Let me just explain why this is bad, because it is bad on multiple levels and thus frustrating to watch. (I checked out around, oh, Moby or thereabouts.)

1.) It is essentially impossible to do. First off, the members of the Electoral College – and particularly the Republican members of the Electoral College – are, to a one, party loyalists. That’s why they became electors in the first place. These are not people you are going to easily peel off from the Republican party, regardless of how corrupt, incompetent or awful Donald Trump is. Saying “just thirty-seven of you need to not vote for Donald Trump” is like saying “you only need to climb thirty-seven mountains.” It is not technically impossible, but for practical intents and purposes given the time frame you are working with, it might as well be. These aren’t Democrats, who consider themselves all to be precious flowers and therefore will generate electors who are oh-so-special that they can’t in good conscience vote for Hillary Clinton. When Republican electors felt they couldn’t in good conscience vote for Trump, they resigned.

2.) It is mostly pointless because there is no superior option available. At this point it seems worth reminding that the grand plan of the “Hamilton electors” (and I love Hamilton, but god, I hate the effect it’s had on political discourse sometimes) is to create a situation where the House of Representatives gets to determine who will be the next President. Firstly, it is worth remembering that the House is Republican anyway, and the most likely thing they will do is vote for Donald Trump anyway, because the GOP base loves Trump and the GOP likely understands that if they were to vote for anybody else to be President they would get slaughtered in 2018 and 2020, because they’d be under attack both from the Democrats on the left1 and from Trump and his loyalists on the right.

But let’s say the House decides to vote for somebody else other than Donald Trump. You’re not going to get anybody reasonable. You’re not even going to get Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney, who would be a right-wing conservative President but maybe not totally wreck everything. You’re going to get Mike Pence, who is a Christian dominionist in all but name and will pass laws to make it legal to discriminate against gays whenever and wherever, or you will get Paul Ryan, who will work overtime to completely destroy the social safety nets of America in favour of tax cuts for the rich, or you will get Marco Rubio, who actively advocated for a Muslim registry harder than Donald Trump did, or you will get John Kasich, who will pass anti-abortion laws throughout the country. And really, any one of these people will give you all of those things, plus destroying civil rights, environmental protections, labor laws and giving you as many far-right Supreme Court justices as they can possibly manage while gerrymandering districts and killing voter protections as much as possible to ensure that their system of minority rule can remain intact.

No matter what happens with the Electoral College, the next President will be a disaster for anybody who cares about the rule of law, because the GOP as a whole actively does not consider anybody to the left of Lindsay Graham to be allowed to govern. You’re already seeing this in North Carolina, where the GOP lost the governorship and the Supreme Court and reacted by introducing reams of emergency legislation to take away the governor’s traditional powers and give them to the gerrymandered legislature they still control. You saw it for six years of the GOP Congress under Obama, ending with their refusal to even vote on (much less confirm) his Supreme Court nominee. Now that they have power, they’re going to actively work to cement their stranglehold on political control, regardless of the fact that they’re less popular than the actual majority vote by far.

Yes, Trump will be worse than any of the other options, because he will be personally and systematically corrupt, and because he will be much more disastrous on foreign policy as tyrants seek to buy him off (and that will happen). But in the end, Trump’s move to fascism will simply be overt, as opposed to the stealthy fascism the GOP will institute, and frankly, it’s probably going to be easier to oppose if it is overt.

Finally, 3.) It is antidemocratic and democratic principles matter. Let’s be honest: if the tables were switched and Clinton had won the EC but lost the popular vote, and Trump was personally campaigning to have electors switch the vote because he won the popular vote, we would rightly call that deplorable. The election of 2016 was conducted under a set of rules to which all parties agreed2 and Trump won under those rules.3 The fact that the Electoral College has an escape switch that is archaic and has not been used in literally centuries does not mean anybody should seek to use it, regardless of whatever the fuck Alexander Hamilton wrote about it. Remember: Alexander Hamilton also helped design the Electoral College working under the impression that political parties wouldn’t exist, which was one of the stupider things he believed, so maybe let’s not be those people who fetishize what the Founding Fathers wrote because they got a lot of shit just wrong.

There’s no easy way to say this: you either care about the rule of law or you don’t. As a liberal, I care about the rule of law because I think it is important for people to have the opportunity to self-determine how they are governed. That’s literally the entire point of democracy. When I see my fellow libs and lefties growing despondent because Donald Trump won a minority of the popular vote and effectively only won on technicalities and now will move to seize power, I can understand that because it’s saddening. It actively hurts to recognize that the other side of the political spectrum has finally abandoned all pretense of comity or political principle and become motivated solely by the opportunity to exercise power.

But that doesn’t make me want to abandon rule of law. It doesn’t make me want to abandon my principles. I believe in democracy and no feeble MAGA-hat wearing motherfucker is going to make me think differently about that.4 And if you’ve given up on democracy, I don’t know why you’re wasting time supporting this fucked up “Hamilton electors” plan; you might as well just go get a rifle and start picking your targets, because if you’ve decided that all that matters is the exercise of power, you’re effectively just Che Guevara in nicer clothes.

Important: Do not go get a rifle and start picking targets, for crissake. That was hyperbole.

Instead of that, and instead of the stupid electoral college plan, what you and all other lib/left Americans should be doing is, well, all of this. Use your voice proactively to build towards 2018 (not 2020, 2018 – the governorships and Congress matter tremendously right away for protecting voter rights and preventing gerrymandering), and start right now. You know this can work, because the Tea Party used exactly these same tactics to overwhelm the GOP and turn it into a permanent clown college. There is no reason not to do the same, except for much better and more productive and fairer ends. Go on. Do the work.

1. Well, hopefully; it’s the Democratic party and we should never underestimate their capacity to try to Be Reasonable And Work With The Other Side no matter how terrible the other side is. [↩]
2. Granted, there was not a lot of choice about the agreement, but consenting to work within a system is de facto consent to it. [↩]
3. Do not even start with the recount thing. If there was any chance the recounts could actually have turned things around, the Clinton campaign would have been on them like white on rice. [↩]
4. As a Canadian I of course extend this disgust towards Kellie Leitch wholeheartedly. Fuck you, Kellie. You’re the goddamn worst. [↩]

This is the Call for Nominations for the 2016 Theszie Awards.

To nominate candidates for all categories, you may use this form. Nominations are due by December 31, 2016.

To see a list of current nominees, click here.

Finally, to see previous years’ results, click here for 2015, here for 2014, here for 2013, here and here for 2012, and here for most historical awards.

Last night, I took my son out to a revival of the…classic? Yes, let’s say classic, for a given value of the word…1980 ‘Flash Gordon’ movie. I was enjoying the heck out of it, as I do every time I watch it; the movie hits that exact sweet spot of camp and sincerity, where everyone knows what they’re doing is silly and they exaggerate all their performances but at the same time they’re treating the silliness of the material with respect. (My kid loved it too, although I was surprised to remember just how scary some of those scenes can be to a ten-year old.)

But as I was watching it, I started to notice that…well, look. There’s no way to be watching a film right now about a tyrannical, capricious madman who has grown decadent with a lifetime of power, treats women as playthings and concubines, and has an equally jaded and debauched daughter that he has a…complicated…relationship with, and not think of the current political climate. I found myself picturing Donald and Ivanka at the inauguration, watching the protesters, and Ivanka asking, “Why is water coming out of their eyes?” With Donald, of course, responding, “It’s what they call tears. It’s a sign of their weakness.”

Likewise, I’m pretty sure that Donald and Melania’s wedding vows actually included the line, “Do you, Donald the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe, take this woman Melania to be your Trumpess of the hour?” “Of the hour, yes.”

I’m not quite sure where everyone else fits into this prophetic scenario, though. Klytus seems to be pretty obviously Pence. It’s just possible he could be Bannon, but I don’t think Bannon’s that calculating. Kala is obviously Kellyanne Conway. Which would make Prince Barin…Jared Kushner? Definitely all the rulers of the kingdoms of Mongo are prominent Republicans who are being played against one another to keep them from uniting against Trump, but I’m not sure you can assign any particular role to any particular Prince. If nothing else, I just cannot fucking picture Paul Ryan shouting, “Representatives…DIIIIIIIIVE!” (But I can picture them responding to a request to team up against Trump with, “‘Team up’? What does that mean?”)

Of course, this is tremendously illuminating in terms of what it means for Trump’s plans for America. “…they won’t be the same human beings. They’ll be more docile. Tractable. […] Let’s just say they’ll be satisfied with less.” (I don’t know if the earthquakes and tidal waves will be literal, but given Trump’s stance on climate change I’m not yet willing to rule it out.)

On the other hand, it looks like there’s a distinct possibility that Mike Pence will be impaled on a bed of spikes sometime in the next four years, and Conway will literally melt. So we’ve got that to look forward to.

What does all this mean? I’m not sure. But if the quarterback for the New York Jets decides to run for President in four years, I’m voting for them even if it seems like political suicide. Because it’s not suicide, it’s a rational transaction.

