Feb 3883
8-Feb 3934
9-Feb 3951
10-Feb 3992
11-Feb 4034

Those are the rolling seven-day averages for this month and are equivalent to the October figures that were the CPA's previous power-production salad days. The total output numbers are even better - significantly above what the CPA and Iraqi Ministry of Electricity managed in October.

1-Feb 88426
2-Feb 89326
3-Feb 89230
4-Feb 89456
5-Feb 89356
6-Feb 87923
7-Feb 87151
8-Feb 87431
9-Feb 88173
10-Feb 89187
11-Feb 89683

Again, rolling seven-day averages. As for Baghdad itself, the peak output numbers are encouraging:

1-Feb 1388
2-Feb 1398
3-Feb 1376
4-Feb 1365
5-Feb 1367
6-Feb 1341
7-Feb 1327
8-Feb 1406
9-Feb 1402
10-Feb 1416
11-Feb 1437

This is the best stretch of rolling seven-day averages that Baghdad has achieved since the CPA began making figures available (August 2003).

Based on rough calculations from December of Iraq's power needs, the current levels are about half of what would be sufficient for Iraq as an ongoing concern. But it does mean that sabotage and socialism are failing to prevent measurable improvement in the power situation.

Exporting Democracy - Everybody complains that you can't get translations of Thomas Jefferson in Arabic. Juan Cole does something about it. You can help.

Quote of the Day comes from Glenn Reynolds:

This also suggests that the Chinese are, well, dumb as rocks. Arming an unstable nation with whom one shares a border with nuclear weapons just seems awfully stupid to me.

O Bitter Victory - Dang! My top referrer for January got himself promoted out of his blogging job. Dirk, Dirk - what about my traffic stats? Huh?

But seriously, folks. This is excellent news for the Comics Journal, a wonderfully appropriate reward for Dirk Deppey, and a very very big problem for the comics blogosphere. Because Journalista, now on hiatus, was indisputably the center of same, the still point of that turning and ever-growing world. It will not be easily replaced, even with handy instructions. Dirk was simply the Glenn Reynolds (in the best sense) of comics blogging. For reasons Sean T. Collins pointed out weeks ago, he is precisely the person the Journal needs running it now, and he promises to try to return to the weblog as soon as he can (my guess would be it happens sooner than his three-month timetable), but, well, dang.

One possibility, not discussed by Dirk, is that he bring on a substitute Journalista. Granted, guest-blogging is so 2003, but this could work. So let's look at the candidates:

Me - Don't be stupid. I'm a comics blogging dilettante and that wouldn't change. Suitability: Poor.

Eve - Okay, Eve's a dilettante too, but she needn't be - she's a freelance writer, after all, and a modest stipend might be enough to justify the work for her. And who better to replace a queer conservative comics blogger than another queer conservative comics blogger? Suitability: TBD (Fair to Excellent).

Doane - Okay, my links would go down, because he hates me. But we're talking about the health of a medium here, and that's more important. ADD has a lot of energy and has introduced genuine innovations into his own blog like his "5 Questions" series. May be one of those people less inclined to go beyond his own enthusiasms than an institution like Journalista requires. Suitability: Good to Very Good.

Sean - Hey, the man needs a job! And he probably approximates the Deppeyian temperament better than most other candidates. His interview series shows him capable of closing the gap between hobby blogging and professional blogging, and while he has traditionally been more of a think-blogger than a link-blogger, his comics-and-match series shows him capable of the latter. Suitability: Excellent.

Graeme MacMillan - The proprietor of Fanboy Rampage has already shown he meets the bottom-line requirement for the Journalista blogger: he produces massive amounts of content on a daily basis. Has a tendency to use Snark as a shield, though, and some of the humor of his site depends on a sense that "of course we all recognize that this quote is ridiculous." But that's just what he's into now. No reason to think he can't take a different approach when called upon. Suitability: Good to Excellent.

Johanna Draper Carlson - Okay, she's not even a blogger, but she's been following comics longer, more deeply and more widely than most of us. In some ways, running Journalista would simply be an expansion of her existing newsfeed and Snarky Comments features. She's familiar enough with the industry to have important thoughts on the business aspects that have featured prominently in Journalista's content - if she wants to share them. Suitability: Good to Excellent.

Dave Intermittent - Great writer, but the adopted surname tells you what you need to know. Suitability: At best, slightly better than me.

Peiratikos - Come on, there's two of them. How am I supposed to know which one to recommend? Mostly think-bloggers anyway - superb at that, but not what is called for. Suitability: Unproven.

Forager 23 - Excellent culture blogger, and the job would keep him off politics, so there's a bonus to it. More of a think-blogger than a link-blogger, and often goes days-to-weeks without posting. Suitability: Hire him to write articles for the Journal instead.

Neilalien - The original comics link-blogger. In some ways, the only obvious candidate. Would he be willing to pick up the posting pace over his own site's every couple or few days? Does his meatspace life even afford him that time? Dunno. Suitability: No better choice if he wanted the job.

Franklin Harris - The man is a professional journalist and covers an allied beat. May be a bit anti-artcomics for the Comics Journal crowd. Suitability: Excellent.