It's been a while since I've written anything about my HeroClix House Rules. No one reading this cares much about them, but then, very few people reading this will comment, either, so it's all good.

I've made changes to how several powers work over the past few weeks. In addition to beefing up Impervious and Invulnerable considerably (the powers now absorb 4 and 3 clicks of damage, respectively, instead of 2), I've also added the following text to (of all things) Leadership:

Now Playing: In Thee by Blue Oyster Cult
So I had a really lousy day at work yesterday. But as all of you non-commenting lurkers know, I have the Greatest Girlfriend In The World, which is why when I walked out to the parking lot after my shift last night, I found her waiting for me with a gift wrapped present. Upon tearing it open with the enthusastic glee of a 5 year old, I discovered --

-- the DC Archive Edition of Kamandi, probably my all time favorite, and arguably the absolute freakiest, of Jack Kirby's singularly creative comic book visions.

The first ten issues, printed on wonderfully soft acid-free paper, in vivid colors that do full justice to the absolutely gorgeous Kirby art... ahhh, I am truly the luckiest of all men.

Some of these ten issues I've read, others I haven't. I'm looking forward to acquainting, or re-acquainting, myself with all these stories. And I certainly hope DC continues to reprint Kamandiissues at least through the entirety of the original Kirby run.

SuperGirlfriend is the best!

Oh, and SuperGirlfriend wants to send a big shout-out of gratitude to Steve Tice, for helping her out with something related to this Kamandi archive edition. So there you go, Steve. Thanks for whatever you did.

Okay. While SuperGirlfriend is out frying up some catfish and hush puppies for dinner (Gad, I feel Southern) let's talk a little bit about The New Job:

I work for a Third Party Benefits Administrator. That's going to be so much Mandarin Chinese to most of you, so let me explicate further: my employer is what is called a 'carve out' or a 'niche player' in the health services industry. If a company would like the benefits of offering certain types of benefit plans (specifically, Flexible Spending Accounts, for health care or dependent care) to their employees, but they don't want the hassle of actually administering those benefit plans, my employer will do it for them... for a fee.

This means that if you have an FSA, and you want to file a reimbursement claim for some of your health or child care expenses, and your employer is my employer's client, you file your claim with us. We process the claim, which means, essentially, we make sure you filled out the paperwork correctly and gave us the correct supporting documentation to prove you really did get charged $25 for your co-pay or $400 by your daycare provider this month, and if you did all that right, we cut you a check... or, in some cases, we send your medical provider or your insurance company a check, but mostly, we send it to you.

Flexible Spending Accounts, and similar but different benefit plans like Health Savings Accounts, are simple in principle... well, no, fuck that, they're actually quite complex in principle, and can be hopelessly complicated in individual application, and this is what I do, all day long... talk to people on the phone about their claims, more often than not, about why the claim they submitted was denied and what they can do (if anything) to get it successfully reprocessed.

If you have one of these flex spending accounts (and I honestly don't know who I'm kidding when I type things like that, since pretty clearly nobody is bothering to read these goddam blog entries, but still, it's a useful rhetorical device even if I am apparently writing for myself alone) then you probably know that there is a thing called 'open enrollment' every year, which is when you call your human resources department (or a carve out subcontractor like the one I currently work for) and you pick all your benefits and make your elections and figure out just what you're going to pay for. Open enrollment is the period when you make decisions like this, and if you miss open enrollment, then you're just screwed, and you have to wait until the next open enrollment to sign up for your benefits.

Open enrollment is a huge part of what my employer does for its clients. Open enrollment season is, in fact, the reason I am currently working there, because this time of year many many companies have their open enrollment, and in order to handle the huge volume of calls that come in now, my employer has hired several hundred 'seasonals' (their word for temps) to come in and help take the calls and process the enrollment data.

Now, you would think that a company that brags relentlessly about having 200+ corporate clients, and that does nothing all day long every day but administer those corporate clients' benefit plans, and which gets a huge percentage of its annual business volume during open enrollment periods, would pretty much have open enrollment down to a science. (You would especially figure this as they entrust a significant part of this work to temps. If you're going to hire 200 plus temps every year to do a very important and reasonably complex job for you, you had better have that job worked out to a point where a trained monkey can do it, because any time you place an order that size with any temp agency, some of the temps you get are going to be, effectively, trained monkeys. It's the nature of the beast.)

Of course, I suppose you could afford to be somewhat sloppy and a little bit disorganized if you were only dealing with little mom and pop organizations and smaller companies who don't make a lot of money, and whom, if you lose their business, you can easily replace the revenue by picking up another, similarly modest client. And, indeed, all the corporate clients my current employer has are tiny tiny little companies that you have never in your life heard of, like, I don't know, Pep$ico, and C0ca C0la, and the $tate of Ge0rgia, and the Feder@l Goddam Judiciary System, and S^n Microsystems, and the ^niversity of California, and a bunch of other pathetic little non-players like that. And when you're dealing with small fry like that, companies no one has ever heard of that don't have a lot of influence over the marketplace and that really can't afford to spend a lot of money on their service providers anyway, well, you really don't have to worry about having your shit together.

Which, I suppose, is why over the past two days I've been directly involved in several conversations nearly identical with this one:

ME: Hey, Juanita, I've got a guy on the phone from Pep$iCo who wants to enroll in his benefits plan for next year. Our department isn't handling open enrollment for Pep$iCo; who do I transfer him to?

JUANITA (not the name of one of my supervisors, but it will do): Oh God I don't know. Isn't it in the computer somewhere?

ME: Well, the computer has a note that we aren't handling Pep$iCo's open enrollment this year, we are supposed to refer Pep$iCo employees back to their HR department. But...

JUANITA: Well Jesus then, do that!

ME: Okay, but he says the last person he talked to here did that and he called his HR department and they told him we were handling their open enrollment. They were very insistent.

JUANITA: Oh Christ. (turns to another supervisor) Meg, are we handling Pep$iCo's open enrollment?

MEGAN: I don't fucking know, isn't it in the computer?

So then Megan and Juanita hunted through the computer and came up with what is supposed to be the master sheet for open enrollment this year, telling us exactly who is handling which of our many clients' during their OE seasons. However, the spreadsheet is somewhat flawed, in that (a) it does not contain one single phone number, internal or otherwise, and (b) the people it says are handling open enrollment, if you go through the laborious process of looking up their phone numbers in the computerized diretory (which hates all humanity with a passionate maniacal frenzy you would think impossible for a cybernetic organism) and then dialing them, disavow all knowledge of any such responsibility faster than the Secretary disavows all knowledge of Jim Phelps' Impossible Missions Force.

In point of somewhat amusing/depressing fact, when we look up Pep$iCo on this spreadsheet, it says quite clearly that Juanita and Megan are in charge of the department that is handling it.

JUANITA: Okay, there is no fucking way we are handling Pep$iCo's open enrollment, I know that for DAMN sure.

MEGAN: Um... well... if you're sure...

Eventually, we managed to find a manager in a different department who let us transfer the poor guy (who had been on hold for twenty minutes by then) to her. She was certain that her department wasn't handling Pep$iCo's open enrollment either, but she was 'aware of the problem' and was 'working on it'.

That was yesterday, and it's not like we aren't getting a hundred calls a day from Pep$iCo employees looking to enroll in their benefits from next year, and as of today, we are still 'working on it'.

Not working on getting them enrolled. Working on finding out which department is supposed to be handling it. So far, everybody is absolutely certain THEY aren't handling it, but after that it breaks down into an urban legend... each supervisor is pretty sure that someone else they know knows someone who may be friends with someone who knows who is handling it, but they aren't sure...

And the really amus/azing thing about this is that this isn't an anomoly. I mean, if it was an anomoly, it would be a pretty bad one, because, you know, if you have a list of 200 plus clients you are handling a very complex and potentially costly job for, you would think Pep$iCo, which just pretty much owns everything on the planet not already under lease to MicroSoft, would not be high on the list of those clients that you want to screw stuff up for.

But, well, Pep$iCo shouldn't feel like the Lone Ranger or anything, because much of yesterday and today I took similar calls from another very small company's employees who also wanted to enroll in their benefits for next year and who had been assured by their HR department that we were handling it. You've never heard of this company and will merely blink in bewilderment and apathy when I tell you their name is $BC. Now, you would think that,for the love of sweet baby Christ, if we've already screwed up Pep$i's open enrollment, at the very least we are going to learn from that mistake and not similarly fuck over the open enrollment of another inconsequential and easily replaceable client like the $outhwestern Bell Company, but if you thought that, you must prepare at this moment to roll your head on your neck like John Belushi and sneer "But noooooooooooooo" in a highly aggravated manner, because here's how that conversation went:

ME: Say, Juanita...

JUANITA: Holy Mother of God can't you see I'm BUSY? ::cuts another V shaped slash in the flesh of her forearm with a razor blade while jittering her bloodshot gaze frantically from one place to another around the room::

ME: Okay. Say, Megan, I've got an employee from $BC on the phone and he says we're handling their open enrollment and he'd like to enroll. Where do I transfer him?

MEGAN: To hell! TO HELL!!!! ::shrieks, leaps out window::

So, you know, that's what my current job is like.

There's more I could tell you. Like yesterday, I got pulled into a room by someone from Quality Review, along with two of my supervisors, and they proceeded to bitchslap me all over the place for a lot of stuff, including not documenting all my calls. Now, what you need to know here is, in order for us to document a call, we need a social security number, which is a whole different rant I may get to, but anyway, without a social security number, we can't even get the call doc program to open. So, now that you know that, here's how that conversation went:

ME: Well, a lot of the calls we got today were open enrollment calls, and they don't want to give us a social security number because they haven't signed up yet and they just want to ask general questions about how the accounts work.

MARGUERITE THE HORRIFYING BITCH WHO EAVESDROPS ON OTHER PEOPLE'S CALLS ALL DAY LONG FOR A LIVING: Well, you still have to document every call at 100% and you know that.

JUANITA: That's right, 100% documentation is the goal and you need to do that.

MEGAN: You know that is part of the process which is expected of you the Gold Call Process you were trained on in training and we expect it of you and you have to do it.

ME: Okay and I understand that. But if they won't give me a social security number then how do I open call doc to document their call?

MARGUERITE: Well, you put in 99999 and then your four digit extension and that will let you doc the call.

JUANITA: I thought it was 00000 and the four digit extension.

MEGAN: I thought it was 1111... and isn't it a five digit extension?

JUANITA: What did they teach you in training?

ME: Well, we were told about three different ways to do it but none of them work. And nobody out on the floor knows how to do it either.

So the three of them exchange an annoyed glance, and then they tell me they'll get back to me. But in the meantime, I still have to doc every call at 100%, even though half our calls this time of year are general questions about open enrollment where the caller won't give us a social security number.

Then there was this exchange, just this afternoon:

JUANITA: Okay, H., I need to talk to you about something when you get done with that call.

ME: What should I sign off on?

JUANITA: Uh... ::turns to another employee who has been there forever:: Lloyd, if I need to talk to him after this call, what does he sign off on?

LLOYD: Aux code 5.

So I sign off on Aux code 5 and Juanita is showing me how I totally screwed up my last call, which she was eavesdropping on, the cunt, and telling me I have to call the participant back and give them the correct information, and suddenly here comes Wilhemina on a dead run with a horrified look on her face and she says:

WILHELMINA: Why in the name of God are you signed off on Aux code 5?

JUANITA: Isn't he supposed to sign off on Aux code 5 if I have to talk to him?

