Unqualified Offerings: Corrupting America's Youth Since 2001 - Your free IHS Summer Seminars list.

UNworkable - Stupid unaccountable bureaucracy! Ineffectual talking shop on the Hudson! It took the UN seven months to fire the staffer the leadership considered most responsible for allowing the August 19 bombing of its Baghdad headquarters to occur. Seven months! You'll note that when the the government of, by and for the people suffered an even bigger atrocity in September 2001 it only took the government - um. Um.

Latest Notes from the Hellmouth - Your daily dose of outrage comes, as so often, from Zero Intelligence:

MLK is one of those 'progressive' schools that suspends everybody in a fight regardless of whether they were instigating it or defending themselves. They have a solution for her problem though - for the past couple of months they've kept her alone and secluded in her classroom while the rest of her schoolmates (including her bully) go outside to play.

There is, alas, more.

A Fanboy's Labor-Saving Device - Eve Tushnet spends three paragraphs saving me work:

First let me get the polemical point out of the way: People who complain about superhero characters' vigilantism are being too literal-minded and missing the point. The situations superhero characters confront are meant to mirror or illuminate situations we face. Sometimes the vigilante nature of the superhero helps call societal conventions into question, emphasizing the primacy of conscience and placing the hero alone in a moral landscape a lot like the landscape of the Western (another very American genre--and more on this stuff soon). Sometimes vigilante status is just a way to clear away bureaucracy and real-world constraints so that the storytelling can move fast and keep a tight focus on the central character's choices. For those of us who read those serial-killer-profiling books, in the second kind of story vigilantism is m.o.; in the first kind, it's signature. Obviously, many superhero stories use both aspects of the convention, with one or the other predominating.

Comparison: the costumes. Superhero comics use costumes for a host of reasons. Mechanical: Costumes make it easier to tell the characters apart, especially when the artists keep changing. They also make it easier for readers to slide into the fantastic--they're like unicorns; when you see one you know you've left real-world conventions and should readjust your expectations accordingly. Plot: Costumes make it easier to suspend disbelief that characters with secret identities can maintain their secrecy. Thematic: Like secret identities in general, costumes help emphasize themes of identity-creation, personal vs. public persona, and the attractions and stresses of playing a role.

But costumes aren't there to suggest that dressing up in colorful spandex is actually an effective response to trouble in the world or in one's psyche. That's just not what they're doing. Ditto, IMO, vigilantism. It serves mechanical, plot, and thematic purposes, but there's no point in trying to force it from symbol into policy prescription. Therefore, criticizing it for being a lousy policy prescription misses the point.

Then she goes on to give an entirely different take on the appeal of the superhero story that is, however, at least as plausible as my own. In that light, I recall an academic symposium at which a panelist recounted the story of a gay kid who felt that Spider-Man helped him get through his adolescence because the the alienation, the compulsion to act in secret, the desire to engage society but on one's own anarchic terms spoke to him deeply.

Also: How to raise a non-reader!

But What About the Mysterious Blue Area on the Moon - Dave Allan, official second-oldest friend of Unqualified Offerings, tips me to Nobel-Laureate Steven Weinberg's critique of the President's Manned Mission to Mars program in the New York Review of Books. (Read it fast. Most NYRB articles pass behind a pay wall within a couple of weeks.)

To an extent this is a dog-bites-man story. As Weinberg himself notes

Astronomers and other scientists are generally skeptical of the value of manned space flight, and often resent the way it interferes with scientific research. NASA administrators, astronauts, aerospace contractors, and politicians typically find manned space flight just wonderful.

but Weinberg makes a plausible-sounding case that the Mars program, vaporware or not, is already cutting into NASA's science budget. He misses the obvious conspiracy theory for some reason. Which scientific research will suffer most heavily? Experimental cosmology. Which scientific research in NASA's purview would most naturally discommode the Christian fundamentalists in the President's base? Hey, I don't need two separate answers to dispose of both of these questions!

But what about the romance, dammit? It tugs at my heart. It urges me to forsake my libertarian principles for the sake of mankind's greatest adventure. Weinberg claims to feel it too:

I hope that someday men and women will walk on the surface of Mars. But before then, there are two conditions that will need to be satisfied.