(Also, if Trump does get re-elected, he probably shouldn’t do any appearances right in front of a big picture window. Just sayin’.)

I’ve thankfully never been in a position where someone in my family withdrew all my life savings and entrusted it to a sweaty guy in a cheap suit who promised to triple our money but whose name autocompletes to “con artist” in a Google search, all because of a number of vague and shifting rationales that mostly seem to carefully tiptoe around the number of black and Latino people working at the bank because they’re totally not racist…but if I had, I imagine it would hit like this election is hitting now.

It’s hard to look at my fellow Americans the same way. Even knowing that Hillary won the popular vote, even knowing that voter apathy and voter suppression means that Trump garnered no more than 25% of the population’s support, it still just makes me wonder what else I assumed about the fundamental intelligence and decency of the people around me that is wrong. Because in the end, that is what everyone got so wrong about Trump–we assumed that because he’s such an obvious, piss-poor liar and because he’s left behind such a clear and unmistakable trail of financial ruination of anyone who ever trusted him in his wake, that there’s no way the American people would fall for his lies just because he pandered to their worst instincts. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things, but I don’t think anything has ever hurt this much to be wrong about. I wanted to believe that America was better than this. And we’re not.

And now…every day brings worse news. The Cabinet that Trump is assembling can best be described as “kakistocracy”, the rule of the worst. We have a new Secretary of Education who wants a repeal of the child labor laws, a Secretary of Defense with the charming nickname of “Mad Dog”, a National Security Adviser who was kicked out of the military for assaulting his staffers, and an Attorney General who was deemed too racist to become a judge. By Reagan. And let’s not forget Steve Bannon, the closest we have gotten to a literal Nazi in the White House. We can all try to be optimistic, and hope that somehow this assemblage of the least competent human beings ever will somehow cobble together a functional government, but the potential damage here is virtually unlimited.

And of course, we have a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and a conservative Supreme Court. This is the closest we’ve come in a good fourteen years to a rubber stamp for every dumbass idea the Republicans have ever come up with, and they’ve gotten a lot dumber over the last fourteen years. Well, at least the House and the White House has. The faint hope remaining for sane Americans is that the Republican majority in the Senate is tiny, and many of the more moderate members won’t have to face re-election until 2020 or later and can kick Trump’s crazier ideas to the curb. It’s going to be hard to get sixty votes for a lot of Trump’s proposals. And John Roberts, at least, has no interest in telling stare decisis to get fucked just because the Republicans want to overturn settled constitutional law. He doesn’t want to be remembered by history as the 21st century Roger Taney.

But that means that best case scenario, we’re looking at eight years of Republican obstruction of good ideas followed by four years of Democratic obstruction of bad ideas. Which amounts to twelve years of inaction on pressing crises. There’s no way to see this as anything other than a disaster. I’m tired of casting blame over whose fault it was, because in an election this close virtually any factor could have been the deciding factor, but I think that Democrats and progressives need to work pretty damn hard over the next four years. We need to make sure that Republicans do at least pay lip service to their oaths of office–this will probably at some point involve impeaching Trump, who looks to be approaching the Presidency with the same mindset that he approaches charity, namely “How can I shovel as much money into my pockets as I can while giving as few fucks as possible about anyone who isn’t me?” I guarantee you, we are less than a year out from a scandal that would have gotten Obama thrown out of office so fast his head would spin were the parties reversed.

We’ve also got a duty of care to the people around us. There are a lot of vulnerable people right now, in a position where the emboldened racist/sexist/transphobic/homophobic/xenophobic bigots of America feel emboldened to take out their worst impulses on the defenseless. I’m not saying “Go out and buy a gun,” here, but be prepared to do things like give to the food shelf at your local Muslim community center. Make sure your LGBTQ friends and family have emotional support, including suicide prevention lines. Call your local Congressperson every time the Republicans try something stupid and don’t be afraid to yell. We can all be an active and present force for kindness and decency in our everyday lives, and there’s never been a time when it’s more needed.

But more than that, we have to mount legal challenges to gerrymandering and voter obstruction laws, and we have to make them stick. We have to find candidates that inspire people, not just ones that are capable–and frankly, they need to be candidates who reflect the diversity of the coalition that brought Democrats to power. Bernie Sanders is a great guy with wonderful ideas, but he’s yet another elderly white person who assumes that their progressive credentials authorize them to speak in lieu of actual minorities. (And bluntly, he does so cluelessly–telling black people that their issues are class issues does not fly after Tamir Rice.) That kind of candidate is not going to cut it in a post-Obama Democratic Party. And we have to say that while reaching out to white Trump supporters is all well and good, we are not going to compromise with them on human rights issues under any circumstances. The humanity of women and minorities is not negotiable.

Of course, just thinking about all that work, all that hate that we have to counter all over again like the last sixty years never happened, all the exhausting effort of once again cleaning up after a Republican shitshow only this time on steroids…it’s enough to make you curl up into a little ball and whimper. It’s dispiriting and demoralizing. So one other thing we have to do is give ourselves permission to think about other things sometimes. To let ourselves laugh at the absurdity of it all, even as we rail against the injustice. To every once in a while just not be fair or nice to the opposition even though we stand for fairness and niceness, because sometimes you just gotta call a dumbfuck a dumbfuck to their face. Molly Ivins said it better than I ever will:

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”

So that’s what. We’ve got a screaming dipshit for a President. Whatever else we do, let’s at least have a little fun at his expense for the next four years.

Hello friends. It’s Justin again. Today, I want to talk about something else.

Who are the villains in the Indiana Jones movies?

Most people would probably reflexively answer—and I would too, if you sprang the question on me—“the Nazis.” This is sort of funny because now, fully half of the Indiana Jones movies don’t have Nazis at all. (And if Spielberg carries through with his threat to make a fifth one, there will presumably be more entries without Nazis than with.)

But of course, when we say, “I am a fan of the Indiana Jones movies,” what we usually really mean is that we love Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and we are very fond of the bits of Temple of Doom that are not actively irritating or offensive, and you take the aspects of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that you are feeling charitably about at the moment and sprinkle those on top.

So the two movies most of us agree are the solid “good ones”—Raiders and Last Crusade—both notably have Indiana Jones fighting the Nazis. There are the many German soldiers that serve as generic cannon fodder in fights and chases, and both movies have a lead Nazi officer who is nominally in charge of things but is really just there to look imposing in the uniform and armband. (Do you remember those characters’ names? I don’t.) Raiders also has Toht the Gestapo agent, who is the film’s sinister lead henchman in the manner of Jaws or Oddjob from the world of 007.

But none of these characters are what I would call the proper “villain” of the movies—the primary antagonist, the top-billed enemy, the “main bad guy.” Not necessarily the bad guy Indy fights, but the bad guy Indy talks to. The one you want to see get it in the end. In Raiders, the primary antagonist is Indy’s old rival, René Belloq, the French archaeologist who is helping the Nazis recover the Ark of the Covenant. In Last Crusade, this role is filled by Walter Donovan, the American businessman and philanthropist who is secretly working with the Nazis to recover the Holy Grail.

To put it another way, the primary antagonists in the Indiana Jones movies are not Nazis, but Nazi collaborators.

This is a distinction, notably, that both characters insist on themselves. Indy asks Belloq when he plans to hand over the Ark to “your boss, der Fuhrer,” and Belloq says, in a somewhat dismissive tone:

“All in good time. When I’m finished with it.”

He sets himself apart here, you see. The Nazis want the Ark because they think it will make their army invincible. But Belloq has his own individual motivation—he wants his “radio for speaking to God” —and when he’s gotten what he wants out of it, he is quite happy to hand over whatever remains to the Nazis. When talking to the officers, he refers to Hitler as “your Fuhrer,” not “my” or “our” Fuhrer. He sets himself apart; in his mind, he is not one of them.

Donovan makes this point at even greater length. As before, Indy accuses his enemy of being a Nazi—a “stooge,” at that—to which Donovan replies:

“The Nazis? Is that the limit of your vision? The Nazis want to write themselves into the Grail legend—take on the world. Well, they’re welcome. But I want the Grail itself, the cup that gives everlasting life. Hitler can have the world, but he can’t take it with him. I’m going to be drinking my own health after he’s gone the way of the dodo.”

Like Belloq, Hitler and the Nazis are merely a means to an end for Donovan. He does not seem to think very highly of them; in the long term, they will be gone and he will endure. For now, they are merely the ones with the resources he needs and the power he needs, and he will use them to achieve his own objective. The rest of the world, by his own admission, is just collateral damage. Donovan seems a bit more ruthless than the occasionally squeamish Belloq, but at their core, they have the same belief that they can work with the Nazis without becoming Nazis themselves. I do wonder if this was an intentional choice on Spielberg’s and Lucas’ part—the idea that there is evil in the world, but that allowing said evil to work for you while looking the other way is a unique, perhaps even more insidious evil in itself.