WILHELMINA: Jesus no!!! Aux code 5 is only to be used for emergency volcano eruptions and Presidential motorcades! Oh my God I have to write this up right now or democracy falls!

JUANITA: Well, okay, what code should he sign off on for something like this?

WILHELMINA: Uh... ::scratches her head, then turns to Lloyd:: Say, Lloyd...

Stuff like this makes it hard to have any confidence in management.

Oh, and then there is the social security number thing. See, all our files are keyed to social security number. Now, I'm reasonably sure that this is actually grotesquely illegal; I believe there are about eight Federal laws that expressly forbid anyone from ever requiring anyone to give them their social security number for any purpose without a court order, but, nonetheless, we open every call with "Thank you for calling The Planet Of Drunken Monkeys, my name is Bonzo the Inebriated Chimp, may I have the participant's Social Security number or alternate ID?" (I am of course paraphrasing; the last thing I need is a suit from management at my current employer doing a web search on the name of the company and turning this page up and starting a witch hunt for the man or woman with the funny funny blog page where he or she is blurting out all sorts of corporate secrets. But we say stuff a lot like that, just with different proper nouns.)

What amazes me is that most people just pony the fucker right up. But, still, a fraction of them... a significant fraction, like, maybe, one in 8 callers... balk. Many of these seize on the 'alternate ID' thing in the greeting. None of them actually HAVE an alternate ID, the idea of an alternate ID is yet another urban legend, every employer in the world and all the service providers in the health care industry just use the SS number because it's a unique number and they're all fucking lazy, but, still, we have to mention it in our greeting just in case unicorns or Keebler elves or yeti started up their own company last week and they are actually using alternate IDs. And these people who (quite cogently) don't want to give us their Social Security numbers will leap all over that and say "What kind of alternate ID?"

So then you have to explain "No, no, you don't have an alternate ID, it's just something we say to calm down the libertarians, give me your Social Security number". And then a surprising number of them will acquiesce, but still, it's a thing. Right off the bat, for everyone who calls, we are asking for something no one in their right mind wants to give a stranger over the phone, and that sure as hell doesn't help you establish rapport.

There is always a hard core who just won't do it. They aren't comfortable with it, they aren't going to do it, it's illegal, we should be ashamed. If I'm lucky, they hang up with that, and no one who works for a call center ever minds when a customer hangs up on them, no sir. But if I'm unlucky, then they will stay on the phone and demand I find some way to help them without using their Social Security number, which I suspect is probably their entirely legal (and reasonable) right, but, well, I can't do it.

So, all in all, my new job sucks. But it's better than my last two jobs, and I have SuperGirlfriend waiting for me at the end of every night, so, you know, life is pretty good. I just hate my job, but I guess we all do, right?

Now Playing: Send Her My Love by Journey

I gather that the 'criminalization of politics' non-defense against the various impending Fitzgerald indictments has become the talking point du jour among the right's talking heads -- apparently Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, among others, have been whipping their moronic audiences into a froth by repeating this phrase over and over again.

I'm trying to make sense of this -- not actual sense, because conservatives, especially the mindless masses that make up the right wing base, don't intellectualize things well, and I understand that. But usually I can at least put the latest right wing demagoguery into some kind of consistent emotional context and get a vague grasp on what buttons the big mouths are trying to push in their listeners' heads... and this time, well, you wouldn't think it was possible, but this 'criminalization of politics' makes even less sense than the usual conservative horseshit.

Again, I'm not talking intellectually. On the level of reason and logic, well, any thinking human being understands that a crime is a crime -- you break the law, you get caught, you're going to get in some kind of trouble -- and whether the lawbreaker is involved in 'politics' or not, at the time they committed the crime, is immaterial. Being a 'politician', whether you hold an elected office or an appointed position or you're just a mover and a shaker behind the scenes, does not convey any kind of legal immunity (unless you're the President, but, well, that's not what we're talking about).

But, as I say, I understand that Limbaugh and Hannity aren't trying to come up with anything logical or reasonable. They are trying to whip their audiences into an infuriated frenzy, which means that, like all demagogues, they are attempting to craft an emotional appeal that will overwhelm their target market's rudimentary thinking ability. But usually these guys are pretty good at it and I can figure out what kind of gut level response they're trying to invoke.

In this case, I'm baffled.

See, you don't go to a bunch of Joe Lunchbuckets and start whining about the 'criminalization of politics' and expect any sympathy. To Limbaugh's Louts and/or Hannity's Horde, all politicians are already assumed to be criminals unless proven honest, and 'politics' is already a dirty word. To talk about the 'criminalization of politics' is just going to perplex these guys. Of course all politicians are crooks, and of course all politics is dirty politics. How many times do you think these people have heard about some sleazy deal in Washington and cursed to themselves over a beer "there oughtta be a law, the stuff they do in D.C. is a crime". They all implicitely BELIEVE that the entire political process is corrupt; Republicans have been coining votes for thirty years by promising to 'get the government off the backs of the average American', with the underlying and fundamental assumption being that government (politics) is inherently BAD.

So I have to think, if Rush Limbaugh starts going on and on about 'the criminalization of politics', even his most avidly mouthbreathing minions are going to be scratching their Dittoheads a little bit. I mean, wouldn't criminalizing politics be a good thing? SHOULDn't we have long since been locking these guys up? Aren't they ALL crooks?

I have to assume, if whining about 'the criminalizatin of politics', mixed in with a lot of bluster about how Democrats are picking on Republicans and it's just not fair, is the best that Limbaugh and Hannity can come up with, then, well... they're desperate, and they got nothin', and they know it.

This may be a very good weekend.

Now Playing: Heads Are Rolling by City Boy

I can't imagine the world really needs yet another fanboy blogging about Infinity Crisis#1, but, well, it's not like anyone pays any attention to this thing anyway.

