The 2008 Presidential race heats up, if only by tiny little increments:

Iowa Gov. Vilsack runs for president

So Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack wants to take a shot at the big chair huh. Let’s try it out:

President Vilsack.

Yeah, I don’t think so.

Comic news does not, as a rule, make headlines in the actual news. It is an industry largely separate from mainstream entertainment news, and for good reason. A well selling, blockbuster comic book, such as the recently revamped Justice League of America, was a roaring success with issue #1 reaching a circulation of around 200,000 copies. Action Comics, the industry’s longest running continuous comic book, features Superman, probably the best known figure of the genre, and sees monthly sales in the 40,000 to 80,000 neighborhood. Some comics do a fraction of that, and still get published. These are not big numbers. When something happens in the comic book world, most people don’t care about it. If Susan Logan, the Editor and Chief of Cat Fancy Magazine, were to die suddenly, it probably wouldn’t make the news, and Cat Fancy Magazine has a circulation of over 3,000,000 issues annually. Unless she were like, mauled to death by a tiger or something.

So when Dave Cockrum, longtime comic book artist, lost his battle with diabetes a couple of days ago, I wasn’t surprised that no one outside the Comic Industry noticed. To some, Dave Cockrum was a legend. He was one of the guys who revamped the X-men in the 70’s, and helped craft them into the sort of characters we see today. He was also widely known for his work on The Legion Of Super-Heros. Outside the comics industry he is known as, well, some guy named Dave. That is why this headline, from CNN, puzzled me:

X-Men illustrator dies in Superman pajamas

I have two problems with this headline. The first is that, really, you have to be a comic book fan to get it. In order to appreciate the irony, a reader would have to know that Superman is owned by DC Comics, and The X-Men belong to Marvel, and that they are each other’s chief rivals.

The other problem, and I think the most important one, is that DAVE COCKRUM’S DEATH ISN’T FUNNY. The article is actually sort of nice, but the headline makes it sound like it’s one of those wacky “Stripper bites Dog” sort of offbeat news stories.

I am glad we’re honoring these old school comic guys, even if we have to be a little demeaning when we talk about them. They are legends, and their creations have made a lot of money for a lot of people. Most often, the creators themselves don’t get in on the multi-billion dollar pie. They deserve respect.

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Scientists working for the Bush administration have perfected a provable method for travel in time. That is the only possible explanation that accounts for this:

Bush: No pullout from Iraq until ‘mission is complete’

President Bush, under pressure to change direction in Iraq, said Tuesday he will not be persuaded by any calls to withdraw American troops before the country is stabilized.

“There’s one thing I’m not going to do, I’m not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete,” he said in a speech setting the stage for high-stakes meetings with the Iraqi prime minister later this week. “We can accept nothing less than victory for our children and our grandchildren.”

See. He is somehow living in a time wherein America was winning a war, and not losing one. When you lose a war, you don’t get to do things like, “accept nothing less than victory”, or “not pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete”. You just lose. You blow chance after chance at stabilization until, surprise, Iraq becomes unstable. He used to own a baseball team, so he should know all about it. Three strikes, and your out. It’s not three strikes, then and then engage in a stubborn refusal to leave the field.

He had nothing but opportunities to solve the problem in Iraq, but he chose instead to squander his long term success for short term cronyism and political gain. He spent his ‘political capital’ on penny whistles and Moon Pies, and now that the bill has come due, he doesn’t want to pay it. Too bad. There’s no construction of political connections conceivable that can keep him out of the Vietnam War this time. He’s in.

I’m not suggesting we pull out right now. I’m simply proposing that we do as the American people demanded, jettison the pie in the sky ass covering bullshit, and look at the actual realties of the actual situation. We are beyond platitudes of glorious national victory. It is time to pick the least bad option and go with it. It’s time to pay the bill, go home, and brace for the hangover.

Here is something interesting: As of today, the US has spent longer fighting the Iraq war than it did fighting in World War II. We have been at it for three years, eight months.

The only wars to last longer than this one are:The Civil War (Four Years), The Revolutionary War, (Six Years Nine Months), and the Vietnam War, (Eight Years Five Months).

