Back - The whole highclearing.com empire was down for awhile last night while Hostmatters did some server maintenance. This seems like a good time to mention that I love HostingMatters, and if you need a blog-friendly webhost, you could do very well with them.

Distinctions - A further attempt at clarifying a point below about Virginia Postrel's concerns Virginia is too quick to blame Democrats for making a partisan attack on Gonzales and the Administration's torture policies, when she should be blaming the Republicans for making a partisan defense (tacit or explicit) of same. Similarly, when Democrats like Charles Schumer mounted a scorched-earth defense of federal law enforcement's conduct of the Waco and Ruby Ridge sieges duiring the 1995 House hearings, all for the sake of Saint Janet Reno, leaving only Republicans to press the issue of FBI and BATF malfeasance, it wasn't Republican partisanship that was the greater sin. Had any House Democrats done their constitutional duty, we would have had all the bipartisan inquiry one required. (The Senate Hearing on the same topic was vastly more productive because some of the Democratic Senators took the adult approach.)

UPDATE: Thinking about this overnight, though, there's a sense in which the Waco hearings prove Virginia's point as much as mine. The conduct of the Democratic members of the committee was disgraceful. But the Republicans were amateurish. Not only were they caught flat-footed by Democratic maneuvering, their own partisan animus distorted their approach to the hearings. Some Congressmen spent more time trying to tie the late Vincent Foster to the proceedings than making a serious inquiry into the conduct of the bureaucracies.

What Else, Though? - Virginia Postrel worries that

On the one hand, the administration has far too easily dodged the issue, and the public has been too ready to pretend that serious human rights violations aren't taking place. On the other, I fear that partisan confirmation hearings are the worst possible forum. By turning torture into just another partisan weapon, the Democrats will almost certainly demean what should be a grave inquiry.

Now, VIrginia has been blogging in opposition to torture for years, going clear back to the scary days right after the September Massacres. Her opposition to torture isn't in question. And heaven knows Congressional hearings can themselves be horror shows themselves. (Does the name Kefauver ring a bell?)

But I gotta ask: if not in the Gonzales hearings and if not by Democratic senators, where and by whom? Republicans inside the White House are the problem, the best of the Republicans outside have made concerned-sounding noises but have mounted no serious challenge to the Administration in the issue; the worst of them have either attempted to minimize the issue for partisan political reasons or advocate it out of sincere zeal. Virginia commends an Anne Applebaum Post column, and it's a good column. But two things seem obvious about it:

1. The Anne Applebaum's of the world aren't going to move White House policy on the issue by themselves.

2. Applebaum is writing about torture this week because of the Gonzales confirmation hearings. The Post is commissioning other chin-pullers on the topic now because of the Gonzales hearings.

It's the fact that Democratic Senators are attacking Gonzales in the hearing room that makes our country's recent sanction of torture news. It is a lousy system, as Virignia says - nothing is "news" unless it's a contest.

One way to keep torture from becoming just another partisan weapon would be for multiple Republican Senators to come out against Gonzales and insist that the White House withdraw his nomination. Bingo, instant bipartisanship! It's worth asking why they don't do that. But their failure to do so doesn't mean that the proper course for Democratic Senators is to fail to do their own duty (however groteque some of the results).

Tautological statement: The Bush Administration has sanctioned torture because they favor having recourse to torture. This isn't shrimp quotas. It's not cynical gamesmanship on their part. They weren't doing it out of expediency to court voters who work in the torture industry. They are sincere. They have only even equivocally climbed down from the policy, if not the praxis, when someone has raged a huge damn stink over it - when they stand to lose something for it. The Gonzales hearing is the latest, and maybe one of the last, opportunities to do so.

Like Virginia, I'd love a better forum and a better cast of characters. But as to what those might be, the imagination fails me.

Fuzzy Math - Now Shahwani tells AP there are "between 20,000 and 30,000 armed men operating all over Iraq, mainly in the Sunni areas where they receive moral support from about 2,00,000 people." I suppose these figures are not entirely inconsistent with his prior set. But it shows how loose the estimates are. If the two estimates are internally consistent, it means 200k of the 2 million are providing more active aid than "moral support."