One condition is that there will have to be something for people to do on Mars which cannot be done by robots. If a few astronauts travel to Mars, plant a flag, look at some rocks, hit a few golf balls, and then come back, it will at first be a thrilling moment, but then, when nothing much comes of it, we will be left with a sour sense of disillusion, much as happened after the end of the Apollo missions. Perhaps after sending more robots to various sites on Mars something will be encountered that calls for direct study by humans. Until then, there is no point in people going there.

The other necessary condition is a reorientation of American thinking about government spending. There seems to be a general impression that government spending harms the economy by taking funds from the private sector, and therefore must always be kept to a minimum. Unlike what is usually called "big science" - orbiting telescopes, particle accelerators, genome projects - sending humans to the moon and Mars is so expensive that, as long as the public thinks of government spending as parasitic on the private economy, this program would interfere with adequate support for health care, homeland security, education, and other public goods, as it has already begun to interfere with spending on science.

The last thing I want, Loyal Reader, is to get you to stop thinking of government spending as parasitic on the private economy. And even if we hurried up and became Swedes tomorrow, we presumably wouldn't believe in or be capable of infinite taxation and public spending. The Mars mission would still have to compete with your favorite basket of public goods for funding, and it will still, on Weinberg's logic, lose. Note that the apparent choice already before Weinberg is one that favors Martian trips over, among other things, expanded government health care. Weinberg clearly wants expanded government health care and such a lot more, Kim Stanley Robinson notwithstanding.

It pains the twelve-year-old me, but I have to agree - at least about wanting other things more than the Mars mission, like significant deficit reduction. When the robots discover something only humans can further study, let's talk about the wisdom and constitutionality of government-funded manned space travel again. Until then, if you want to go, do it with your own money and your own time. Put together a convincing enough plan, though, and I might chip in.

Toward More Gaudy Nights - Last week was a busy one, so I haven't been able to properly address the comment thread for "Gaudy Night" at Brainwash. I hope to get to it in the next day or two. The most sweeping objections come from Rich Puchalsky and deserve detailed comment, but in brief, I think he's prey to various levels of excessive literalism (re both the essay itself and superhero stories as well). I'll post something here when I've posted something there.

Meanwhile, Sean Collins and J.W. Hastings tripped over a grammatical infelicity of mine. I wrote

Most of the field's best writers have been liberals or leftists, so our core questions tend to get answered accordingly: the powerful should behave like social workers at home (violent social workers, mind you) and neoconservatives abroad.

By this, I was not intending to distinguish how the powerful (superheroes) should behave domestically from how they should behave internationally. It just reads that way. (Bad Jim!) I could better have written

the powerful should behave the way social workers behave at home (violent social workers, mind you) and neoconservatives behave abroad

That is, the powerful should actively intervene to "help" others, and here are two real-life models that fit how they should do so. (Because Yes, Sean, I think of the Siamese twins of neocon benevolent hegemony and Blairite humanitarian interventionism as simply the Nanny State overseas.

A Fanboy's Reviews - Yes, I've become a crummy comics blogger! Let's try to make up for it a little with some reviews:

Tell Me Something (Jason) - Basically, a James M. Cain story for furries. One-name cartoonist Jason chronicles a love triangle involving a crow poet-turned-pickpocket, his coke-snorting crow ex-girlfriend and her dog husband, who is either a crime lord or someone who just happens to have the phone numbers of hit men. And the female crow's father is a dodgy character himself, who keeps bully boys and porn photographers around. The template is silent movies - each page after the first one has two by three panels as regular as a reel of film; there's no word balloon dialogue at all, just a handful of word-only panels interspersed among the pictures like dialogue cards in a pre-talkie. The pictures carry the story. If, as Eve Tushnet, Dave Fiore and I were musing last week, page layout is to sequential art as meter is to verse, then Jason is Alexander Pope rather than Shakespeare - his six-panel grids have all the regularity of Restoration verse, and like the better Restoration verse, manages to weave a lot of event on its tight little loom.

I liked it. We are not talking timeless work of genius here - one of the reasons Jason is able to convey his wordless story is because you've seen most of it before, elsewhere - but the plot describes a satisfying spiral and the storytelling has a pleasing economy to it. The book's anthropomorphic world is amusing and baffling at once (sometimes "cartoon physics" works for our hero, the crow poet, sometimes they don't) and suggestive. (While there are other animals, dogs and crows predominate. I at least want to read a certain ethnic tension into the book's dog-crow relations.) And the package is lovely - crisp black and white line art, thick brown cardstock cover with foldovers, and only 8.95.