But of course, in both cases, this is proven to be a delusion at the end of their respective movies. Belloq may consider himself apart from the Nazis, but he dies standing over the Ark at the head of a trinity with Toht and The Main Nazi Officer Whose Name You Don’t Know. While Toht comes to perhaps the most gruesome end of the three, Belloq’s exploding head is the most brutal; everyone remembers Toht’s melting face, but Belloq is the death they save for last. Perhaps because it is the most satisfying?

Donovan comes to his own special-effects-heavy end, aging into a skeleton and crumbling into dust after drinking from a false grail. But when the dust blows away, it exposes the Nazi insignia that Donovan must have been keeping on his person all this time. In the end, I suppose, the film reveals him for what he truly is and not what he thinks he is.

Okay. It is, officially, the last fucking Friday I will have to think about this fucking election one way or the other, and my blood pressure is through the charts and I’m jittery and I can’t even fucking look at FiveThirtyEight anymore without having a panic attack. So let’s take a moment to make the last case you will ever need to hear for going out on November 8th and voting for Hillary Clinton. And because it is the last case, it’s going to be a doozy. Ready?

1) Trump is the worst major-party candidate ever to run for President. It is, at this point, not an argument. He is a pathological liar, a grifter, a con artist, a crook. He has aligned himself with foreign governments whose outlook is antithetical to the American way of life. He has actual fucking MOB TIES. He is a serial sexual predator. He has repeatedly and openly advocated for American troops to commit war crimes. He is so thoroughly incompetent and disinterested in becoming competent that the keystone of his foreign policy is an unworkable boondoggle that everyone understands will achieve no realistic or meaningful goal. His tax policy, such as it is, will blow a multi-trillion dollar hole in the national debt. He has forcefully and continuously expressed his admiration of autocratic dictators, and suggested on multiple occasions that he will use the power of the Presidency to punish people who he dislikes. He courts white supremacists and racists while parroting their opinions literally verbatim on multiple occasions. He traffics in the most deranged conspiracy theories to the point of inviting their promulgators to his inner circle. He is actively managing a campaign to suppress the votes of people he feels are inclined to support his opponent. He is not simply manifestly unqualified to be President, he is actively and dangerously inclined to treat the Presidency as a means to aggrandize his personal wealth and power at the expense of democracy itself.

Four years ago, I said that while I didn’t think that Romney would be a bad President if elected, I thought that he could not be allowed to succeed through a campaign of sheer and unmitigated mendacity. This is incalculably worse. Giving the Presidency to Donald Trump would be like letting Bernie Madoff run our country. It is imperative that he lose the election, by as large a margin as possible so as to remove his potential excuses of “voter fraud”.

2) Hillary Clinton is actually a very good candidate. At this point, Hillary Clinton has endured more petty bullshit than any candidate in recent memory, and I say this knowing that we have a man in the Oval Office who many people still think is a secret Muslim who’s planning to take away our guns. (Better get on that, Barry!) The Republicans have been salting the ground against a potential Hillary candidacy for a solid twenty-five years now, beginning with her inability to properly bake cookies like a good Presidential wife and continuing on to criticize every decision she ever made while holding political office and quite a few that she didn’t, and they’re currently laying the groundwork for impeaching her before she’s even taken office on the grounds that she probably did something bad. (If you enjoyed the 60+ attempts to repeal Obamacare, just wait until the monthly impeachment trials!) If you think that the fact that the Republicans have been solidly and unrelentingly committing character assassination against her for a quarter-century and your mild dislike of the woman is mere coincidence, you are deluding yourself. Hillary is the victim of a smear campaign, and her approval rating only shows that it’s working.

Is she a little secretive? Yes, but no more than could be expected from a woman who’s had her Secret Service agents write tell-all biographies about her, her husband testify about his sex life in court, and Russian spies hacking her assistant’s emails. Is she hawkish? No more or less so than any other serious political candidate we’ve ever had in the last century or so because the US has been intertwined with global politics in complicated ways that make it difficult if not impossible to avoid the use of force at times, and neither isolationism nor pacifism is particularly practical as a stance right now. Is she corrupt? Oferfucksake. No. She’s not corrupt. She is literally being accused of corruption by a man who has made a career out of sticking other people with the losses for his business failures and runs a charity as his personal piggy bank, as part of an elaborate “I’m rubber you’re glue” distraction from multiple pending civil suits against him for fraudulent business practices. Don’t fall for it.

Hillary Clinton is an intelligent, dedicated civil servant who is going to do her damnedest to make the world a better place. Anyone telling you otherwise is either lying or has been suckered by lies.

3) Voting for a third-party candidate helps Trump. There are two third-party candidates running this year, Gary Johnson of the Libertarians and Jill Stein of the Greens, about which more later. Neither one stands even the tiniest snowball’s chance in hell of voting. If your vote is going from Hillary Clinton to either one of these candidates, you are reducing the margin of victory for Hillary because she loses a vote and Trump doesn’t. If enough people do this extraordinarily stupid thing then the margin of victory will go below zero and Trump will win, and there is a non-zero chance the human race will perish in a nuclear holocaust. (Oh, right. I forgot to mention that under Item #1, he has no understanding of military strategy or tactics and apparently thinks that nuclear weapons are an acceptable first-strike option. This is how bad Trump is. “Nuclear holocaust” is something that gets lost in the motherfucking shuffle.)

Even if you’re not convinced on a personal level by Items 1 and 2, saying “But I want to vote with my conscience” or “I want to vote for the candidate that best aligns with my personal beliefs” is essentially admitting that you don’t understand how math works as a practical option. If the gas company tells you, “You have to pay the gas bill or we will shut your heat off and you will freeze to death,” it is not a practical solution to say, “Oh yeah? Well I don’t like the gas company, so I’m going to buy a pack of matches as a protest vote!” If your doctor tells you, “You have gangrene in your leg and you must amputate your leg or you will die,” you do not get to say, “It’s so unjust that I only have two options! I think I’m going to get a shot of penicillin instead because I want to send a message!” Whether you like it or not, this election is Clinton vs. Trump. That choice is clear and inarguable unless you are a dumb and/or crazy person.

4) Jill Stein and Gary Johnson are terrible candidates. They’re not as bad as Trump, because it is literally not possible to be as bad as Trump unless a man with quirkily mismatched glasses has nicknamed you “The Smiler” and maybe not even then, but they are manifestly incompetent, unqualified, and ideologically fringe on a level that they can only get away with because they’re so obviously not going to win that media coverage of their campaigns has been reduced to, “Aww, look! They’re giving a speech just like a real candidate!” Anyone who tells you they are voting for either one of these two because they want someone better than Hillary either hasn’t done their homework or is a fucking lunatic.

Gary Johnson is backing a tax plan that he quite clearly doesn’t understand and which all credible economists agree is regressive and hopelessly inadequate. He wanted to eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, then backed down from that statement on live television while admitting he doesn’t actually know what those departments do. He justified his ignorance of global politics by saying that you’re more likely to go to war in other countries if you know where they are. His own Vice-Presidential candidate isn’t willing to say on the record that he’s qualified to run the country.

Jill Stein, despite being a motherfucking medical doctor, is spouting bullshit about “toxic mercury” being found in vaccines because she doesn’t want to antagonize her base. She has publicly said that she’s not willing to rule out wifi causing brain damage. Her central fiscal policy depends on what she has literally called “a magic trick” to make money suddenly exist, one which absolutely everyone who has ever looked at it has called actual fucking gibberish. Oh and her VP appears to be an anti-Semite.

And even if some miracle happened and these two were elected and proved to be more competent than their stated political stances would indicate, they have fuck-all hope of getting anything done because they have no base in Congress. Their respective terms of office would be disasters, and no responsible person should vote for them. If you don’t think the Democratic Party is representing your views, get involved in local politics. If you want a viable third party, work at the local level to stand sensible candidates. But for this election, vote Hillary.

5) A write-in is an abstention, an abstention is a vote for Trump. Again, the Trump supporters are going to turn out in force to support their candidate, because they’re all aware this is probably their best chance to get an open white supremacist and misogynist into power who’s willing to use the office to punish women and minorities. There are also people who are going to turn out for him out of a blind obligation to the Republican Party, who has been derelict in their duty on an unprecedented scale here. But these people are a tiny sliver of this country’s eligible voters. Trump cannot win if turnout is high, because he is thoroughly despised. His only hope is if most of the people who despise him are too apathetic to do anything about it. If he can keep his base energized and nobody else shows up, he wins. In case I wasn’t yet clear enough, THIS IS BAD.

Go vote. If you can, do it right now. Early voting has already started in most states, and you can go here to find out more:

https://www.vote.org/early-voting-calendar/

If you can’t vote now, vote on election day. You will spend four years or the rest of your life, whichever is shorter, regretting it if Trump wins. Don’t do that. Vote, and vote for Hillary.

Thus endeth the passionate advocacy.