Ne'er So Well-Express'd, the Continuing Series - The best quotes from two Poor Man pieces today, which is not to say you don't need to read the rest of them, because you do. On turning wrong corners:

True, many soldiers in Iraq have been in places where people were nice and glad to have them, which is great, but misses the main point. Kennedy was shot on a sunny day, but most newspapers didn't lead with the nice weather.

and Alberto Gonzalez:

The point is this:

To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a "presidential directive or other writing" that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."

Albert Gonzales thinks that the Magna Carta is liberal pablum.

I have not eaten all the candy. In fact, the Iraq item in particular goes well beyond snark to make some crushingly urgent, eloquent points. Go, gorge.

Hey! Dumbass Big Media Guys! - Hire Fafblog already! You're going to miss out on a lot of revenue if Fafblog starves to death first.

Hm . . . - Karin L. Kross reviews the year's-best comics lists from Time and Salon, and in the course of finding them wanting for all kinds of reasons, observes that

It's tiresome to even be asking this question in the first place, but the fact is that, faced with lists like these, largely free of any feminine influence, I'd like to be confident that they were left off for reasons beyond shortsightedness, sexism (unintentional or otherwise, on the part of either the individual or the industry), poor promotion, or just plain laziness.

On a sinking suspicion I checked my own list of 2004 favorites and, sure enough, it is bereft of female creators. Now, my lists are explicitly What Jim liked best of what he read. I don't present them as an informed survey of the entire field - I'm not remotely a comprehensive reader. I pay for my books and restrict myself to buying things I hope to like. I went through a very brief stage of wanting to be up on what all the other comics bloggers were talking about where I'd shell out money for instructively bad work, and I swap books with a couple of people too. Nevertheless, none of the titles on my list have a female creator. So what's up with that?

The short answer is that I didn't read many comics by women this year. I read an issue of Blue Monday and liked it okay, but not enough to keep buying it. I'm not following any of DC's superhero titles, so I'm missing out on Gail Simone's Birds of Prey. My favorite comics read of 2003 was Carla Speed McNeil's Finder series, but this year only two new issues came out. Speed McNeil's other offering this year was the art for the Queen and Country: Operation Storm Front volume. I liked the art in that book very much, and was considering it for my faves list on that basis, but docked it for the story. That was probably a mistake, for the car crash sequence alone.

There are not that many women working on the sorts of comics I tend to read, though there are more women working in comics than I've tried reading - a bunch more. (There are not that many female comics bloggers either. I ransacked everyone's link lists when putting the most recent blogroll update together and could only find Heidi MacDonald.

So, given Karin's list of possibilities - shortsightedness, sexism (unintentional or otherwise, on the part of either the individual or the industry), poor promotion, or just plain laziness - I'll pick shortsightedness, plain laziness and sexism on the part of the industry for sure. I wouldn't be the best person to judge the possibility of sexism on my own part, and I don't know if we understand all the reasons why many fewer women than men choose "put yourself out there" fields like writing, art, blogging etc. Historically, injunctions toward feminine discretion must have played a major role ("whistling girls and cackling hens"). Does that still obtain even with the generation of women coming after me? It isn't just comics, where dorky men go to gain subgroup status, where creator disparity obtains. Most poetry journals get the vast majority of their submissions from men. (At least, that was true in the late 1990s, when I an old teacher of Will's told a group of us that, while she knew this was true, she wasn't letting magazine editors off the hook for that: in her view it was their duty to get more submissions from women.)

We Have a Winner - Jim Kakalios writes

It was spoken by the Flash in the first episode of the excellent animated Justice League series. The one that is still not out in complete season one and two DVDs.

thus winning the no-prize for correctly identifying the source of this item title. Meanwhile, Abu Aardvark clarifies that the comic book politics course in question is not being taught by him but rather by "a friend." I mean, not a "this friend" but a real, honest-to-god friend friend.

Farting Around - Economics really is the dismal science.

A Fanboy's Notes - There's something immensely cheering at the thought of a giant in his field still being alive, able to enjoy his reputation, provide oral histories and link the present age to its forebears. So it's sad to learn of the death of Will Eisner Monday. Eisner founded much of the basic grammar of graphic storytelling. For those of you who have read Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, in the passage about the prewar "experimental phase" of the Escapist that followed their viewing of Citizen Kane, the actual innovations described were, in the real Golden Age, Eisner's. Decades later, his Contract with God revolutionized the field again, and paved the way for Maus and Ghost World and all the rest. Most of his work remains for me to explore. There is no doubt it will survive for me to do so.