Given that, let me say this: what a difference a writer makes.

Infinity Crisis has been being billed for over a year now as a direct sequel to the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, a 12 issue crossover miniseries that finally threw the last spadeful of dirt on DC's Silver Age, back in 1985. DC's Silver Age had been in Cheyne-Stokes respiration for about, I don't know, 5 to 10 years before that, as clueless editors frantically flailed their arms and legs in a desperate and never successful attempt to somehow transform what was once the greatest 2 dimensional superhero universe in existence into a 3 dimensional metareality like that depicted by their chief competitor, Marvel Comics. Yet no matter how grim n' gritty DC got, no matter how many times Superman accidentally destroyed an entire planet full of Luthor worshippers or took Lois Lane off to 19th Century Paris for a long weekend of red sun light bulb powered, silk sheeted debauchery, or how often Barry Allen had to use lethal force to stop Professor Zoom and then go to jail, it just wasn't getting there. You could make the heroes and villains act darker, but lurking in the background there was always the knowledge that once upon a time (not too long ago) Superman had been exposed to Red Kryptonite and turned 200 feet tall, and Jimmy Olsen still had a souvenir collection full of magical and/or futuristic artifacts that could have turned him into a god if he hadn't been too stupid to deploy them competently. In a universe that encompassed the likes of Bat-Mite, just how seriously could you take the characters?

To get around that, DC buried its Silver Age continuity and started anew, and for the past 20 years, the so called Original Universe has shambled stuporously through an evershifting mulligan stew of constant continuity improvisation. THE HISTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE was a nice 2 volume Prestige set that came out right after Crisis; it was supposed to be the Bible for the new continuity, and various writers and editors had contradicted it in its entirety before the ink was even dry on it. A new SECRET ORIGINS series was rolled out to explain all the new origins of the entirely revised characters, yet Roy Thomas chose to waste the first several issues of the series doing 'secret origins' of Golden Age characters who, in the new continuity, no longer existed and never had.

From those blundering missteps the DC Universe never really recovered, despite the best efforts of many people, a few of whom actually had writing talent, to do otherwise. Every once in a while someone like Alan Brennert or Roger Stern would come along and temporarily erect a small pup-tent of sensible continuity somewhere in the chaos of fourteen different entirely mutually contradictory LEGION reboots and a long period when JUSTICE LEAGUE was a comedy comic whose editors were advising Batman fans on the letters page that they could 'regard the JLA Batman as out of continuity if it made them feel better', and Hawkman never, never, NEVER made sense. But then some hack (often Keith Giffen) would come along and wipe it all out with yet another poorly conceived miniseries, and we were back at zero again.

And through it all, however hard they tried, DC still couldn't really, fully get the 2 dimensional stink off their characters. It's tough to make someone like Superman grim n' gritty. I mean, it's just hard. And Wonder Woman... it's going to take more than a massive infusion of Greek mythology to make that profoundly disturbed concept work in the Modern Age, trust me.

However, if CRISIS was doomed from the start, it was only because it was handled with the utter ineptitude any sane person could but expect from the likes of Marv Wolfman and Len Wein. CRISIS had, without a doubt, some of the most beautiful artwork George Perez has ever done, but the story simply made no sense from start to finish, and every single creative decision that was made in the book, from the big ones (let's kill off Flash and Supergirl) to the minor ones (let's turn Kamandi into Tommy Tomorrow) were all such egregiously rotten ideas as to make nearly any long time fan's head spin.

Infinite Crisis, on the other hand, is being written by Geoff Johns.

And that, my friend, has made the difference.

There's been a breath... well, really, a gale force wind verging on hurricane status... of fresh air blowing through the DC Universe for the last couple of years. Suddenly, comics that I never in my life thought I'd ever read are not only being beautifully written in terms of plot and characterization, but the continuity is making sense, too. Who was doing it? Some guy named Geoff Johns. Johns managed to seemingly effortlessly untangle the mess lesser writers had made of the Justice Society, which is a pretty major accomplishment, yet it paled beside perhaps Johns' greatest pre-IC triumph... he actually made coherent sense out of the fucked up mass of incoherent crap various lousy editors had turned Hawkman into.

Now he's writing Infinite Crisis, and, well, it's a treat... but what's surprised me most is not simply that Johns is using the book to try desperately to untangle a lot of the overall continuity messes that have sprung up in the DCU since the original CRISIS, but he's directly tying IC to the original CRISIS plot... and he's making what I would have sworn was a recipe for disaster actually work again, too.

Is Power Girl actually, really, truly the genuine, authentic Earth-2 Supergirl, somehow survived through the cosmic reboot from one universe to the next? So Johns seems to be hinting; wouldn't it be great if it were true? Is that really the Golden Age Superman... the original Man of Steel... come back after 20 years in limbo to save the day, along with the Earth-3 Luthor and the Superboy of Earth-Prime? Is Johns really going to pick up the plot threads from CRISIS and do something with them, where lesser writers and editors (Wolfman and Wein, specifically) simply intended them to be tossed away and never mentioned again?

I'll tell you, simply the scene where the Freedom Fighters (dweebs though they are) walk down a hall in a supposedly abandoned warehouse, turn a corner... and confront Dr. Light, Dr. Polaris, Deathstroke, Black Adam, Sinestro, Bizarro, the Reverse Flash, the Psycho Pirate, and the Cheetah... and Bizarro says "Good bye" instead of hello... man, that hit me right in the spine. As with Blue Beetle, Johns took characters I never cared a bit about, made them, briefly, very human... and then killed them ruthlessly, just to show us that, yeah, this really IS a realistic superhero universe right now, and even heroes can die when they're overmatched. (And my God, weren't they overmatched? Just Black Adam or Sinestro would have been enough to make the entire team shit their drawers. Throw in Bizarro and, well, it's just over. The rest of the bad guys might as well have been out for popcorn, although they all got their sadistic licks in.)