Bush has claimed that the Iraq war would last longer than his presidency. This was, of course, before his ass was handed to him in the midterm elections, so his attitude may have changed somewhat since then, but lets assume that estimate holds. He has two years left on his term, plus a little less than two months till a new president would be inaugurated, so even if that president, let’s call him President Obama for the sake of the hypothetical device, pulled all troops out of Iraq on his first day in office, that would put this conflict at five years ten months. The third longest war in our history by a long shot. It only has to last a year past that to take the number two spot. Think about that. Two of our top three wars would be long pointless quagmires. Two wars we lost. Our record is starting to suck.

America has been involved in twelve wars, if you count Desert Storm, Afghanistan, and this Iraq mess as separate wars, which I really don’t. But for the sake of the math let’s say they are different. We have lost two, Iraq and Vietnam, putting our war success rate at about 83% That’s a low B average. If you consider only wars since the mechanized age, which I will call 1900 and up, our average drops to about 71%. A score that, weirdly enough, begins to resemble Bush’s typical academic performance.

I guess we should have expected no better.

AND NOW IT’S TIME FOR:

THE TOTALLY IRRELEVANT POLL RESULT OF THE DAY

This weeks totally irrelevant poll comes to us from CNN. They asked 1025 people the following question:

Who do you think was the better president — George W. Bush, the current president, or his father, George Bush, who was president from 1989 to 1993?

The results were clear. 60% of respondents prefer Bush 41 to Bush 43. Other results from the survey are as follows:

Robert Altman, badass, died today in a Los Angeles hospital. No word yet on why. Motorcycle accident probably.

Altman directed 39 movies during his long and storied career, his last being the excellent screen adaptation of Garrison Keillor’s long running radio show, A Prairie Home Companion.

Robert Altman info: IMDB - WIKIPEDIA

News Corp, the bosses of the bosses of the people who put together the whole OJ Simpson “what if I really did commit the murders that everybody on earth knows I committed anyway” hypothetical experiment, have canceled both the book and the special. From AP:

After a firestorm of criticism, News. Corp. said Monday that it has canceled the O.J. Simpson book and television special “If I Did It.”
“I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,” said Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. chairman. “We are sorry for any pain that his has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.”

A dozen Fox affiliates had already said they would not air the two-part sweeps month special, planned for next week before the Nov. 30 publication of the book by ReganBooks. The publishing house is a HarperCollins imprint owned — like the Fox network — by News Corp.

So it sounds like it was really more of a “we stand to lose tons of money in lost advertising revenue” sort of thing, than any real act of conscious. I wonder if they would have felt this way if everybody had been all excited about the book/crappy pseudo-journalistic interview. Would their concern for the victims families feelings have been so acute? One can only speculate. I will, however, put this forward. From the same article:

Sales [of the book] had been strong, but not sensational. “If I Did It” cracked the top 20 of Amazon.com last weekend, but by Monday afternoon, at the time its cancellation had been announced, the book had fallen to No. 51.

Nice.

Put your money in canned food and shotguns. The robots will soon take over the world:

New Robot Can Sense Damage, Compensate

When people hurt a leg they can often make do by limping or using a crutch until they feel better. Now, there’s a robot that can also cope with injury.
The ability to compensate can be vital in new or dangerous situations where unexpected damage or injury can occur.

Researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., built a four-legged robot that can sense damage to its body and figure out how to adjust and keep going. They report the development in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

Most robots are used in industrial applications where their environment never changes, explained Hod Lipson, a co-author of the paper. If they are to become useful outdoors or at home they need to be able to cope with changes, he said.

Yeah. Remember that last scene in The Terminator? This is how that shit gets started.

This is completely disgusting:

O.J.’s latest: ‘If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened

In a new TV interview and book, O.J. Simpson discusses how he would have committed the slayings of his ex-wife and her friend “if I did it.”

The two-part television interview, titled “O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened,” will air November 27 and November 29 on Fox, the TV network said Tuesday.

“O.J. Simpson, in his own words, tells for the first time how he would have committed the murders if he were the one responsible for the crimes,” the network said in a statement. “In the two-part event, Simpson describes how he would have carried out the murders he has vehemently denied committing for over a decade.”

Wow. Only on Fox. There must be SOME way to put this man in jail.

Today I bring you a leaked, unfinished trailer for next summer’s sure to be blockbuster, Spiderman III. Very informative. Watch it now before Sony figures out it’s gone, and puts the cease and desist smack down.

It there’s no video here that’s why.