There’s been (and I know this will kind of surprise you, but it’s true) a lot of analysis of the ways that the historical arc of the Republican Party has finally led us to a living elevator fart loudly arguing that we just shouldn’t bother holding the election because he wants to be President. People have talked about economic insecurity, racial animus, anti-Washington sentiment, sexism, misogyny, and a party apparatus that seemed bizarrely happy to bend to a knife at their own throats. But one of the things that I think hasn’t received enough attention is the way that the Republican victories of 2000 and 2002 paved the way for their eventual disarray and internal strife.

If you go back to the immediate aftermath of 9/11, you’ll no doubt remember a country that was pretty solidly united behind President George W. Bush. The 2002 elections gave the Republicans control of the House and Senate, as well as many state legislatures and governorships. Karl Rove, who was at that time tremendously influential in the party apparatus, decided to use this control as part of an ambitious scheme to give the Republicans a “permanent majority”, using detailed demographic information to redraw the political map in a way that made many districts so safe that any Republican could win them. (This scheme was furthered in 2010, by an additional round of redistricting, but it began in 2002.) At the time, this seemed like a plan to consolidate Republican control for generations to come…but I’d argue that it was, in outcome, a plan to permanently destroy the Republican Party. And we’re only now beginning to see how devastating it was.

Because the Republicans of the 90s, for all that they were already beginning to stoke the politics of racial resentment and mindless opposition to the Democrats on any issue, were also ferociously disciplined in getting their members to fall in line for a unified party agenda. Newt Gingrich…look, I can’t stand the man. I’m not saying I wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire, but I will say that I probably would if he weren’t. But he was a very effective Speaker of the House, and he even managed to work with Democrats from time to time on genuinely bipartisan bills. The Republicans were not, as they are now, in constant danger of throwing coups against their own leadership for being insufficiently batshit fucking crazy.

What changed? Simple. Back in those days, the Republican Party had leverage over its own members. Republican representatives had to go back to their home districts every two years and campaign, and those campaigns required them both to be reasonably responsive to the needs of their constituents and to stay in the good graces of their party. Competitive campaigns cost money, usually more than a representative could raise on their own, and the Republican Party tended to remember at election time when someone was off on their own criticizing their party leaders and who was a good soldier. That party discipline was frustrating at times, because it meant that Democrats couldn’t appeal to the conscience of individual members to peel away their votes on key issues, but it also meant that the party couldn’t be hijacked by rogue factions.

Rove changed all that. By making safe districts in which Republicans no longer needed to worry about re-election, he ensured that the party apparatus had no control over its members. Republicans no longer had to care about whether the RNC would support them through a tough campaign, because there were no tough campaigns anymore. Instead, Republicans now had to deal with competitive primaries, where they faced challengers not from the left but from the right. This was a huge problem, because they’d spent the best part of two decades motivating the base to vote with increasingly paranoid and racist rhetoric in the sure and certain knowledge that they would be selecting the candidates that the base voted for.

Instead, the base is selecting their own candidates. Those candidates are now running in non-competitive seats, and frequently campaigning and voting against the very idea of the party establishment. They believe the rhetoric that was once cynically deployed in service of keeping the legislature in safe hands, and the Republicans are increasingly finding that they have no levers to pull to keep them in line. And now that Republican extremists are in power, they have more authority and a bigger spotlight from which to promote their positions. This leads to more extremist candidates standing for election, all the way up the ladder to the national Presidential race. Trump’s defeat of the GOP establishment can be directly traced back to this decision to make a “safe space” for right-wingers. The moderates, in the hopes of removing their obstacles to power, may have removed themselves as an obstacle to others instead.

Ironically, it may be Obama who winds up saving the Republican Party from their own worst elements. He’s already announced that his post-Presidential goals are to challenge the Republican drawn maps as gerrymandering and force them to create more representative districts once more. Perhaps when the ultra-right wingers are forced to contend with actual voters, we’ll see at least a moderate amount of sanity return to the Republican Party. Until then, the redistricting plan seems to be going down in history as a classic example of the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for…because you just might get it.”

Hello internetters, it’s Justin again, recently returned from a self-imposed comics blogging hiatus, and I wanted to talk to you about Marvel Comics. What are the odds, right?

I didn’t mean to leave it this long; I thought, within a week of my last post, I’d get the follow-up bashed out and posted, but it’s been—gosh, over a month. Why the delay? To find out the answer, I called myself up for an interview on the subject.

Hi, Justin, thanks for sitting down with us.

No problem, Justin.

You’re looking well.

That is a lie, and you know it, but I understand that you want to be polite. I will accept the compliment, insincere though it is.

Fine, let’s get to it. Last time, you said that you “have trouble really connecting with Marvel books these days.”

That is correct.

Are you reading any of Marvel’s current output?

No, actually.

Really? I would’ve thought Mark Waid writing an Avengers book would be an easy sell, at least. We love Waid, as I’m sure you know.

I know! I know. I did actually buy the first issue of All-New, All-Different Avengers. But I couldn’t really get into it. I tried out The Ultimates, too, because I hear such good things about Al Ewing, and the concept is neat.

So what’s wrong with the books that you’re not buying them?

Honestly? I think this is a case of, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

I don’t understand.

See, now we’re coming to why this post has been so long in coming. I’ve starting writing it a bunch of times, but I can’t seem to finish. I keep looking for a way into this post, and each way I’ve tried it so far has left me with a “Who farted?” grimace about my own ponderous thoughts. I thought maybe the interview format would help me get the words out of my head. You could ask questions and we could see how I arrived at my current attitudes.

Okay, I guess. So what do you mean by, “It’s not you, it’s me,” exactly?

Well, most people on the internet with Opinions About Comics like to believe that we are evaluating things based on solid, critical reasoning, right? “X is not good because Y.” And so, when “X” is a comic and it’s not good, you try to solve for “Y”.

You should have warned me you were going to use algebra. Okay, fine, what are some of these “Y” values?

I mean, there are a lot. For one, I don’t understand why writers don’t use narrative captions and thought bubbles like they used to.

“Balloons.”

Excuse me?

“Thought balloons,” not thought bubbles. John Byrne says—

Oh, never mind, the point is, these are fantastic narrative tools that are really only found in comic books, and people shun them now. I don’t understand why you’d cut yourself off from a tool that helps convey information quickly in a medium where space is at such a premium.

Watchmen doesn’t use narrative captions or thought balloons.

I guess. I mean, I suppose I understand if it’s a stylistic choice. But in the first years of the 21^st century, it became gauche to use them, and I don’t think I’ll ever understand why. But you’re right, ultimately it is just a choice. But it’s a choice I don’t like.

Have all the status quo shakeups over the past couple of years put you off?

Yeah. I mean, it’s like Peter Parker is Tony Stark, and Doctor Doom is Iron Man, and several different people are Captain America. Somebody else is Wolverine—it’s a very DC sort of way of doing things. The Fantastic Four aren’t around anymore. There are a bunch of different Avengers teams, and they don’t live in Avengers Mansion—this is a huge deal to me, actually. It all feels wrong.

Even the way the books look. The logos aren’t “comic booky.” There’s no corner boxes. Everyone’s costume seems over-rendered, with all the seams. Computer coloring can do some wonderful things, but I feel like it overpowers the line art sometimes, and line art is what I like about comic art, you know? Even the glossy paper. It just bugs me.

So…basically, it’s not like it was when you were a kid?

Basically, yeah. Basically.

Well, isn’t that kind of…I mean, that’s such a whiny thing to say.

That’s what I thought too! So I fought it for a long time. I thought, “Argh, these guys keep messing it up, they don’t know what they’re doing.” It had to be, right? I had all these “Y” values that I thought contributed to “X is not good.” And then one day, I realized—what if “X” is good, and “X” is simply not for me?

I feel like you’re losing the plot with this algebra thing. Can you explain it a different way?

I just mean that…the things that I like about superhero comics—specifically Marvel comics—aren’t what Marvel comics are about these days.

Well, what are the things you like about superhero comics? What is your platonic ideal of the genre?

Well, Bronze Age Marvel Comics, right? The Bronze Age is the best. Funnily enough, a big part of the reason I think that is because of Wizard magazine in the 90s. People just remember them rigging the speculator market and hyping the crap out of what we called “T&A” books at the time, but those dudes were raised on Bronze Age comics, and they wrote about how great Roger Stern’s Amazing Spider-Man run was, and the Paul Smith issues of Uncanny X-Men, and Walt Simonson’s Thor, and Byrne’s FF. It was actually a huge influence on my tastes.

Wizard. Really? That’s kind of embarrassing.

Yeah. Actually, could you strike that? I want that off the record.

Oh sure, I’ll edit that out. So you’d like modern comics if they were more like Bronze Age comics?