Light Brigade, 1 of 4 (Peter J. Tomasi and Peter Snejbjerg) - During the closing days of World War II, a company of American GIs gets caught up in a war between rebel and loyal angels. The color art is lovely. Snejbjerg does a great job of indiviuating the soldiers' looks. The snow scenes are gorgeous, the battles evocative if not altogether realistic. (I suspect the German soldiers stand too close together when charging, but hey - they're zombie!) The story is, frankly, standard-issue Vertigo eschatological horror, not that there's anything wrong with that. The human-interest hook is GI Chris Stavros, who suffers an irony surfeit at the beginning of the book. (Crouched in a foxhole, he learns that his wife has died back home and his son is crippled.) The MacGuffin is a sword that must not fall into rebel angel hands. I might have preferred a straight-up war comic. Still, Nazi zombies. Cool.

Conan #2 (Kurt Busiek and Carey Nord) - Retells Robert E. Howard's short story, "The Frost Giant's Daughter." Writer Busiek does a serviceable transcription job getting Howard's simple plot across. I've read "Frost Giant's Daughter" twice, and once this year, and detect no false notes. The art is uneven. There are some gorgeous landscapes. The panel layout is vigorous - rarely so many as six panels to a page and a lot of insets. Like Snejbjerg and Light Brigade colorist Bjarne Hansen, Nord and colorist Dave Stewart do beautiful snowscapes. The aftermath of a skirmish that crosses pages four and five, and the distant-view chase scene atop page 13 are striking. Njord's rendition of Howard's Frost Giants is impressive. As to human figures, there's good and bad. He has a gift for the outrageous musculature that has become a trope of sword and sorcery art. (For good - or evil; as Ron Edwards has pointed out, prior to the invention of the Nautilus machine - and anabolic steroids - even fit men just didn't have such physiques.) Conan and his opponents look like someone took a human-shaped net bag to Safeway's annual steak sale and just kept shoving purchases in there. But all cartoonists have their favorite views, and Nord's is one from which a charging Conan's chin all but disappears. And, maybe because the pages are shot from Nord's uninked pencils, we tend to lose Conan's eyes in shots where the character appears at any distance.

I would go so far as to say that Nord hasn't mastered the basic trick of making a character look like the same guy consistently from panel to panel and page to page. But his art has an appropriately brutal energy about it and his page designs forgive much.

Mother, Come Home (Paul Hornschemeier) - How I have feared to review this book. Because I may not be up to getting across how good it is. Right now, this is my graphic novel of the year. If it somehow loses eligibility because the chapters were originally serialized in the author's ongoing Forlorn Funnies comic, change the rules.

This is the story of a boy, Thomas Tennant, and his father. The boy's mother, the father's wife, has died, and they're trying to cope with her loss. It doesn't go so well. Hornschemeier is a young man, I've learned, but he knows an awful lot about not just sons but fathers.

Jeez, you know what? I'm going to have to try this again later. The book deserves better than I can manage to give it right now. Come back soon, but don't wait to buy it.

Counterpoint - Hesiod defends the Clinton Administration from - me.

Here's the essential problem with Jim's argument. The Clinton administration did not invade or launch a massive attack on Afghanistan for PRACTICAL reasons. Reasons that did not exist with respect to Kosovo where we had a unanimous NATO backing us up.

Hesiod makes a good point. While the original article I quoted (and various liberal blogs) stressed lack of domestic in addition to international support, the political geography of Southwest Asia was not nearly so congenial to military intervention as Southeastern Europe was. Al Qaeda's atrocities in New York and Washington didn't just change the balance of public opinion in the US; it changed it abroad as well (for a time, at least).

I think that the case for the Clinton Administration is, therefore, better than you'd think from my original item. That said, the US didn't just happen into a situation in 1999 where NATO was just begging us to take the organization to war. The US overcame reluctance among various parties and worked the media to raise the sense of urgency.

So far no evidence has come to light that the Clinton team made the same kind of effort re Afghanistan. The Taliban were terrible folks fighting a dirty civil war against various domestic opponents. That's the same sort of situation that the US has turned to rhetorical advantage time and again. We still don't know quite what combination of blandishments and threats secured Pakistani cooperation in October 2001 - some combination of them could have been tried in earlier years. (Just as a for instance: an end to anti-nuclear sanctions, lower tarriffs for Pakistani exports and a veiled threat to take out Pakistan's beloved nukes.) Might have worked. Might not have. And the 'stans were the other possible avenue. This would have provoked Russian objections. So did Kosovo, of course.