(I can't quite tell, though... did Dr. Polaris die when the Human Bomb exploded in his face? I hope so. He's a yutz. Or he was.)

I enjoyed the four miniseries that led up to IC, and now it looks like I'm going to really enjoy IC, too. I just hope when it's over that Johns picks up at least JSA again. I've gotten really hooked on that book, and I'd hate to drop it... but I will if Johns doesn't come back to it after IC.

According to LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writer, reporting on the "Senate-approved ban on torturing detainees in U.S. custody" --

Buried in what seemed like a fairly straightforward news report from FOX on the most recent Plamegate rumors, I found this:

Amy Walters, Senior Editor of the Cook Report, feels Bush will stay the course on the Miers nomination, because ultimately, loyalty and political self preservation will see Senate Republicans backing his play:

SuperGirlfriend and I had a pretty excellent weekend. Saturday the kids went back to SuperGirlfriend's ex, and he actually made an effort to be civil to me, too, and after shaking hands with me and exchanging apologies with me in the yard, he let the girls show him around the new apartment... something they've been longing to do, but that hadn't happened yet because until Saturday, he had resolutely refused to even allow himself to be within eye or earshot of me voluntarily.

However, hopefully all that is behind us now. I don't expect him to like me, ever, and, well, to an extent, having the opportunity to be hypocritically civil to someone I don't much like myself isn't anything I'm personally overjoyed about, but SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids will all be under a great deal less stress if the SuperKids' dad and I can be in the same room together without radiating hostility towards each other. Sometimes, I guess, you just have to bite the bullet.

He got SuperGirlfriend all upset trying to reverse some extremely complicated arrangements she had made in re: SuperAdorable Toddler's pre and after school care, but to give him further credit, after mulling her objections over for a while, he called later that night and advised that since it was so important to her to keep it the way she'd arranged it, he'd go along. These are major breakthroughs for him, and he's obviously making an effort to do the right thing for his kids, so, well, I have to be grateful.

After that was over, SuperGirlfriend and I were both a little despondent, as we always are when the girls leave for the two weeks they spend with their dad. So to cheer us up I suggested lunch and a movie somewhere. We wound up out in the sticks, as I wanted to check out a multiplex my bus used to take me by every morning when I was in training for my current job, eating at a Rafferty's across the road from the theater. I highly recommend Rafferty's and so does SuperGirlfriend; the food we had was superb, and our service was excellent, too.

As to the movie, we decided to see Stay, which seemed mysterious and enigmatic and fascinating from its advertising campaign, but which is in reality a lot of bewildering plotless nonsense that comes off mostly as a very long commercial for some horribly sterile glass & chrome yuppie lifestyle no one in their right mind would ever want to find themselves immersed in. As an experienced author myself, I could pretty clearly see how the script came about; the writer was essentially just hammering away at his word processor, throwing one modern day movie cliche after another up onto his screen, until he had created this bizarre mishmosh of The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects and Fight Club and I don't know what the hell all else... and clearly neither did he, because when it came time to actually explain all the nonsense we'd watched to date, well, he didn't bother. Basically, it was all a dream. Yay. Don't you just love movies like that?

After the bad movie, we went shopping, and at a movie store called Coconuts we found Season 1 of Drawn Together, which SuperGirlfriend loves and wants me to watch (I've seen two eps so far; it's pretty funny and pretty sick simultaneously), as well as the Director's Cut of The Warriors (I had no idea the movie was supposed to be set in 'the future', nor that it had some kind of comic book origins, although the comic book connection certainly explains the bloodless way that Walter Hill staged all the violence) and a second hand copy of Johnny Handsome I was so delighted to find that I didn't check whether it was full or wide screen, and didn't notice it was (fehfehfeh) full screen until I got it home.

However, it's still wonderful to have a copy of the movie again, and SuperGirlfriend enjoyed watching it with me, so it's pretty much all good.

We also hit a bookstore, and I spent too much money on Reflex, Stephen Gould's sequel to his excellent Jumper, and The Protector's War, the second in the new trilogy by S.M. Stirling, the first installment of which was superb. I'm looking forward to reading both, however, I still have a very high pile of books in my in-stack from the last time SuperGirlfriend and I went to a bookstore back in early summer, so it's going to be a while.

Sunday was a grey, drizzly, rainy, cold autumn day, and we mostly stayed in and put some finishing touches on the apartment, bringing some pieces of furniture up from storage downstairs so I could take over one corner of our large bedroom and turn it into a home office for me, swapping out a small file cabinet we had the printer on in the living room for a TV table I wasn't using to give us a little more room, getting hold of some office chairs for each computer... overall, a day where we got a lot of useful work done on the apartment, which kept us largely too busy to miss the SuperKids too much. Always a good thing.

Today of course is Monday, and a grey, drizzly, cold Monday at that. I'll get into reviews of the comics in the latest box from Steve Tice at some point in the near future... or I won't, and y'all will just have to live without another really long post about comic books that nobody will ready besides Mike Norton. I'm sure, somehow, you'll bear up.

Have a good Monday, everyone.

I was going through my latest Big Box o' Comics from Steve Tice this weekend and I noticed that there is, apparently, a new sheriff in town... or, rather, there's a new meme running through superhero comics in general, anyway...

Entirely adversary-referential opponent groups are now 'terrorist cells' or 'terrorist organizations'.

This is excellent. HYDRA is no longer 'that pack of weenies with green Hefty bags over their heads who live only to make Nick Fury's life miserable'. Now, they are an international terrorist organization. And the Wildebeeste Society isn't just 'a bunch of pathetic hosers implementing really retarded ambushes on the New Teen Titans that would never work in a million years if Marv Wolfman didn't mandate it', oh no. Now they are a 'terrorist cell'.