Well, sure, I would. But, here’s the thing. I could spend all my time complaining about how Marvel’s not doing it “right,” and whining that the books should be more like Bronze Age comics. Or, you know…I could just buy Bronze Age comics. There are literally thousands that I haven’t read, right? And if you go to Half-Price Books, you can actually get them cheaper than new comics. I filled out my Byrne FF run at Half-Price Books, most of them at only a dollar a pop.

But don’t you miss out on the “newness” of it? I mean, you know how the stories all end, basically.

I guess. It is kind of a bummer, but I don’t know, even new comics, I don’t feel emotionally attached to them, either, so it doesn’t matter. Like, when they kill someone off or whatever, or that thing with Steve Rogers being a sleeper HYDRA agent and everybody on the internet flipped out…it doesn’t bother me or make me angry. Even big retcons. Like, remember when they said Professor Xavier recruited a whole other team of X-Men between what we see in Giant-Size X-Men #1? That bugged me at the time, but it doesn’t anymore. To be honest, they don’t even take place in the same continuity.

What do you mean?

I have this idea about “the Marvel Universe,” which—to me—is a fictional spacetime continuum originating with Fantastic Four #1 in 1961 and collapsing in the first years of the 21^st century with New X-Men #114. (Arguably the end of Busiek’s Avengers run is the real “end” of the Marvel Universe, as I reckon it, but Morrison and Quitely’s first issue is a clearer line in the sand.) This “Marvel Universe” was a construct that, if you only chose to believe in it, allowed you to view forty years’ worth of comics created by hundreds of hands as a single, unbroken, internally consistent tapestry of events. It wasn’t really, but that was part of the game. That’s why they used to give out No-Prizes! Anyway, the current Marvel comics, I would argue, do not take place in this same “Marvel Universe,” but rather are comics based—loosely or otherwise—on this fictional history. I mean, all of Bendis’ retcons with the Illuminati—do any of those characters sound “right” in context? Do you believe that they really could have happened between the panels? So they are quite welcome to do whatever they like; it doesn’t affect what I consider to be the “real” stuff.

That’s not a criticism? It seems dismissive.

I really don’t mean it to be. You know, I meant what I said in my last post about how it’s great that different, more diverse audiences are getting into Marvel. Like, I’ve heard that young girls like Squirrel Girl. I don’t get Squirrel Girl—I mean, I get it, but it doesn’t speak to me. But like, maybe they shouldn’t have to cater to a thirty-two-year-old man all the damn time. So I actually have made my peace with it. None of this is actually a criticism of Marvel; it’s not me angrily insisting they’ve lost a loyal customer. It’s my deal that I don’t like the books. That’s what I mean by, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

But your tastes haven’t changed at all, it’s the tastes of the market. So it is the books that have changed, not you.

Well…maybe. But, you know, the last time they were doing things that felt “right” to me was the late 90s, and Marvel was bankrupt. (You know, Marvel did have a lot of good books in the late 90s, they just got overlooked in favor of the thirty million X-books they were publishing.) They probably wouldn’t be around today anyway if they kept pandering specifically to me and people like me.

So is that it for you, then? Are you never going to buy a new Marvel comic again?

No, I mean, I still read some things, in trade and such. Waid’s Daredevil run was great, really well done. I would even say I loved it. But I enjoy it in a different way than I enjoy what I narrowly define as a “Marvel comic.” Waid’s Daredevil and some random Bill Mantlo issue of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man both hit the pleasure centers of my brain, but they’re totally distinct pleasure centers. I mentioned New X-Men—I think it’s probably the “best” X-Men comics have ever been…but they don’t really seem to be of a piece with, say, the Claremont/Byrne run, even when they’re explicitly referencing it. And I think I enjoy Claremont/Byrne more. And Joss Whedon’s run was, again, based on the Claremont/Byrne comics, but they don’t really “fit” if you put them side by side.

It still seems like you’re retreating into the past and not leaving yourself open to new things. Remember when you were a kid and you thought it was lame when adults didn’t like to try new music?

I have to be honest, I’m getting to that point about music, too. Part of this, I think, is being a parent of young children. When your day consists of HEY HEY WHAT IS IT WHY ARE YOU CRYING OH YOU WANT SOME JUICE OKAY HERE IS SOME JUICE OH YOU SPILLED THE JUICE GREAT JOB, you’re tired at the end of the day and maybe would rather have something comforting instead of spending your few free hours trying something you might not even like.

That is a chilling analysis of your life.

Well, the kids’ll get older and I’ll eventually get time back for myself. But the point is, I think it’s okay to say, “I like the old stuff better”…as long as you don’t insist that the old stuff is better, objectively, somehow. At the end of the day, you’re gonna like what you’re gonna like. I’m quite happy to dive through quarter bins for old comics, and I’m happy that people like the new comics. And I think if you out there in Blogland reading this feel the same way, that “They just don’t make ‘em like they used to, dammit,” that you should consider what it is you really want and whether forcing everyone into your own box is the best way to go about it.

That seems…healthy, I guess.

I think so. Unless you were being sarcastic.

Oh, I don’t even know anymore.

After a long stretch of being wrong about how far naked and unashamed xenophobia could take someone in the current iteration of the Republican Party, it seems like I’m on much firmer ground in predicting Donald Trump’s path through the general election. I was right in saying that the media have no real interest in promoting Trump’s counter-narratives about Clinton, because watching the first-ever total implosion of a major party candidate in real time is great television. (Notably, his only strong stretch in the polls this entire season was between Conway’s hiring and the first debate, when she kept him relentlessly on-script and took away his opportunities to freelance.)

More germane to the last week or so, I was also right in thinking that once Trump started getting serious media scrutiny, he wouldn’t be able to take the heat. He held off scrutiny on his tax returns, but only because he’s now far too busy defending himself from upwards of a dozen allegations of sexual assault that he essentially confessed to into a hot mike. He’s a hot mess of a disaster of a candidate, and it’s becoming clearer and clearer by the day as his response to virtually every challenge is to flail in an incoherent baby temper tantrum, call his opponents playground slurs, and try to find someone else to blame for his failures.

And that brings me to the third thing I was right about. I have been saying ever since Trump’s first polling meltdown, shortly after the convention, that if Trump got behind in October he would spend the last month of his campaign trying to find someone to pin the blame on rather than trying to win, because Trump is a narcissist as well as a misogynist and the preservation of his ego holds a higher priority for him than anything else. He can’t handle losing, he especially can’t handle losing to a woman, and so if he isn’t going to be President then he knows that it must be somebody’s fault. So I knew that October would be a month of Donald Trump blaming the GOP for his failure, simply because they’re the only possible suspects once you eliminate Hillary (who, as a woman, simply isn’t capable of beating TRUMP!)

I don’t mention this to boast, though. I mention this because I want to make it clear that I really thought I was braced for this. I really did think that I understood what it meant to have a solid month of Donald Trump running smack into the brick wall of his own incompetence and throwing a month-long pity party for himself with the cameras all pointed at him to catch his miserable, mean-spirited, petty spite in all its magnificent glory. I thought I might even enjoy some of it.

OH GOD WAS I WRONG. This is…this is seriously the most chilling, creepy, horrifying and horrible week of politics we’ve ever had in American history. This is Donald Trump being revealed as a serial sexual predator, and finding a posse of sleazy apologists who will go out and say, as a Hail Mary strategy for getting their pal an office that they manifestly have not even considered whether or not he deserves, that the accusations against Trump are all lies, slander and misconstruals of innocent comments from over a decade ago and should be ignored…but that Bill Clinton’s sexual assaults are all the gospel truth from wronged women who have been silenced for over thirty years and disqualify his wife from office.

In other words, they’re out there saying, “We can’t afford to have a sleazy, perverted, gross dirty old man getting into the White House. VOTE TRUMP!”

I anticipated that Trump would go after his own party. I did not anticipate the sheer, pathetic, unmitigated moral cowardice with which the GOP would greet these attacks. I did not expect that after a tape surfaced of the candidate openly boasting about his ability to commit sexual assault and get away with it, followed by a dozen corroborating stories from women in his past, that the response from the Republican Party would be, “Um, yeah, that’s pretty bad, but, um… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

And while I expected Trump would descend into paranoid fantasies to preserve his ego, I really didn’t think we’d get a rally where he flat-out said that Hillary Clinton was conspiring with “the international bankers” (I’m actually kind of amazed he avoided saying “Zionist”) to destroy the United States of America by rigging the election with the help of a complicit GOP. I did not think we would get to the point where he literally accused his political opponent of being the Devil. I did not think that Trump would preserve his fantasies of being a political messiah by literally inciting crowds to revolt in the event that he was not elected. I thought I was braced for a crazy October, but the crazy is now coming thicker and faster than I was emotionally prepared for.

And I don’t know when it will stop. At this point, I would be entirely unsurprised if another thirty or forty women come forward before Election Day; Trump has had decades of unrestrained and unpunished privilege in which to assault women, and I’m sure the only question is how many of them are willing to talk about it. And I think that Trump will get more and more unhinged as his accounts finally come due. But I no longer feel like I know what it means for a major-party candidate to be unveiled as a grifter and sexual predator with the whole world watching, less than a month before we elect our first woman to the Oval Office. It’s just too damn motherfucking nuts right now to get a grip on.

I guessed some of this stuff in principle, but…in practice, being right about it doesn’t fucking help.

So let’s say that you (or more likely, your friend who sent you to this webpage and is dragging you to the Doctor Strange movie, or maybe the Google search algorithm that directed you here) want to get a quick handle on what the Marvel Cinematic Universe is before you go see the movie that’s coming out in a few weeks’ time. And because you only have so many hours in the day, you want to do it without watching thirteen movies in a row. You basically need a quick summary of everything that happened that you can read on your lunch break, something that will let you know what’s going on without having to watch everything at 1 1/2 speed just to fit it all in and winding up convinced that ‘The Avengers’ is a Benny Hill sketch.

No problem! Gotcha covered. Read on! (Oh, um, spoilers for the Marvel movies, but really at this point you should not be able to complain about spoilers for any of them except possibly Civil War and that’s way down at the bottom so you have no excuse.

Iron Man: Tony Stark is a rich douchebag who makes money selling bombs, but doesn’t feel guilty because he doesn’t drop them. Then he gets captured by terrorists and forced to confront the consequences of his actions, and also to build a cool suit of power armor to escape. (The suit also keeps him alive because he got shrapnel in his chest.) He comes back and decides to be nice to everyone while using his power armor to stop bad guys, which ticks off his business partner who hired the terrorists to kill him. Business partner builds his own power armor, they fight, Tony wins and announces to the world that he. Is. IRON MAN! (Stinger: Samuel L. Jackson shows up and says, “Hey, wanna join my superteam?”)

Incredible Hulk: Bruce Banner is on the run from military man “Thunderbolt” Ross because he tried to recreate the ultimate super-soldier (HINT HINT!) and it instead turned him into a big green guy whenever he gets angry. He’s hunting for a cure but that isn’t going so great. A British guy offers to help the government catch Banner in exchange for some of that sweet sweet super-soldiery goodness, but it goes bad and he becomes an even crazier big green guy. Banner turns into the Hulk to defeat him, then goes on the run again. (Stinger: Tony Stark tells “Thunderbolt” Ross, “You know I’m way better at this superhero stuff than you are, right? I’m part of a superteam!”)

Iron Man 2: Tony Stark is having a crazy bad week. His dad’s friend’s son is trying to kill him because he (the son) thinks Tony stole the Iron Man design, the government wants him to turn over the plans to the suit so they can make more, his business rival Justin Hammer is trying to steal his designs, and oh by the way he’s dying from heavy metal poisoning because the suit has to be plugged into his chest to keep his heart going. After Samuel L. Jackson and a cool superspy named the Black Widow (who’s been posing as his new secretary) give him a pep talk, he busts Justin Hammer for espionage, invents a new version of the suit that doesn’t kill him, blows up his dad’s friend’s son, and tells the government (in the form of Garry Shandling) to fuck off. (Stinger: Samuel L. Jackson’s right-hand man, Phil Coulson, finds out that a big weird hammer is in New Mexico. HINT HINT!)

Thor: All the Norse gods are real and they’re aliens from the planet Asgard and all the Frost Giants and stuff are more aliens. Thor, who’s nice (but hot-headed and kind of dumb) gets tricked by his brother Loki (who’s a manipulative little shit) into picking a fight with Frost Giants, so Odin takes his powers away until he learns how to control his temper and exiles him to Earth. Thor, having learned all the wrong lessons, picks a fight with the government to get his hammer back (which is where his powers are) but it doesn’t work because he’s not being good yet. Odin takes a nap and Loki decides to send an Asgardian killer robot called the Destroyer to kill Thor, but when Thor risks his life to protect ordinary people he gets his powers back and wrecks it. He and Loki fight and Loki winds up cast into the void, fate unknown. HINT HINT! (Stinger: Thor’s scientist buddy is invited by Samuel L. Jackson to study a weird super-science artifact called the Tesseract. He agrees…but he’s being mind-controlled by Loki!)

Captain America: The First Avenger: FLASHBACK TIME! Back in the 40s, ordinary guy Steve Rogers signed up to test the original super-soldier serum that Bruce Banner was trying to replicate. He becomes Captain America, and hangs out with his best friend Bucky and Agent Peggy Carter and Tony Stark’s dad to fight Nazis. Meanwhile, a Nazi super-science dude called the Red Skull, who took the same super-soldier serum but got his face melted off because he’s bad, and his sidekick Arnim Zola, decide the Nazis are probably going to lose and form a secret super-science cult called HYDRA. They use the Tesseract that Samuel L. Jackson will later ask Thor’s buddy to study to power their death cult, and Cap fights them. Bucky dies…apparently (HINT HINT!) and Cap defeats the Red Skull but is frozen in the Arctic for decades until Samuel L. Jackson finds him.

The Avengers: Loki shows back up and steals the Tesseract. He also brainwashes Hawkeye, who showed up in ‘Thor’ but didn’t do anything, into helping his evil plan to help a bunch of aliens called the Chitauri take over the world. Samuel L. Jackson knows this is bad shit, so he gets Black Widow, Hulk, Iron Man and Captain America to stop them. They capture Loki, just as Thor shows up to do the same (there’s a big fight because they don’t know Thor is a good guy but it’s all cool) but they don’t find the Tesseract or Hawkeye or Thor’s mind-controlled scientist buddy. Loki tricks the heroes into fighting each other and escapes in the confusion, and opens a big space portal above Manhattan for the aliens to use. The Avengers shut down the portal, recapture Loki, free Hawkeye and Thor’s buddy, and return the Tesseract with Thor and Loki to Asgard. (Stinger: The aliens were really working for an even worse alien named Thanos!) (Additional Stinger: Everyone eats shawarma!)

END PHASE ONE!

Iron Man 3: Tony pisses off a crazy terrorist called the Mandarin, but it turns out he’s not really a terrorist. He was hired to act all terroristy by a company called AIM, which is testing out another super-soldier serum called Extremis that can drive people crazy and make them explode as a side-effect. (The Mandarin’s bombings are really just people exploding.) Tony defeats them and oh by the way he gets surgery to fix his heart, but it doesn’t make him feel better because he was so freaked out by the killer aliens over Manhattan that he’s sure are going to come back and kill everyone and he doesn’t know what to DOOOOOOOO!

Thor: The Dark World: There are more aliens like the Frost Giants, but these are Dark Elves and they’ve been hiding for millions of years waiting for someone to find a super-science artifact called the Aether that they can use to unmake the universe because they believe it was really just a bad idea all around. Thor’s girlfriend Jane finds it. She gets superpowers but it’s killing her, and also elves are trying to kill her and she’s just basically having a bad week. Thor and Loki team up to stop the elves after they kill Thor and Loki’s mom, but Loki is killed…apparently (HINT HINT!) Thor defeats the elves, saves Jane and tells dad Odin he’s going to go live on Earth and be a superhero, and Odin’s like, “Sure, fine, whatever.” but it’s because he’s really LOKI IN DISGUISE! (Stinger: The Aether and the Tesseract turn out to be part of a family of super-science artifacts, and the Asgardians pawn it off on a weird alien dude called the Collector because It Would Be Bad to put them too close together. The Collector wants to do just that, though, because he’s a collector.)

Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Captain America is working with Samuel L. Jackson and his superspy group SHIELD, but SHIELD is acting all creepily authoritarian and Cap’s not down with that. They get worse after a mysterious assassin called the Winter Soldier kills Samuel L. Jackson… apparently (HINT HINT!) and Cap goes AWOL with the Black Widow to track down the Winter Soldier despite the orders of cool nice dude Robert Redford who takes over. Surprise surprise, Robert Redford is a bad guy, SHIELD has been thoroughly infiltrated by HYDRA thanks to decades of diligent work by Arnim Zola, the Winter Soldier is a brainwashed, cyborgized and cryonically preserved Bucky, and in just a few days SHIELD is going to bring the ultimate pre-emptive strike on line and kill everyone in the world who would even think about opposing their agenda. But Samuel L. Jackson isn’t dead so he and Cap and Black Widow and their new buddy the Falcon (an ex-soldier with a suit that lets him fly) defeat HYDRA, kill Robert Redford and Emile Zola, and free Bucky although he’s so spooked he goes on the run. So does Samuel L. Jackson, because SHIELD is kind of FUBARed by HYDRA and he needs to go undercover to make sure that he can root out all the bad guys. (Stinger: Some of the bad guys are using Loki’s magic staff to make new superpowered people!)