Still, the argument that the Clinton administration faced a less international situation than the post-WTC Bush Administration did is a good one.

Not Much Gets Past the Boy - Matthew Yglesias finds the flaw in the "remake the Middle East" ointment:

Along these lines, it's worth raising the question of whether the current administration really wants a democratic Iraq, or whether the reason their policies seem so unlikely to create one is that they in fact fear such a thing.

Why might that be, Matt:

Fundamentally, America's beef with Saddam was not that he was a nasty dictator (lots of nasty dictators in the Middle East) but that his policies were inimical to America's strategic interests in the region -- defense of Israel, and preventing the emergence of a hegemonic regional power in the Persian Gulf. Replacing Saddam with an elected government, however, might do very little to change any of this. Saddam's hostility to Israel was, broadly speaking, in line with public opinion. Iraq's quest for hegemony, meanwhile, is a logical outgrowth of the factual situation. Unlike Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, it has a large population; unlike Egypt or Syria it has a lot of oil; and unlike Iran, it's majority-Arab and hence suited for regional leadership.

But wait, there's more!

There are large Shi'a populations in Saudi Arabia and at least one other Gulf state (Bahrain, I think) and they're not very well treated. It would be natural for a democratically elected Shi'ite president of Iraq to see himself as the champion of the rights of his co-religionists right across the border, possibly through methods including military intervention. If a legitimate Iraqi regime were to use force against, say, the Saudi monarchy, it's sort of hard for me to see how the United States could credibly characterize such a move as illegitimate.

Matt does forget one thing - the core principle that we could invoke in such cases: "We decide."

As to the rest of it, near as I can tell, the public-consumption version of Neo Theory is that Arabs and Muslims hate Israel and America because they are oppressed. Not by us, you understand, and certainly not by Israel, which is the only democracy in the Middle East if you live in the right zip code. Rather, repressive Arab and Muslim governments scapegoat Israel (and the US) and their silly subjects believe it. Democratize the Middle East and elected governments will have no need for scapegoats because everything will be swell all day and well into the evening hours, and the citizens of those governments, freed of state propaganda, will leave off their mad rages against Tel Aviv and Washington.

The evidence for this theory seems poor, especially as regards Israel. The US, for instance, has more citizens of Arab and Muslim background than ever, including not just recent immigrants but people who have lived here a generation and more. It's fair to say, I think, that their views on Middle Eastern issues touching on Israel and US foreign policy are a lot closer to those of their confreres in the Old Country than to the New Republic's. And as Fouad Ajami writes today, the democratic welfare states of Europe have been the incubators of the most radical Islam the modern world has yet seen. (Via Outside the Beltway.)

What got Matt started on this line of thought was Juan Cole's reporting of Iraqi reactions to the assassination of Sheik Yassin, late of Hamas.

Let's Not Kid Ourselves - Amid the back and forth between the Clinton and Bush camps over who did and didn't do enough to prioritize antiterrorism before the massacres of September 11, 2001, the lamest apologia for the Clinton Administration is that they couldn't have taken stronger military measures against al Qaeda because public support wouldn't be there. This from the gang that dragged NATO into Kosovo and began that war with no Congressional approval and with a minority of the public supporting it. When the Clinton Administration really wanted a war, they got a war. Bob Kerrey gets it right:

Testifying Tuesday were Albright, Powell, Rumsfeld and former Clinton Secretary of Defense William Cohen. The pairs of representatives agreed with each other on many broad issues, including the difficulties of targeting bin Laden and his allies prior to Sept. 11, 2001, and the perceived lack of political support for military action during those years. Some commissioners, particularly former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., argued that both administrations could have rallied support for military operations just as they did in Kosovo and Iraq, respectively.

Now let's up front about this: I might well have opposed military action in Afghanistan at the time. But I opposed Kosovo too, and you'll notice that didn't stop anybody. Had the Clinton Administration gone into Afghanistan at the time against public opinion, it almost certainly would have enjoyed the same "rally round the flag" effect that Gulf War Phase I, The War for the KLA and Gulf War Phase II enjoyed.