Whew. Well, THAT's a relief.

I don't object to someone trying to come up with some kind of rationale for, you know, groups of bad guys whose only purpose for existence is to fight specific good guys. Far, far too many of these groups came into being in Marvel's Silver Age as thoughtless writers and unthinking editors just went creatively berserk, tossing out whackier and whackier ideas for who the Avengers or the FF could fight this week. (And it should be noted that while Marvel was the company that really went overboard with these entirely other-referential villain groupings, DC blazed the trail with the Superman Revenge Squad, a bunch of interstellar losers who had nothing better to do with their time than come up with truly half assed strategems to aggravate Superman.) Somewhere in the late 60s, many writers seem to have lost sight of the idea that supervillains really should have some kind of agenda that is entirely separate from 'let's go get the superheroes', and for much of the Silver Age, the various battles between heroes and villains at both comics universes became largely incestuous, as Lex Luthor and Dr. Doom stopped creating intricate, labrynthian schemes to take over the world, and instead started coming up with more and more complex maneuvers meant to avenge themselves on whoever their arch enemy was.

The first time I saw HYDRA referred to as 'an international terrorist organization', I was more or less pleased. I think it was Roger Stern who first came up with that appellation, in an issue of MARVEL UNIVERSE, and it made me realize (as the best writing often does) that I'd never really pondered before exactly why HYDRA exists. The 'international terrorist organization' tag made things seem much more sensible, and I liked that. (In point of fact, HYDRA isn't an 'international terrorist organization', they are, well, a generic thug group with no real agenda of their own who only exist to get beat up on by various superheroes, generally in fill in issues by writers too lazy to come up with a better plot. But at least Stern took a shot at it.)

Apparently I wasn't the only one to be impressed by the 'terrorist' tag, as I see it everywhere in comics now, usually affixed to either single supervillains or supervillain groups who otherwise apparently exist for no reason except to give certain specific superheroes a hard time. And when I've seen it heretofore, I've more or less nodded my head and moved along. So R'as al Ghul is an 'eco terrorist' now instead of a world conquering megalomaniac. Okay. So Killmonger and all his buddies were 'terrorist insurrectionists' instead of, you know, bad guys. Fine, sure, whatever.

But... the Wildebeeste Society is a 'terrorist cell'? I'm sorry? All these guys ever did in their lives was dress up in dopey looking armor, ambush the Teen Titans, and stuff them all into test tubes. If that's terrorism, well, I say for God's sake, let's let the terrorists win.

Picked this up from The Poor Man, who redirected me to The Tattered Coat:

Michael Vick is a pretty damn good quarterback, but, well:

...and I'll resist the urge to start quoting Huey Lewis lyrics at you. No, don't thank me, just send money.

It's been an arduous hegira. See, first I figured, well, SuperGirlfriend's computer is better than mine and we just got DSL hooked up, so now I can get one of those neat looking template-powered blogs over at blogspot, just like all the cool kids have. So I went trudging over there and did indeed set such a blog up (you can find it at miserableannals.blogspot.com, if you've a mind to, but it's just going to sit there and fester now, so there's little point). However, as I continued to play with it, I discovered that (a) the built in comments at blogspot won't let you edit them unless you become a paying customer, and I say PUH-tooie to that, and (b) blogspot won't let me post my Squawkbox comment threads, which I am paying for, and which I therefore can edit, and I say PUH-tooie to that, too.

See, I need to be able to edit my comments, because I have emmenies. Yes I do. I mean, pretty much all 8 of you folks who read the Miserable Annals blog have been pretty cool, but you never know when one of the Portal of Evil retards is going to stumble onto this thing and decide to urinate in one of the comment threads. Plus you never know when someone from some Smallville comment thread might show up here and start whining about how I have textual diarrhea or some such nonsense and I'll have to slap them down, too. I mean, I'm a big believer in freedom of expression when we're talking about MY freedom of expression in other people's comment threads, but I need, require, and resolutely demand absolute control over anything anyone says in MY damn comment threads.

So I was hatin' on blogspot, and after wasting several hours over there trying to unscrew the inscrutable, I decided I'd just look elsewhere.

Now, I've known for a while that Angelfire actually has a blog building area, but I'd haughtily ignored it, as is my wont, mostly because the computer I've been using for the last four years has something like .003 megs of RAM in it and if I try to run any graphics program written after the fall of the Roman Empire on it, it just cries. However, once blogspot crapped out on me, I figured I might as well check out Angelfire, and, well, no, they won't let me use my SquawkBox comment threads either (at least, when I try to put the link in the comments window I can't get it to show up on the blog page itself, which maddens me) but they DO allow non-subscribers to edit their comment threads, which is pretty cool. So here I am.

I'm really not wild about doing a blog where I have to type stuff into a somewhat preformatted window, for the good and simple reason that, well, I can't put in some of the formatting I've painstakingly learned how to do, and I just find that aggravating. I'm sure there must be SOME way to put my Squawkbox link in, and I'd really prefer to, but I can't figure out how right now, so, I guess I'll let it go and just be happy to have a nicer looking blog that is rather easier to work with than the previous page. The website giveth and the website taketh away, I suppose.

Of course, now one of you fine folks who use blogspot will tell me there IS a way to edit blogspot's built in comment threads, and I'll just bang my head against the wall for a while.

Now Playing: Take It Easy (live version) by the Eagles
It isn't dishonesty, karma, or even a damned liberal conspiracy. It's all just plain darn pesky bad luck:

Now Playing: Going Nowhere Fast by Fire Inc.

Both Billmon and Newsweek?s Christopher Dickey have speculated that Judith Miller?s Plamegate source may have been Ahmed Chalabi, one time Iraqi political exile and current VP of that particularly beleaguered Middle Eastern nation. Billmon flatly doubts it, and Dickey doesn?t say anything about why he suspects it besides Chalabi being one of Miller?s frequent sources regarding Saddam?s imminent and looming WMD capacity during the run up to the invasion.