Guardians of the Galaxy: But fuck all that, let’s go to space for a caper flick! Star-Lord, a human who was abducted by aliens and raised in space, is stealing a MacGuffin that’s also wanted by crazy space terrorist Ronan. Ronan is working for Thanos and his two daughters, Gamora and Nebula, because Thanos has promised to help Ronan kill all his enemies (which is pretty much everyone) if he gets Thanos the MacGuffin. But Gamora is sick of her crazy dad and wants to double-cross everyone and sell the MacGuffin and use it to fund a new life somewhere way the hell away. So she goes to steal it from Star-Lord, then they both run into bounty hunters Rocket and Groot, and there’s a big fight and everyone gets locked up in jail. They break out with the help of a revenge-crazed alien named Drax who wants to kill Ronan, and go to sell the MacGuffin together to…the Collector! It’s part of the same family of super-science artifacts as the Aether and the Tesseract. But the deal goes bad and Ronan steals the MacGuffin. He realizes it’s a super-science artifact that he can use to get his killing done, and double-crosses Thanos. There’s a big fight, and the heroes stop Ronan and give the MacGuffin to a group of space police called the Nova Corps for safekeeping.

Avengers: Age of Ultron: Okay, back to the HYDRA guys using Loki’s staff to create supersoldiers. Turns out that the magic staff is actually just a cool staff, and all the real power is in the gem in the middle…which is, all together now, a super-science artifact with unimaginable power. After the Avengers stop HYDRA and get it, Tony Stark decides to use it to create Ultron, a robotic protector of humanity that will keep everyone safe from the aliens he just KNOWS are out there…but it goes very wrong and the robot decides to wipe out the human race. He steals the stuff he needs to do it with the help of the supersoldiers HYDRA created (Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch), but they betray him and join the Avengers, who stop Ultron with the help of Tony’s second attempt at a robotic protector of humanity known as the Vision, although Quicksilver dies. Oh and by the way it’s around here that Thor goes, “Gee, isn’t it kind of funny that all these super-science artifacts keep turning up? It’s almost like someone is looking for them!” Thor goes to find out what’s up with that, Iron Man goes off to figure out why he’s so messed up in the head about aliens and is doing so many stupid things, and the Hulk just goes off somewhere, leaving Cap in charge of the Avengers. (Stinger: The guy looking for them is Thanos!)

Ant-Man: Oh and by the way there’s this dude Hank who has a shrinking serum and he doesn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands so he hires an ex-con named Scott Lang to steal it back from an evil corporation. Which he does. And Scott becomes Ant-Man.

END PHASE TWO!

Captain America: Civil War: After sulking for about ten movies, “Thunderbolt” Ross comes back and says he’s sick of all these superheroes cowboying around and causing massive property destruction and being totally ineffective, because that’s his job. He forces the Avengers to submit to UN authority, and Tony Stark comes back to tell everyone they should do it because he can’t be trusted and so neither can they. This rightfully causes a big argument, which would probably not be enough to sustain a whole movie so we get a guy named Zemo who hates superheroes because Ultron killed his family, who frames the Winter Soldier for killing the king of Wakanda (a country that only exists in the Marvel Universe) to draw him out of hiding. Everyone thinks Zemo’s doing this because…well, no, everyone thinks the Winter Soldier really did it, except Cap because he’s loyal to his buddy, and Cap thinks Zemo did it because the Winter Soldier knows where a whole bunch more Winter Soldiers are kept and he’s not quite free of his brainwashing so Zemo can make him tell. And also make him kill people. Cap decides to help the Winter Soldier, and gets a team together to find Zemo. But Iron Man gets his own team together, and they have a big fight. Everyone gets captured except Cap and the Winter Soldier, and Iron Man chases them down by himself without telling anyone because he’s starting to suspect that Cap was right. BUT…it turns out that Zemo isn’t after more Winter Soldiers. He’s after proof that the Winter Soldier killed Iron Man’s parents so that he can get Iron Man and Cap to fight. They do, their friendship ends, and Cap and Winter Soldier break out the rest of the rogue Avengers and go on the run. (Stinger: The Winter Soldier goes back into cryonic sleep in Wakanda until he can get his shit together!)

Now, it’s debatable how much any of this will have to do with Doctor Strange, because supposedly he deals with all the weird shit that the Avengers don’t even know about. But just in case you need to know any of it, now you know it!

It’s been too long since I talked about comic-book related stuff that just tickles me pink. And I want to rectify that by talking about one of my favorite comic-book villains, Doctor Demonicus. No, really!

I’ll admit, I love Doctor Demonicus a bit more in concept than in execution. He’s only appeared in a few stories, mostly licensed stuff from the 70s like Godzilla and Shogun Warriors, and he’s never really been used to his full potential…but then again, that’s kind of what I love about him. Because Doctor Demonicus, for those of you unfamiliar with the character (and I don’t blame you) is an evil genius and mad scientist who schemes to take over the world through the use of comic-book style Mad Science!

Only, well, he tends to get the kind of results you get in the real world when you try to use Mad Science. Being hit with radiation gave him disfiguring skin cancer, mutating animals into giant monsters just led to rampaging giant monsters all over the damn place, and the island he raised from the ocean depths to be the seat of his new empire a) turned out to be the site of a demonic temple, and b) sank again. (And the UN wouldn’t recognize it as a country anyway.) What sets him apart from all the other disposable worldbeaters and mad geniuses of the Marvel Universe is that he always gets the bad breaks. And he responds with predictable, hilarious impotent fury at the cosmic injustice of it all.

I love this idea. I love the idea of a frustrated, pissy Doctor Doom wannabe who never manages to make any of his schemes work because the laws of narrative don’t recognize him as an A-list supervillain the way they do Doom or the Red Skull, and so he constantly gets screwed over by petty little setbacks and ordinary hassles as much as by superheroes. I want to write a whole series of Doctor Demonicus, Would-Be World Beater, dealing with random shit that constantly derails his plans for world domination. Things like labor negotiations with his evil henchmen going south in the middle of a superhero battle, leading to them all staging a walkout on him just as the Avengers arrive. Or his plan to forge an alliance with Kang the Conqueror getting bogged down in the treaty stage because Kang insists that as a sovereign of a foreign power (ie, the future) he needs to nail down all the details now to avoid pointless infighting later. That kind of thing.

We haven’t seen that–as I say, he’s not really been used much at all, and certainly not by a writer who’s explored that angle. But conceptually, Doctor Demonicus is just perfect. Because he’s such a total failure.

Despite my statements last week, I did wind up finishing David Cross’s book ‘I Drink for a Reason’. I finally found a way into it by reading it as an educational study in why “edgy” comedy seems a lot less funny to many people than it used to, and why it’s growing gradually less popular. (I’m sure that comedians like Cross would say that it’s because “society is getting too PC”, but I’m a big believer in the fundamental truth that only assholes use “politically correct” or “politically incorrect” in anything other than an ironic manner.)

The conclusion I’m coming to is that the central joke behind “edgy” comedy is the conflict between the societal expectations for behavior and the way that the comedian treats their open defiance of those societal norms as commonplace and unexceptional. So the humor comes not so much from the fact that they’re being racist, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic, and generally terrible as human beings, but that someone would stand up on a stage and act that way and not expect to be criticized for their horrible behavior.

Example: There’s a photo in the book of two women I don’t recognize, with the caption, “I fucking HATE these two cunts!” The joke is that nobody would simply drop that admission into a random conversation, because nobody is that openly hateful and misogynist.

The problem is, though, the advent of the Internet has given a voice to a number of people who actually would and actually are. You can no longer assume, as an “edgy” comedian, that people can detect the irony in your vicious misogynistic insults, because there’s no difference anymore between what you say as a joke and what Roosh V says every damn day of his life as a serious statement of purpose. You’re essentially trying to argue a form of special pleading, saying, “If you really knew me, you’d understand that this is all deeply ironic,” but you’re saying it to a crowd of strangers who only know you as the fictional persona you present…and who can compare it to any number of real people saying that shit for real.

It’s especially problematic when some…probably a lot, let’s be honest…of these “edgy” comedians are kind of assholes about some things, like, say, women in comedy (they’re generally agin’ it) and who try the Cousin Larry move of giving their honest opinions about some things, their “just kidding” opinions about other things, and waiting to see your reaction before they reveal which is which. ‘I Drink for a Reason’, to once again use the book as my punching bag, has sections where Cross makes fun of anyone who believes in a religion because they’re spending their lives chasing down a delusion about a non-existent god. He also makes fun of Midwesterners for all being crystal meth addicts. And he expects people to just “know” when he’s being ironic, because it’s obvious to him, so why isn’t it obvious to us?

Basically, “edgy” comedy is running into Poe’s Law like it’s a brick wall. How can Daniel Tosh claim that it’s a joke when he says that he hopes someone gets raped when there’s a guy running for city office in New Jersey on the GOP ticket who said the same thing to a reporter writing a story on him? How can David Cross differentiate his smug, alienating anger about “PC liberals” from the smug, alienating anger about “PC liberals” displayed by an actual major-party Presidential candidate? “Edgy” comedians really need to up their game to stand out from the crowd these days.