Both administrations have a lot to answer for. And massive military action against al Qaeda at the turn of the millenium may even have been objectively unwise. You think I'm being an idiot isolationist again, but if an early attack on Afghanistan precipitated an Islamist coup in nuclear-armed Pakistan, you wouldn't like it. And, as was also pointed out in the hearings:

The officials from both administrations also struck a similar theme on the question of preventing the terror strikes, arguing that it is unclear how effective aggressive action might have been given the extent of the plot and the determination of the participants.

Imagine the post hoc ergo propter hocs if we had invaded Afghanistan and the World Trade Center attacks happened anyway - as they might have.

But for better or for worse, and to my mind it's for worse, any President who really wants a war can have one almost any time. Events prove that the Clinton Administration wanted to insert itself into a Balkan civil war a lot more than it wanted to go to war against anti-American terrorists in Southwest Asia. This excuses not a single Bush Administration failing. But let's not kid ourselves about a lost Golden Age of anti-terror vigor.

Aargh! Now They've Got Me Doing It - Reader Mark Shawhan e-mails

On reading your most recent post (on that special forces unit that got pulled out of Afghanistan), I noticed two things. One of them is a bit trivial: in the fourth paragraph from the end (the one beginning "back to the Guardian claim"), it seems like you reversed Iraq and Afghanistan (at least, the paragraph makes a lot more sense if you read it the other way round).

Help! When it comes to the war on terror I can no longer distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein!

Anyway, thanks to Matt, and I fixed the error. He continues:

As for the other thing: doesn't deploying special forces to Iraq in 9/02 damage the hawkish argument that President Bush went to the UN to pursue diplomacy, etc, in good faith? If we're already laying the groundwork for our invasion as W. is making his speech to the General Assembly, that doesn't look like we're really giving diplomacy a chance, now does it?

Well, yeah, but we disposed of that one more than a year ago.

UPDATE: Mark Shawhan, not Matt Shawn. Will no one fact-check my ass?

Fair's Fair - Virginia Postrel has a point:

Remember when putting troops on the ground in Afghanistan was a sure ticket to disaster, a military action hardly more conceivable than launching a nuclear attack? Remember the lessons of the Soviets and the British? Judging from this week's discussions, not many people do.

True! Which is why, at various times, I argued that the Bush Administration had handled Afghanistan about as well as it was possible to handle it. The last thing I wanted was huge numbers of regular infantry clumping around in easy truck bomb range of Taliban sympathizers or disgruntled warlords.

But I certainly didn't want these guys pulled out:

Fifth Group Special Forces were a rare breed in the US military: they spoke Arabic, Pastun and Dari. They had been in Afghanistan for half a year, had developed a network of local sources and alliances, and believed that they were closing in on bin Laden.

Without warning, they were then given the task of tracking down Saddam. "We were going nuts on the ground about that decision," one of them recalls.

"In spite of the fact that it had taken five months to establish trust, suddenly there were two days to hand over to people who spoke no Dari, Pastun or Arabic, and had no rapport."

Along with the redeployment of human assets came a reallocation of sophisticated hardware. The US air force has only two specially-equipped RC135 U spy planes. They had successfully vectored in on al-Qaida leadership radio transmissions and cellphone calls, but they would no longer circle over the mountains of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.

British Press, so you have to check. Googling around suggests that, while 5th Special Forces really did have a good number of Arabic speakers, its Pashto and Dari was mostly picked up on the run. And that "given the task of tracking down Saddam" straight out of Afghanistan is hard to verify independently, because of secrecy and casual reporting.

But here they are in Afghanistan on November 12, 2001. It's where Master Sergeant Jefferson Donald Davis died on December 5 of that year. And there they are outside of Baghdad by August or September 2002.

This excellent St. Louis Post-Dispatch series about the life of one 5th Special Forces soldier and the death of another says that

They had deployed again in January 2003, had taken part in the fall of Baghdad and then had gone on the hunt for Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

This is what John Bolduc's old unit was doing by late-Spring 2003: "By late May, the team was providing security for several Iraqi politicians, a task that bored Morehead but that he understood was risky."