Cheerier news: Steve Englehart announces via e-mail that he, Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin have done a 6-issue Batman miniseries for release alongside this summer's movie. They are reprising their legendary, if brief, Detective Comics run of the 1970s. Englehart writes "My goal, in accepting this, was to do something _as good as_, but _not the same as_, the first run. Word from DC is, they think we did. (Confidentially, I think so, too. Marshall and Terry's art is spectacular, and it was a thrill for me to get back to a character and situation I had so much fun with the first time.)" I think the "confidentially" was a rhetorical flourish, given that this was an e-mail circular. The miniseries will be called DARK DETECTIVE.

The hot rumor I'll start: a similar Englehart DC project "with some other heroes I've had some success with." I infer the letters J, L and A may be involved.

Turning the Wrong Damned Corner, Again - In the London Times article Brian Doherty linked for the Hit and Run item discussed below, an Iraqi general estimates "40,000 hardcore fighters attacking US troops" and "part-time guerrillas and volunteers providing logistical support, information, shelter and money" swelling total insurgent ranks to 200,000. It's probably a swag. There's a chance that General Shahwani has something to gain by wildly overestimating the numbers of his (declared) enemies. ("[Shahwani] admitted that his paramilitary police force had been infiltrated by people who are leaking information to the guerrillas.") But here's a brief history of estimates of the size of the insurgency:

Summer 2003 - There's no insurgency! Just some bandits.
Winter 2004 - A few hundred to a couple thousand dead=enders.
Summer 2004 - As many as 5,000.
Fall 2004 - Up to 20,000.
Winter 2005 - About 40,000 dedicated, up to 160,000 kibitzers.
Summer 2005 - ?

All this time we've been assured that our kill ratios are splendid, that the insurgents lose every single encounter and so on. Meanwhile the top US estimate (the 20,000) quadrupled this year. Our intelligence has either sucked all along and the insurgency has always been much bigger than the Pentagon and NRO have imagined, or the insurgency has mushroomed despite all the Good News You Never Hear About and our unbroken string of military successes (Samarra, Fallujah, Najaf, Samarra, Najaf, Fallujah, Samarra . . . ).

Either way, it's hard to figure out how loudly I'd have to cheer to make the matter go away.

The Saban Center Iraq Index chart of TOTAL NUMBE OF INSURGENTS DETAINED OR KILLED (pdf, page 11) is tricky to read and based on iffy data. It estimates about 30,000 insurgent detentions/KIAs from May 2003 through November 2004. Looking at the spikes in April and Aug-September 2004, it seems reasonable to attribute 5-10,000 insurgent losses to Baby Sadr's militia. That leaves 20,000 losses for the Sunni insurgency that has - take your pick - 20,000 to 200,000 at large. We have killled the early estimates of the resistance forces at least four times over.

Warblog Fanboy Rampage - A new, possibly semi-regular feature inspired by Grim's legendary comics blog, in which we yank quotes from comments sections and hold them, wriggling, up to the light. Why? Because I can be mean that way, but also because I think it's in the comments sections that the uberhawk id truly struts itself. Our opening example is relatively mild and comes from a Hit & Run thread about the size of the Iraqi insurgency. The commenter, RC Dean, writes

As for the question of whether anyone on this discussion has called for the defeat of the US (other than Pavel), well, I haven't read anyone other than Mr. Q who seems to believe that, since we are in Iraq, we might as well see it through and win this thing.

Like I said, we're going non-inflammatory in our inaugural item, but nevertheless what we have here is an exaltation of attitude over intellect - not whether we can win, or are winning, which was the topic of the original item, but whether the people discussing the issue are hoping loudly enough for victory. You see it in every hawkish outlet on and offline. War's tendency to turn countries into a really big gym class is why some of us oppose the unnecessary ones in the first place.

Just Wondering - Jane Galt has an interesting entry on the social security controversy, and notes therein that

Now, as it happens, I think that there will always be a minimal safety net for the poor elderly, no matter what sort of forced savings scheme we adopt (and I'm in favour of adopting one). But I think better a minimal safety net and a forced savings scheme than a generous middle-class entitlement.