Billmon goes further, saying it would take a Byzantine mind indeed (I?m paraphrasing) to come up with a scenario in which Judith Miller would end up going to Chalabi to find out who Joe Wilson?s wife was.

Well, perhaps my mind is more devious than most, I don?t know. What I do know is I have little trouble coming up with such a scenario, in which, rather than Judith Miller going to Chalabi for confirmation of a rumor that Wilson?s wife worked for the CIA and lined up the Niger job for him as a plum, Chalabi actually planted the information on her.

Like this: the Shrub Administration decides it would be useful to make it look like Wilson is a slacker who basically used the Niger trip as a government funded vacation, and only got the assignment through his wife. (This is the kind of cronyism/nepotism they all instinctively understand from personal experience.) They need to get Plame?s status as a CIA operative involved in this area of investigation out there to the press, but don?t want to leak it directly, either because they know it?s classified information and that?s a big bad, or simply because the leak won?t be as effective if it?s obviously a smear job. (I suspect whoever decided to leak it knew damned well it was classified and could, technically, be viewed as illegal, which is why they looked around for a way to do it that couldn?t be traced back to them.) Now, if history teaches political conspirators anything it?s that anyone will rat anyone else out if a prosecutor starts passing around indictments, so, looking at it from that angle, the best filter imaginable in this kind of potential evidentiary chain is someone no U.S. prosecutor can ever slap paper on.

So it?s not that Miller went to Chalabi specifically for information on Plame. However, she would almost certainly have gotten in touch with Chalabi at some point during this period just to see if he knew anything, and Chalabi, as a favor to the people who put him into power, would have made sure he worked into any conversation the fact that Joe Wilson?s wife is a CIA operative and that?s how Wilson got the ?pleasure cruise? assignment to investigate Nigerian uranium.

Whether this is true or not we obviously at this point can have no real idea, but assume for a moment that it is. This would mean that someone on the highest levels of the U.S. government leaked the identity of a CIA operative working under cover to, not an American journalist while ?playing hardball politics?, but to a foreign national? and not just any foreign national, either, but to someone who is arguably the most well connected, amoral and opportunistic political player on the current Middle Eastern scene. Saddam Hussein may have had only insubstantial ties at best to Al Qaeda, but Chalabi should be able to get in touch with nearly anyone on any side of the board. If he suddenly knows the real name of a CIA NOC, he?s also going to know that everything in her recent work history is probably Company-derived, and one can assume that, as he?s been asked to leak the information back to the American press anyway, he?s going to make sure he gets as much mileage out of leaking it to his Middle Eastern contacts first as he can. All of which is to say, if you want to endanger CIA operatives working under deep cover, well, running a commercial announcement on Al Jazeera providing their names, phone numbers, and home addresses is probably a better way to do it than leaking it to Chalabi? but only slightly.

What makes this an interesting speculation for me is that apparently (I gather from the blogopshere) Fitzgerald has some really really smokin? piece of ?secret evidence? that he?s shown to various judges to back them off any time someone starts making noises about him ?exceeding the scope of his original investigation?. Nearly every working journalist and every blogger of note has speculated at one time or another as to what that evidence might consist of; me, I?m wondering if it might not be, say, a copy of a phone log showing a call placed at an interesting time on an interesting date directly to Chalabi? or something similar.

Let?s take this speculation further. Treason is, of course, one of the very few things that bypasses even the vague, generally all encompassing concept of ?executive privilege? (which is in no way specifically mentioned in the Constitution, anyway, but has been generally accepted to exist since Nixon first asserted it). Treason is, in and of itself, a somewhat subjectively defined crime, but the Constitution has this to say about it:

Now, I?m fairly sure that further work has been done to define ?treason? under statute, but, even if we simply go with the basic Constitutional text, well, it?s not hard to see how a U.S. official telling an Iraqi government official the real name of an undercover CIA operative would comprise ?giving Aid? to ?enemies? of the United States. One can bluster all one wants to about how leaking that kind of information to a member of the U.S. press isn?t anything remotely like a criminal act, but when it comes to whispering this kind of data into the shell like ear of the biggest favor-trader in the Middle East, that argument starts to ring a little hollow.

In this particular case, I suspect that if, say, a sitting President or Vice President were to have personally given that information, either to said foreign national in person or over a secure line, they?d actually be pragmatically safe from all fear of legal repercussion? after all, Fitzgerald can?t subpoena Chalabi, nor can he realistically threaten him with anything, and Chalabi has a great deal more to gain from going along with his buddies in U.S. government than he has from stabbing them in the back.

All of which means, if, say, someone hypothetically named ?Beney?, or maybe ?Chush?, were to have told some grubby foreigner about an undercover CIA agent in person, he would almost certainly get away with it.

This strikes me as the unlikeliest of eventualities, however. In such a case, however safe this might be in this particular instance, well, decades of experience at slinking around the highest levels of global politics would tend to instinctively inhibit one from being the person who actually made such a phone call or, worse, face to face request. One would, at the very least, have just handed the greasiest, most conniving desert rat currently alive a huge lever for potential future blackmail? not the kind of thing an experienced political campaigner is going to want his fingerprints on.

Going beyond highly developed political survival instincts, I find it difficult to believe that ?Beney? or ?Chush? would see this sort of thing as being on their own level. Each of these guys has to regard himself as being the most powerful single human being in the world, while Chalabi is, well, a player, sure, and clearly a successful one, but, nonetheless, a man like ?Beney? would have to view a guy like Chalabi as a subordinate. The instincts of a ?Beney? or a ?Chush? are going to tell them that they just don?t have to take meetings on that level any more.
And for both reasons, I tend to think they would farm this out.