It wasn't until July 2003 that 5th Special Forces was assigned to the Saddam hunt, according to the Post-Dispatch series. But they're the kind of soldiers we absolutely want chasing down al Qaeda supporters and leaders, they're the kind of soldiers whose skills are rare and whose deployments represent therefore a clear choice - Send them on Task B and you are perforce prioritizing it over Task A. The Bush Administration's decision to send 5th Special Forces and Task Force 121 to Iraq rather than Afghanistan represents a clear choice to prioritize Iraq over al Qaeda. There are hawks who have spent considerable energy justifying that choice, but it makes no sense to deny that it happened.

Back to the Guardian claim. Does it represent a (misleading) compression of events for dramatic effect? Maybe. It's possible, though, that there were still elements of 5th Special Forces in Afghanistan after others had been moved to Iraq, that the quoted soldier was one of them and that these troops were pulled out in Summer 2003 to hunt Saddam. As the Times reported in November, General John Abizaid decided to merge Afghanistan's Task Force 5 and Iraq's Task Force 20 into the new Task Force 121 in July 2003. If that involved shifting Task Force 5 troops from Afghanistan to Iraq for the Saddam hunt, then Guardian reporter Philip James' source could have meant exactly what he said.

Now that Saddam has been captured, and only now that Saddam has been captured,Task Force 121 has been shifted back to Afghanistan to track down al Qaeda leaders. Priorities, priorities.

This excerpt from the Washington Times article is rich:

A Defense Department official said there are two reasons for repositioning parts of Task Force 121: First, most high-value human targets in Iraq, including Saddam Hussein, have been caught or killed. Second, intelligence reports are increasing on the whereabouts of bin Laden, the terror leader behind the September 11 attacks.

Task Force 121 isn't the sort of unit that just waits around for intelligence reports. Task Force 121 develops intelligence itself. Now, two and a half years after al Qaeda's slaughters in New York and Washington and a year after the start of our Mesopotamian detour, it's developing some in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Well, like I say, priorities.

Voting for the Terrorists - Well, which ones, darnit? Fafnir helps you make an informed choice. (Will you have the right to slap a "Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Apulus" sticker on your SUV?)

Sweet Relief - What's that floating away? At least a few libertarian anxieties about John Kerry:

For the first time, he will target a popular tax incentive, known as "deferral," offered to most U.S. companies that do business in lower-taxed foreign countries.

To soften the blow to corporations, Kerry will propose a one-time, one-year offer to tax at 10 percent any profits a company brings back to the United States and invests here, an expanded tax credit to companies that create domestic jobs, and a reduction in the corporate tax rate to 33.25 percent from 35 percent -- a 5 percent cut.

writes Jim VandeHei in the Post.

Drezner writes:

1) This is a lot more about symbolism than substance. According to the Post story, the total sums involved in these tax changes are around $12 billion. That sounds like a lot, but it's around 1% of the federal budget. Not a lot of money either way.

2) That said, the symbolism is important, in that "corprate tax reductions" sound a lot better to the business community than "Benedict Arnold CEOs."

3) The economic advisors quoted in the Post story are Roger Altman and Gene Sperling. They fall decidedly into the "sane" camp of Democratic economic advisors.

Point 1 is partially undercut by the truism that everything important happens at the margin, but to the extent thatDrezner's right, the plan looks even better: offshoring is not the apocalypse, current Democratic rhetoric to the contrary. So dressing up minor countermeasures as a bold plan is actually reassuring. Assuming Kerry wins the election (a big assumption), the plan may be stillborn anyway, since many Democratis legislators and interest groups will hold out for something bloodier and Chamber of Commerce Republicans will carry water for the estimated one percent of all corporations that are projected to see tax increases under the plan - they happen to be the very largest corporations.

My preference is that taxes be: a) low, and b) revenue-neutral. The Kerry proposal has minimal virtues in the direction of the former. The "loophole"-closure does not seem to do special violence to the latter. There are some social-engineering aspects to the "job creation" provisions, but they're time-limited. There's another arguably-interventionist provision that is, by Democratic policy standards, sensible: you can continue to defer taxes on overseas income if you expand into a country to sell in that country. That is, if you build an auto plant in India to sell cars in India, you don't have to wear the Scarlet 'O' around your business-casual neck.

Other aspects of Kerry's anti-offshoring and "jobs-creation" platform are still troublesome. Some, like the "plan" to "invest in renewable energy and technologies that will create 500,000 jobs and make energy more affordable for businesses" are not just wasteful but downright silly. Then there's the "International Playing the Dozens" plank:

John Kerry will crack on countries that violate trade agreements . . .