I suppose that, given a choice between the two options, and only those two, I'd pick Jane's way too. Here's what I wonder: Would a system of welfare for indigent old folks lead to

1) A return to the societal expectation that adults will help care for their elderly parents; leading to,

2) Politicians who vow to get tough on "deadbeat kids?"

Discuss.

Tsunamiana - It's not just the first week of the month, but the first week of the year. In other words, accounting hell. Didn't get home until 10:30 and I'm aiming to spend some quality time with the NyQuil bottle soon. Quick disaster-blogging reactions:

Joyner spots the first "No mas" from an aid agency, Medecins Sans Frontieres. They've got all the money they can use right now. It's worth keeping in mind that sometimes it's worth donating a few weeks or months down the road, when problems remain but the first cash has been run through.

Or maybe not. Patri Friedman at Catallarchy suggests there are better things to do with your money:

. . . my argument is not “Don’t give to tsunami relief". Rather I urge all of you to give in to those charitable emotions, let them inspire you into getting out your checkbook, and then just change your target.

It's an interesting argument about getting the most bang for your charitable buck. What Patri may be missing is the possibility that donating to tsunami relief probably makes the giver feel better than donating to malaria, TB or AIDS research. That has interesting implications about the purpose of generosity. Meanwhile, Arbitrary Aardvark has another worry:

Google lists 17 places where one can give away money to help tsunami-related clients. Google does not list any places for investing in helping tsunami-related clients. I think this is a huge mistake.

He then explains why.

This all probably touches on last week's tempest in a blogpot between Tim Cavanaugh of Reason and Glenn Reynolds. It's surely true that at some point commerce becomes essential to the tourist areas' recovery. That day may be sooner rather than later. That said, I sympathize with Cavanaugh's clarification in the Hit&Run comment thread that "There's a middle ground between shunning the place as a tourist destination for all time and taking your vacation while thousands of bodies are still rotting in the open air. A week or two of lost tourist dollars will set back the economy less than it will show a decent respect for the dead."

In subjunctive defense of the tourists quoted in the original article, however, something else occurred to me. This has been an evolving story. The death count rose over a period of days. Someone at the beach or just arriving may be the last person on earth to learn the full scope of the horror. And if the report is accurate ("[they] had been assured of a 'wonderful holiday' "), the hotel did indeed want them there.

UPDATE: Diana Moon snuck back to Letter from Gotham and wrote about the sociopolitics of disaster-proofing.

You Mean Like a Bunch of . . . Super Friends? - Abu Aardvark is teaching a course in comic book politics and has created a blog for the class, called, um, Comic Book Politics. Among other things, you can relive those thrilling "literature of ethics" debates of yesteryear.

(A no-prize to anyone who identifies the exact allusion in this item's title.)

Music Notes - Getcher Finn Brothers tickets. Neil gets all the pub, but Tim Finn's Say It Is So is the Finn Family CD I most cherish. (Yes, more than Woodface.)

It's Done Then - I finished updating the New Year's Eve "My Year in Comics" item.

A Happy Blogospheric Welcome - Longtime Liberty Magazine contributor Clark Stooksbury has a blog now. Cool!

Things Past, and Passing, and to Come - Danny Pinkus at Head Heeb considers the sticky wicket that is the prospective Gaza disengagement.

UPDATE: Thanks to Diana and Jonathan for correcting my misattribution of authorship. When did every blog but this one become a group blog, anyway?

Famous Cartoonists' School, 21st Century Edition - Interesting article in the Boston Globe about the new Center for Cartoon Studies that cartoonist and educator James Stern is founding in White River Junction, Vermont. The article suggests that Stern conceives the two-year post-secondary institution as a kind of more-indie, more holistic Kubert School. If you have $14,000 a year and a yen to create, apply through their website.

Thanks to reader Eric Mauro for the pointer.

OMG 2005R00lz!!!!! - Did this site finally freshen its "New Crew" links for the first time in dog years? Yes it did. Welcome the following new recommended blogs:

Kevin Sites

Heretical Ideas

Justin Logan

Howling Curmudgeons

The Beat

Adrienne Aldredge

Intel Dump

Snarkout

The Comics Reporter

Crash Landing

Thoughts Eclectic

Also tested and repaired existing links. If a site hadn't updated since October 2004 or earlier, it's gone. The previous New Crew have been moved to their permanent homes.