Here's some scary shit from Digby's blog:

Topic: politics <p>
There’s a blog I’ve just discovered that I like very much. It’s called Orcinus, although it’s URL isn’t anything that remotely resembles that, and other than as the Latin term for a killer whale (I think) I don’t know what Orcinus means, or why this blogger is applying the title (if I’m understanding it correctly) to his blog.

I mean, for all I know, it’s a Tolkien reference. But I like this guy’s writing very much. If you want to find the blog, it comes up first after a Google search on ‘Orcinus’. I could paste a link, but it’s way more trouble than I want to go to right now. Sorry.

Anyway, everything I’ve seen on this guy’s blog is worth reading (I’m especially enjoying the way he’s been bitch slapping Michelle Malkin all over the place lately) but here’s what I wanted to write about a bit – an entry from November 7 2005 which he opens with:

Topic: politics <p>
From Katherine Schrader of the Associated Press:

Topic: random <p>
One of the things I looked forward to from childhood on was living in the 21st Century. It's been a consolation to me as I grew steadily older, through my teens and twenties and thirties, using up and wringing out from the rag of my lifetime every last drop of anything you could remotely describe as my youth, that although I might be inevitably and irreversibly approaching middle age, at the very least, I was also approaching that epochal and much storied turning point, where I would get to peek into not only the changing of a century, but of an actual millenium.

For me, a lifelong science fiction geek, the year 2000 and beyond was a magical concept. I absolutely loved the idea that I might very well live to see a time period so constantly and continually evoked and imagined by so many of my favorite authors. As the turn of the millenium drew nearer, I was filled, more and more, with anticipation. Oh, sure, it was abundantly clear to me that most of my favorite fantasists had substantially missed the mark in a lot of different details... I wasn't going to get to vacation under a domed city on the Moon or Mars within my lifetime, nor could I go into a Radio Shack and buy a working jetpack, and it wasn't very likely I was going to get to ride around in a flying car any time in the forseeable future, either. But, still, the world did and does have personal computers, DVD players, the Internet, cell phones, laser-beam tape measures, remote controls, holographic postal stamps, and a whole lot of other really cool shit, and if capitalism guaranteed anything, it was that people would keep inventing nifty gadgets as long as there was a profit to be had from doing it.

So I was content. The future might not be what it used to be, but still, it was pretty spiffy nonetheless.

Then this idiot Bush stole the millenial Presidential election, and my entire 21st Century experience went straight to hell.

It's a grisly irony, I think, that the dominant political figure the Arthur C. Clarke's real world 2001 is the ramrod for a social movement that would happily turn the clock back to 1952 tomorrow if they only could. And not even the real 1952, which was a terrible time full of anti-intellectual hysteria and paranoid xenophobia, but to some weird conservative fantasy 1952, where white men still wear coats, hats and ties whether they're at home or the office, white women are all smiling married mothers who stay home all day and bake, and non-whites are all cheerfully employed doing menial labor for 35 cents an hour any time they're not at church.

In fantasy-1952, there is no minimum wage, gas costs 22 cents a gallon and every service station has a uniformed fellow with a big smile who cleans your window and checks your oil in addition to filling your tank for you, cars are roughly the size of Texas but there's still plenty of free parking because only Caucasian folk can afford them, the only known midwinter celebration is Christmas, and everybody goes to Sunday School and prayer meeting. Nobody is homosexual, nobody gets pregnant before they're married, Americans are always the good guys and we always win, and everybody loves the President.

This is the antithesis of the egalitarian, fully integrated, sexually liberated and high tech future promised in the pages of Amazing Stories and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine when I was growing up, and while I can accept that that future is never going to actually happen, I have to say that I would certainly have liked to live to see a 21st century that embodied something besides a passionate headlong heartsick reach for a mythical American heyday that never actually existed.

Somehow or other, Bush and his insanely bigoted clique of pinhead conservatives have hijacked my future. And if I can't have jet packs, domed cities, orbital colonies and rocket cars, then at the very least I'd like to have a world where Americans aren't entirely despised outside our own borders, healthcare is affordable, tolerance and open mindedness are universally regarded as admirable social traits, and religious fanaticism is an acknowledged psychological aberration.

I want my 21st Century back, dammit. Who do I talk to about that?

Topic: random <p>
This is going to be an odds n sods entry. Deal with it.

I find it amusing that over at Boneyard's page on Collateral Damage, he has the new Clayface listed as 'confirmed' for the set. What's amusing about that is he has Clayface listed as '(Ultimate)'. Now, to the best of my knowledge, DC has no Ultimate characters, although recently they have begun ripping off Marvel's Ultimates line (a truly dreadful and appalling idea... well, both are; Marvel's Ultimates line, and the idea that anyone should rip the concept off) by putting out All Star versions of their characters. I guess this new Clayface is from one of the All Star Batman stories, although I'm proud to say it is very unlikely I would ever actually be in a position to state this in an authoritative fashion, because if you ever catch me with an All Star comic in my hands for longer than it takes me to ball it up and toss it in the nearest incinerator, you'd better check me for a pulse.

I also find it equally amusing and annoying when I see someone on the Internet spelling 'the' as 'teh'. I used to see this and think it was a typo (it's an easy one to make if you type quickly, as many of the up and coming generation does), but apparently it's morphed into some kind of deliberate textual slang for modern morons.

I find it annoying that the left shift key on this keyboard sticks about every third time you depress it, so I'm near constantly having to backspace out a line of inappropriate capitalization and then hit the left shift key again to unstick it.

I find it deeply entertaining to watch conservatives trying desperately to tell me that because only ONE member of the Shrub Administration has been indicted so far (on five charges that could, but will not under any circumstances, result in 30 years of jail time), this is a triumph for the Republican Party and a crushing defeat for liberals everywhere. I do wish Fitzgerald would get his thumb out and just paper the Oval Office with indictments, though. I think if he's going to issue indictments, he should just let the throttle stick wide open and indict every single Republican working in Washington for something, and get some paper on all those fucking conservative bloggers, too. Supporting the troops and cheerleading for the war from behind a nice safe comfy computer desk should be good for 90 days in prison or a mandatory tour of duty in Iraq, at the very least.

I find it depressing that I now miss Harriet Miers. I liked it when the righties were throwing grenades at each other over the nomination. I don't really know anything about this Alito guy, but when conservatives unite behind someone, I have to assume he's bad news.

I find it depressing that Halloween is over and we got no trick or treaters, especially since I went to a lot of trouble to get the night off from work so I'd be home for trick or treaters. Somehow, in my adult life, I have never managed to live anywhere that trick or treaters come by, or if I do, there's a tornado warning that year on Halloween and they all stay home.

But I find it exhiliarating that we're heading into Thanksgiving and beyond that, into Christmas. We won't have the SuperKids for Thanksgiving, which is exasperating, but it's in SuperGirlfriend's divorce agreement that she gets the kids for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so that will be wonderful.

And SuperGirlfriend has gone off to work, so the apartment is sadly quiet and empty. Time to go put some music on and take a shower.

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: