More often than not the terrorism Marvel's super-heroes are battling originates with American corporations or the American government. When a Marvel character actually takes on terrorism that is far more frequent in the real world, then it is a moment to take notice.

Iron Man #25 is a bit larger than most comics because Marvel is in full marketing mode for the upcoming Iron Man movie release. This issue includes some pictures from the movie, a brief take on some of the past Iron Man armor and a short bit on Iron Man's origin (in which Stark takes on Godless Communists in Vietnam). But these aren't the only surprises in this issue.

The last few pages tell a very short story of what happened while flying to Paris. In the midst of the flight a young man gets up, tells all the passengers to shut up and reveals that he's wearing a device made infamous by Yasser Arafat, and the Palestinian Arabs.

Tony dives into one of the plane's toilets. A few moments later Iron Man emerges behind the would be terrorist. He grabs the murderous evil-doer and Iron Man breaks through the plane's body where the would be homicide bomber destroys only himself.

The story's punch line comes when Iron Man returns to the plane to assure passengers that all is well and they will land safely. They, being folks who would probably relish the upcoming Marvel-UN comic, turn on Iron Man for being, what else, an "Oppressor!!!"

There are a lot of problems over at Marvel, but I have to tip my hat to them for this little story. If you haven't seen it, drop by a local comic shop and pick up Iron Man #25.

As I've noted in an earlier post, Marvel is doing a real world team-up with the United Nations; creating comic book propaganda unseen since perhaps WWII. To bad that if this stuff was produced during WWII then it would have made Nazi Germany and fascist Japan look like misunderstood freedom fighters.

Brett Schaefer, at National Review, has noticed this pairing and decided to let readers know what Marvel's masked super-heroes will really be supporting.

"The very notion that today’s U.N. is eager to embark on heroic struggles against evildoers defies reality. But reality is no check on propaganda, which explains why the organization is so keen to team up with Marvel. The U.N.-themed comic will be distributed free to one million U.S. school children in hundreds of schools. The U.N. also plans to translate it into other languages and distribute them around the world.

"Why? A U.N. communications officer explains that the comic will make the U.N. “more accessible” to young people who will “get excited if they know their heroes like Spider-Man will work with the United Nations to address these issues, peace and security.”

"Marvel Comics became a publishing powerhouse because their superheroes had flaws and were therefore more “realistic” than their competitors’ offerings. How ironic that Marvel’s “realistic” heroes will be used to burnish the image of an often ineffective organization, subject to corruption, lacking in accountability, and serving as a soapbox for the world’s most despotic nations."

This isn't the first time Marvel takes up the UN banner. That veritable New York comic publishing house created the UN Bannermen in Marvel Boy II (#2), which came out in September, 2000. What is rather ironic about these United Natoins super-soldiers is their weakness: "Between their low intelligence and programmed responses, Bannermen are not very versatile, and can be taken out of a fight by disorienting them sufficiently." Not too unlike the real United Nations Peacekeepers.

We all know why Marvel won't do this on behalf of those who truly fight for peace, freedom and liberty, and who have a much better overall record of reaching their goals. Why are the folks making these kind of decisions at Marvel these days working to produce propaganda for a bunch of Hate-America Lefties? This kind of stuff makes Marvel look very bad especially following on the heels of killing off Captain America when America is fighting a war against Islamo-Nazism, and the UN constantly works to undermine the American position in that war.

Given the causes Liberals trumpet, it is truly astonishing to see so many Liberals finding common cause with the Islamo-Nazi forces of terror throughout the world (support for Palestinian Arabs against Israel is just one example). David Horowitz has described this as an Unholy  Alliance.

In his new book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg points out what is a stark similarity  between Islam and Liberals, which may explain the correspondence between Liberal Fascism and Islamo-Nazism.


One finds the same tendency in Islam. Muslims who do evil are simply defined out of Islam. How many times have we heard, "No true Muslim would do " X, Y or Z? Because of this Islam has not changed a wit since the 6th Century. And because Liberals refuse to critically examine their own past, they have not changed a wit since the days when H.G. Wells was calling for Liberals to embrace an "enlightened Nazism".

Roger Kimball went searching for what seems to be Liberal's most hated book, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, and has come up, suspiciously enough, empty in a few stops throughout Connecticut.

I've conducted my own brief look at two Seattle area Barnes & Nobles (University Village, Northgate, and downtown Seattle) and one Borders (Tukwila-Southview and downtown Seattle) and have discovered that none are stocking Mr. Goldberg's book.

I wonder if Liberal Fascism will be brought up the next time the Seattle Public Library celebrates Banned Books Week? I'm not holding my breath for that one.

TINSTAAFL. That is the acronym for There is no such thing as a free lunch. It is an economic truism. Most people understand it, even if they have never heard the phrase.

Politicians, however, are not most people. They harbor the darndest ideas. One crazy idea they embrace, described by Jeff Jacoby in his latest column, is that borrowed money will stimulate the economy. Why this won't happen is perfectly summarized by this analogy:


But politicians prefer willing ignorance to sound reason.

Victor Davis Hanson properly pillories a rather antisemitic rant from Arun Ghandi, descendant of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the man who made set the stage for the Islamo-Nazi terror that ravishes India and Pakistan.

Arun Gandhi has written, in the antisemitic tradition, that "the Jews" are "the biggest players" in the creation of a "culture of violence", and "that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity."

Mr. Hanson wonders what would have happened if someone had written such statements about another group:

"it is worth noting, had anyone on a university campus written anything comparable about “the Arabs” and Islam, there would very likely be outrage rather than the present silence."

Mr. Gandhi wrote his antisemitic rant while safely ensconced at the University of Rochester in New York, though I doubt his rantings would be any different if he was sitting in Gaza next to Hezbollah who regularly lob rockets at Day Care Centers within Israel.

Arun Gandhi follows in his ancestor's footsteps, who urged the Jews of Germany to willingly walk into the Nazi gas chambers, stating that this would bring "a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep."

Why everyone has a love affair with M. K. Gandhi and his progeny is beyond me.

To the Left it is simply unthinkable that racism and antisemitism could exist among their political allies. Jonah Goldberg makes perfectly clear that this just is not the case.

Jonah writes,

"Anti-Semitism and racism are bad.  And frankly, I don't much need leftwingers to tell me that. But insisting that they are inherently rightwing and fascistic doesn't make it so.
...
"I’m thinking of a military leader who seized power in his country by stirring up populist rage against foreigners and foreign powers and promising a sweeping program of national-socialism. He claims that he is the true expression of the will of his people and is using every trick to make himself dictator for life. He is currently harassing the Jewish population, a quarter of which has already fled the country.

Give up? The answer is  Hugo Chavez, world famous Buckleyite Conservative and devotee of Milton Friedman."

And who is it Hollywood Liberals make special trips to get their picture taken with? 

The United Nations has now declared, "We cannot ignore the recent improvements both in the security and political situation in Iraq," Staffan de Mistura, head of the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), said in a address to the Security Council.

Thanks to NRO's KJL for this bit of news.

I've listened to Michael Medved for years and have great respect for his comments on American pop culture. But I've lost all respect for the man, during this campaign season. His blind support for John McCain is an absolute embarrassment. Listening to him on a daily basis is as tough a slog as is listening to Air America.

I have finally turned him off and will only listen sparingly, maybe only on Fridays when he has his "Call of the Week" and does his movie reviews. Though I may even swear off those.

The last straw for me was when he shot down a caller who presented Medved a direct quote from John McCain, in which McCain clearly endorsed amnesty for illegal aliens, with, I paraphrase, "... this obsession with a quote from a Tuscon paper from 2003 ... its pathetic."

Furthermore, he did bring up Mike Huckabee's dirty campaigning in Iowa and South Carolina but dismissed it as nothing more than a characteristic of a disorganized campaign organization. A guy who can't manage his own campaign should be elected to manage the greatest country on God's green earth? I don't think so.

Maybe when the campaigning is over I'll go back to listening to Medved in the afternoons. For now however I've got 3 silent hours. Maybe I'll see what Dennis Miller has to offer.

I am back and forth regarding the writers' strike and have written that in principle I oppose unions, but in practice think that film and television writers are being taken by the studios. Orson Scott Card makes some excellent points regarding the current strike. His arguments, which, unfortunately, are not being made by the WGA union big-wigs, make  a tremendous amount of sense.

"Here's what we writers should really be fighting for:

"The long copyright that was invented to protect writers should not extend to corporations. Period.

"If a literary work's copyright belongs to the human being who created it, then the copyright should last for the writer's lifetime plus ten years -- twenty if he has minor children at the time of his death.

...

"Most films make almost all their income in the first fifteen years. The studios have made back their investment by then or they never will. So if they insist on owning the copyright and treating the writer who created the thing as if he were a roach in the salad, they can do it -- for a decade and a half.

"If they want to make money from it longer, though, they will not make the writer sign a work-for-hire contract. On the contrary, they will insist that he continue to own the copyright and only license the studio to make a movie from it. It should be illegal for such a license to be perpetual -- it would have to be renewed.

"If the studio decides not to renew the license by paying the writer again, then the script reverts to the writer -- he can get the film remade if he can, and if anyone else wants to reissue the original movie, they not only have to pay the studio for their work on it, they have to buy the script rights from the writer."

This makes a tremendous amount of sense to me, and should be something anyone of any political stripe should be able to support.

The one point Mr. Card makes, with which I disagree is, "Unions can become too powerful -- but without unions, the profit motive will inevitably drive employers to treat their employees unfairly." This strikes me as nothing more than Mr. Card's Democrat politics coming to the fore. I've worked in the construction industry for over 7 years and never have I had to rely on a union contract to be treated fairly. A company that doesn't treat its employees fairly will soon find that it doesn't have good employees and eventually that company will find its profits beginning to dwindle.

Disney is giving its CEO, Robert Iger, a 7% pay increase, making his total compensation package for 2007 valued at about $27.7 million. If that is what Disney wants to pay its CEO, then it's no skin off my nose.

However, when the you take that information together with the fact that if Disney gave the Writers Guild of America everything it wanted then it would only cost Disney about $6.25 million a year. In other words, Robert Iger could write a personal check to settle the strike and still have a total annual compensation package worth over $21 million.

On the other hand, the Hollywood Hill, a group of liberal Hollywood activists (brought you by the Department of Redundancy Department), see its reason for being as follows:


Reading something like that makes me hope that Mr. Iger keeps his checkbook closed.

I would like someone to point out to me the Democrat who regularly insults and snubs the Liberal base, takes conservative positions domestic social and economic issues, thinks man-made global warming is nothing to worry about, pushes oil exploration in Alaska's ANWR and wants to vigorously fight the war against Islamo-Nazism.

That kind of Democrat will never appear on the public stage.

The moment a Republican appears on the public stage who regularly insults and snubs the Conservative base, strongly fights for liberal positions on domestic social and economic issues, accepts the Gore thesis on climate change, votes to block oil exploration in ANWR ... and, by the way, was pushing for the Iraq surge before Pres. Bush
...
That kind of Republican is pegged as the leading candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination by the Main Scream Media.

Go figure.

If there was a Democrat candidate who did to Democrats what John McCain does to Republicans, then I'd vote for the Democrat in a heartbeat.

How come when conservatives take positions opposing embryonic stem cell research and favoring adult stem cell research they are attacked for being "anti-science"?

However, when liberals attack the science around nuclear power and nuclear waste storage, they are considered "pro-science"

If you have listened to Michael Medved at any time during the past few weeks, then you have heard him go on and on about how clean Mike Huckabee's campaign has been. This, despite the dirty trick of creating a negative ad and then holding a press conference to claim that you weren't going to run the negative ad, and then run the negative ad.

Since that bit of political theater didn't seem to change Medved's tune regarding Rev. ... uh, I mean Gov. Mike's clean campaigning, I doubt that the Huckabee Push Poll automated phone calls, in South Carolina, attacking Fred Thompson, and in Michigan, attacking Mitt Romney, will either.

Here's something I found in an interview Neil Gaiman gave to Booksl*t.com. I don't expect many, if any who frequent Townhall.com, to agree with Neil's religious world view. But his point at the end is definitely something to ponder.

"Given that we’re living in a universe in which religions and mythologies and semi-imaginary things, depending on where you’re standing, the level of imaginariness…. There are definitely people who look at the entirety of what’s going on the world today as a couple of people fighting over whose imaginary friend likes them better. And then you’ve got people who say, “No, no, this isn’t an imaginary friend, he’s actually the real thing. But that guy over there, he’s an imaginary friend.” And it’s huge and it’s responsible for an enormous amount of worry and difficulty and it’s why I’m not allowed to travel with eight ounces of shampoo. I’m allowed four ounces. I’m going to have to pour away half of my shampoo before I can put it in my quart bag and put it in my carryon. Which is really bizarre.

"And that’s because of people arguing over things that many people regard as imaginary. Chiefly, gods, religions, and national boundaries, which are absolutely imaginary. They’re completely notional. They don’t tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren’t even any national boundaries when you get down and walk around. They’re just imaginary lines we draw on maps.

"I don’t know where I got to from that. It was more sort of a rant. I just get fascinated by people who assume that things that are imaginary have no relevance to their lives. ..." (emphasis added)

The next time I hear someone attack fantastical fiction as a pointless waste of time, I'm going to think about this quote. Perhaps I'll ask said attacker well if imaginary things aren't so important why, pray tell, are we so worried about defending U.S. - Mexico border, which, when you boil things down a bit, is just a line some folks drew on a map.

The point being, I think, is that the imaginary is incredibly relevant and incredibly important to all of our lives.