President John Kerry today asserted that "Hey China! Your mama fucks better than she looks!"

Point is, there's plenty wrong with Kerry's rhetoric - he's certainly not making the anti-protectionist case. And there's plenty wrong with some of his substantive proposals. But from a libertarian perspective they could be worse, and Kerry's not running against a libertarian, but against a President who has committed copious economic sins of his own.

A Fanboy's Head's Up via this kind e-mail:

NPR's Morning Edition will be doing a feature on Mike Mignola/Hellboy this April 5th. I did a taped interview with Morning Edition this afternoon to be used in connection with the feature. Our local NPR runs from 5 to 7am and repeats from 7 to 9am. Your local may be different.

All the best,

P. Craig Russell

ps. Just came across your blog and have been enjoying it.

So. Just remember two things: 1. Hellboy feature on Morning Edition, April 5th. 2. I got an e-mail from freakin' P. Craig Russell.

Another Fanboy's Notes - Good article in the Guardian last week about John Updike, lifelong cartoon fan. There's no indication that he still follows the field closely, but his love of the medium and his own attempts at a career in cartooning have clearly marked him.

If all Updike's stray references to comics were gathered together, they would form a focused little thematic volume, superior in insight to almost anything else written on the subject.

avers author Jeet Heer.

Look Over There - In case you haven't learned it from everybody else, former Calpundit Kevin Drum is now essentially The Washington Monthly website - or at least, his relocated and renamed blog, Political Animal, is the most prominent thing about the place. Still indispensible for political analysis from a mostly-measured Democratic perspective.

Annals of We Are Not Making This Up - "Man told to stay away from mascot chicken" reports the Salem, Oregon Statesman-Journal:

He was released from jail later that morning, five days after he took Speckles home from outside Ray's Food Place, where the chicken is a longtime mascot and local favorite.

Kathy Dean, Gombos' wife, said they were not regular shoppers at the store and were only thinking of the chicken.

I blame gay marriage. (Link via Mrs. Offering.)

Plan Ahead - Will Wilkinson explains why you should go to Libertarian Summer Camp.

Blogger Makes Good - Now-Somewhat pseudonymous Diana Moon has published a profile of film-maker Albert Maysles in The Forward. (Link requires registration. "jhenley/jhenley" will work.) Being a film ignoramus, I learned a lot from it. Like that Maysles made the Stones documentary "Gimme Shelter," which I've actually seen, and which was a pretty amazing piece of work. Plus all sorts of information about Maysles newest project, a documentary about the "notorious 1913 blood libel trial in which a Ukrainian Jew, Mendel Beilis, was wrongly accused of the murder of a 13-year-old Christian boy." Sadly, the topic remains relevant.

Note to Diana: The new blog template is aces. But you' ve lost your item-specific anchor links. Time for a little template editing.

Rebels in the Air - Tonight at a Reason party I met Tim Pozar, who runs the Bay Area Research Wireless Network. Out of his own pocket pretty much, BARWN is wiring up as much of the third world and as many economically-depressed areas in the US as possible for wireless internet connectivity - Oakland, Bhutan etc. They put 802.16 transmitters, which operate in the unlicensed portion of the RF spectrum, get donated bandwidth and spread the word through a kind of viral marketing. Now I'm a vector. Tim might be happy to fund his efforts out of your pocket too. His first US effort is Oakland. It occurs to me that if you've got the cash, he's got the expertise, and could help you contribute similarly to your own community.

Or you could wait until someone passes a law, I suppose.

Works for Me - Not easy reading, but Vietnam Vet Bill Larsen's "Mike MacParlane Taste Test" strikes me as exactly the right one to apply. It's not dissimilar from the "My Sister Libertarianism" that I discussed on this site back in olden times. I am fully aware that there will be some, even many, hawks who will say that the Iraq War passes the Taste Test for them, and some of them will neither be kidding themselves or us. But it doesn't pass mine.

(Via Antiwar.com blog.)

More Great Power, Less Responsibility - Franklin Harris says superheroes are not killing the comic book industry.

The industry to fashion a pillow large enough for the rest of the world to bite? - Be advised that this website does not exist. It is the basest conspiracy theorizing to suggest otherwise. Its Statement of Principles doesn't exist either. Nor does this Thomas Friedman column. Oh no no no, it would be irresponsible to even suggest that any of the links in this post were working links.

"America is in danger of someday not being at war."