If Fitzgerald has some kind of evidence that, in fact, the leak to Miller in re: Plame did originate with Chalabi, his next obvious question is going to be, where did Chalabi hear that from? One assumes a competent prosecutor would already have subpoenaed the White House phone records from that period, as well as all their email, so if we continue with that supposition, there would probably be some kind of circumstantial evidence there that would support the hypothesis. From there on, it?s simply a case of finding the top level aid who took the order from his boss and then made the leak/asked for the favor from Chalabi. Find that guy and you can threaten to bury him forever on a treason charge ? and a Constitutional argument could be made that treason against the United States is one of the few things that the Chief Executive can?t pardon.(I?m not going to elocute it right now, but you can find a copy of the U.S. Constitution online pretty easily. Search it for terms like ?treason?, ?impeach?, and ?pardon? and see what you think.)

Whether it?s treason or not ? and I admit, you could certainly try to persuade a judge that Chalabi isn?t (currently) an ?enemy of the United States?, so leaking classified CIA info to him could, if you were deranged enough, not be considered ?treason? ? certainly conservatives, even (or especially) the hardcore, hydrophobic, braindead ones we have in Congress, as well as all the zombies out there in TV land taking their marching orders from Hannity, Limbaugh, and O?Reilly, would be inclined to regard revealing classified information to a goddam towelhead as being an offense rather more serious than simply passing a note to Judy Miller. In fact, conservative biases are going to make ?it?s not a crime? a much harder argument to sell if it turns out that the person Bush or Cheney revealed Plame?s identity to was wearing a burnoose rather than a NY Times press pass. Even if the combination of ?executive privilege? (whatever that may be) and the pardon card still manages to shield both Dubya and the Legion of Idiots from viable prosecution, Dubya?s plummeting approval ratings and a growing perception on the part of pragmatic Republican politicians on the Hill that they need to distance themselves from King George if they want to have the slightest chance of keeping their own jobs may combine to create an atmosphere where even our current Congress might be willing to entertain the idea of impeachment? always assuming the polls come back in favor of it.

Many pundits analyzed the results of the 2000 Presidential election as having come about due to a ?perfect storm? created by, among other things, the Monica Lewinski scandal, Gore?s relative lack of electronic charisma, an utterly ruthless Republican ratfucking campaign of unprecedented and mind boggling proportions, and a newly created alloy of various right wing fringe elements underneath the Bush/Cheney banner. I?m not sure that?s true; most people seem to be forgetting that America swung hard to the right in 1980 when the voters first elected Ronald Reagan as a result of Carter?s weak response to the Iranian hostage crisis, and many seem to erroneously feel that Clinton?s two terms in office represented a consequent swing back to the left. That isn?t true; Clinton achieved election because of a strong conservative third party candidate running in 1992 that split the right wing vote, and he retained office based in large part on his own enormous charisma, especially as compared to the lugubrious troll the Republicans chose to run against him in 1996. However, Clinton was never a leftie to anyone but the most raving of John Birchers; his ?mandate?, such as it was, was moderate and centrist, and the secret of his success, even without Ross Perot as a spoiler, was that he was capable of pulling a few crucial percentage points of the conservative vote away from the hardcore base and over to the nominal ?left?? which he repositioned much much closer to the center than any previous ?Democratic? President ever had.

The common wisdom, that Bush?s win in 2000 represented a clear shift in American values back to Sunday school, conventional marriage, and apple pie, isn?t necessarily true either. In retrospect only the most zealous of conservative dupes still even attempts to deny that Bush stole the 2000 election outright. His mandate has never actually existed, and the so-called new alloy of fiscal conservatives with right wing radical Christians is, in fact, the exact same coalition of deficit hawks, foreign policy adventurists, and Moral Majority morons that first lifted Reagan into office. (And there is even a lot of deceptive crap out there being reported as ?history? about Reagan?s mandate. Reagan achieved an electoral college landslide by winning a large number of states, but each state was very nearly split down the middle between Reagan and Carter in 1980, and Reagan and Mondale in 1984. Reagan?s ?landslide? would never have happened at all without John Anderson running as a strong independent candidate from the left in 1980? and all of this simply means that the idea that the country ?swings? from left to right every twenty years is foolish; the country is now and always has been almost exactly split between conservative and liberal ideologies, and Presidential elections are largely won or lost by factors like electronic charisma and whether or not there are any strong independent candidates running in any particular Presidential election.)

Whether the ?perfect storm? analogy holds any water for the 2000 Presidential election, I do think it?s possible that Hurricane Katrina, the long series of military blunders in Iraq, a tailspinning economy, the Miers Supreme Court nomination, and, finally, Plamegate itself, may combine into the kind of ?perfect storm? that would be necessary to see even as avidly partisan a Republican-dominated Congress as this one become willing to impeach, and even convict, Bush and/or Cheney on charges of treason. If Fitzgerald is planning to shoot that high, now may well be the best of all possible times to do it? and if that isn?t the most eloquent argument for some kind of intelligent design to the universe I?ve ever heard, well, I?ve never heard one.

Lest we get our hopes too far into the stratosphere, I hasten to add that even were any or all of this true, I doubt Bush will ever actually see an impeachment proceeding from inside the defendant?s chair. He?s much too well connected; if the Republican power structure started to see this as something that was plausible and practical, he?d be offered the opportunity to cut a deal. Cheney, however, might have to do a little time, and it?s even possible that to placate the voting public and retain any kind of chance at a majority in the mid terms, the Republicans might have to let someone else be installed as Veep in Cheney?s place, to ascend to the throne when Bush resigns in disgrace. The Republicans would, of course, commit ritual suicide en masse before they?d let a Democrat take crown and sceptre, but nobody who?s been touched by the Plamegate scandal would be tolerated by an outraged American public, either? so? at the end of this chain of ridiculous supposition, what do I see?

Anyone up for President McCain?