It’s not to say that it can’t be done–Sarah Silverman manages it by constantly tip-toeing up to the line of admitting that she’s putting on an act, then undercutting her admissions with a fresh round of absurd and callous ignorance. Colbert in his old Comedy Central days used his material to constantly make himself the butt of his joke. Even Cross and Odenkirk, when they worked together on ‘Mr. Show’, signposted the premise by starting their act with an open admission that they were just doing it to get hate mail. But the days when you could just say something racist and give people an “aw shucks” grin are gone. Don’t blame the PC liberals, though. Blame the guys like Vox Day who never understood that it was a joke in the first place.

So I’m currently reading ‘I Drink for a Reason’, by David Cross. And it’s bad. I mean, it is shit-the-bed bad. It is is-this-actually-meant-to-be-an-ironic-douchebag-persona-he-created-for-this-book-a-la-Colbert, change-the-name-of-the-show-retroactively-to-“Mr. Show With Bob and That Guy He Carried On His Back for Four Seasons”, oh-my-god-did-he-actually-just-put-in-a-chapter-explaining-that-while-he’s-not-bitter-or-angry-about-bad-reviews-they-are-“bordering on libel”-and-he-must-respond bad. I am 82 pages into this 236-page book, and there’s been exactly one bit that I actually thought was funny and I feel kind of dirty for laughing at it because it’s about a guy entering a pole-sitting contest and being pelted with Rupert Murdoch’s feces. (It is, though, kind of funny in context.)

But I’m not quite ready to quit reading yet. Because I started the book. And I don’t like starting a book and not finishing it. I feel like I need closure, even if the closure is just “Yep, that’s 237 pages of unfunny material that I’m going to pretend he was forced to produce at gunpoint, probably by the same sadistic bastards who made him do ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel’. (And yes, I did go look up the correct spelling of “squeakquel”.) But the point is, I know that this is irrational behavior and yet I can’t stop myself. I can only think of two books I’ve ever given up on reading, and I admit to wanting to go back to at least skim one of them to the end.

(‘House of Leaves’, by Mark Danielewski. I couldn’t stand the Johnny Truant or Zampano material, but part of me wants to at least read the Navidson records.)

(‘The Laughing Corpse’, by Laurell K Hamilton. Bought the first two books at once in a fit of optimism because I heard good things about the series and they looked short, gritted my way through the first one, and realized that the second one wasn’t getting any better.)

What I’m getting at is, am I some sort of weird aberration? Does my pathological need to finish what I’ve started and complete even the sloggiest, draggiest book mark me out as some sort of crazy person, or does everyone else gut it through bad books too? And if you do tap out, how long does it take you? Do you give it a chapter, a section, a paragraph, a sentence? Are there specific events that make you decide to nopetopus your way out, like a horrific and gratuitous violent sequence or the use of a particular hacky trope?

And most importantly, should I go with my instincts and continue reading the remaining 154 pages of smug, unfunny ‘comedy’? (Sample joke: “Imagine! A grown man treating the idea of exorcising the ‘Devil’ out of some mentally ill woman as a real thing! Crazy!”) (No, that’s not the setup for a joke. “Crazy!” is apparently his idea of a punchline.) Or should I just sell the damn thing to some other poor unsuspecting fool and get on with my life?

*looks around* Well, what do you know, they didn’t change the locks on me…!

Hello, citizens. My name is Justin. If you recall (and even if you don’t), I used to write about comics and stuff here, way back in 2009-2010. Do you remember when Conan O’Brien was hosting The Tonight Show and people were losing their damn minds about James Cameron’s Avatar? This was the cultural climate of the time during which I communicated important thoughts to you about Superman and the Dark Phoenix Saga, and also a small number of made-up facts about Beck.

Anyway, since we last spoke, I have had two children! There is a boy and a girl; the older one is six, and if you do the math, you will find a clue as to why I stopped blogging. There came a time when I had less disposable income to spend on comics and less time to spend reading them—and even less time to spend writing about them. I buy a few things here and there and keep in touch with the comics world by reading stuff on the usual comics news sources, much in the same way that you might follow a baseball team in your fine local newspaper without ever actually watching a game.

But I still think things about comics and feel things about comics, and every now and again I find I still want to talk about comics. However, my wife is pretty uninterested on the whole subject, and my son is not yet old enough to understand what I mean when I tell him that Jim Shooter was one of the best damn things ever to happen to Marvel, yet in the end he left them no choice but to ride him out on a rail in 1987. And so, I thought I would maybe start sharing these thoughts with you again.

Much has happened in the world in the past six years. For example, a terrifying madman is running for president! Have you heard about this? I will spare you the details because I want to talk about superhero comics, so you can perhaps draw your own parallels between the current unpleasantness and the Vote Lex 2000 storyline. (I still have my pin!)

Anyway, let’s talk about the big things.

DC rebooted its entire line, and then five years later wrote a kind of a narrative apology for doing so. I wish that DC Comics wasn’t so gosh-darn insecure about its superheroes. That’s what I think it comes down to, in the end. They have these characters that everyone knows and everyone loves, and yet they feel they constantly have to apologize for them. “You know, now that you mention it, maybe the kids who made fun of me for reading comics were right, and it is dumb that Superman wears trunks on the outside of his costume. Sorry it took us so long to get rid of them. By the way, do you think he should have been Superboy? I think he should have been Superboy and hung out with the Legion; sorry we got rid of that bit of history all those years ago. But on second thought, let’s do it over now and say he was never Superboy again. Sorry.”

They try so hard to convince you that Aquaman is cool. But don’t you already think Aquaman is cool? And if you don’t, is Geoff Johns going to change your mind by telling you, “No seriously, he really really really is, actually”? But anyway, All-Star Batman is neat and people seem to be cautiously enjoying Rebirth. But if sales go south again, I hope they’ll look at their characters and say, “Well, here are some things that are really neat about this character, let’s play around with them and bring them to the forefront,” rather than convincing themselves that Wonder Woman would sell like hotcakes if only they changed these three things about her origin.

Marvel made a bunch of movies that fans, critics, and non-fan audiences liked. Let me admit something to you: when Marvel announced their intention to make a series of individual movies that would feed into a combined Avengers movie, I was like 90% certain this was not going to happen. The deck, at the time, seemed pretty stacked against the idea. If any of the movies leading up to it had bombed, the whole thing would topple over, and then there’s the whole matter of figuring out how to make an Avengers movie itself. And then they got Joss Whedon to direct it, who at that time had a bit of a reputation for having projects fall apart on him.

But First Avenger was great (I’m kind of iffy about third act, though) and Thor was winning enough, and then Whedon came along and made it look like making an Avengers movie is the most obvious thing in the world. For real, you guys, Avengers was the real deal, the superhero movie you always wanted to see but which conventional wisdom told you could never be. Conventional wisdom, as it turns out, was wrong. I was wrong. And now the barriers are down and Spider-Man can show up in a Captain America movie that has Giant-Man and Iron Man and this all seems about right.

By contrast, DC made a movie that has Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman in it that I have no interest in seeing. Friends and family can scarcely believe this, but it’s true. Understand, it’s not so much that I am refusing to see this movie on some kind of principle, or because I took some sort of nonsense loyalist oath to Marvel movies. It’s just that every single thing I have read or heard or seen about it has told me, “You will not enjoy this on any level.” Even Suicide Squad I have a morbid curiosity about; I will possibly rent it. But Batman v. Superman…I’m not a professional critic and I don’t “owe” DC or Marvel anything. Why would I bother spending what little free time I have on something that looks so frustrating?

That said, DC has a bunch of TV shows on the air that have their problems but are so thoroughly charming that they overcome them. I don’t mean for this to be a backhanded compliment. Charm is important; possibly the most importing thing in adapting a superhero comic. Grant Gustin isn’t playing any Barry Allen I recognize, or even Wally West, but he’s really good at playing whoever this guy is who calls himself the Flash, and Jesse L. Martin’s Joe West has become one of my favorite TV dads of all time. Supergirl is very uneven and is totally hampered by having to hang around the DEO. (Did CBS think that their audience couldn’t handle a genre show that had no procedural element to it?) But Melissa Benoist is terrific and embodies everything you like in Supermythology. I’m curious to see if the move to the CW will allow a bit more of the “Can you believe they’re doing this on TV?” feeling you get from seeing King Shark or Gorilla Grodd on The Flash.

Marvel has made a push for diversity that people, by and large, seem to have accepted. When they announced Sam Wilson was going to take over as Captain America, the first thing I thought about was that eventually Steve Rogers would be back, and how was that going to look? “Well, thanks for holding down the fort, Temporary Black Replacement, but White Original is back!” But instead Marvel has decided…they are both Captain America? And Peter Parker and Miles Morales are both called “Spider-Man” and nobody much seems to mind? I wouldn’t have thought to go that route, but darn it, it’s working.

I have a sneaking suspicion these characters are being primed for the movies, which, if true, is clever forethought. Robert Downey Jr.’s not going to be able to be Tony Stark forever, and recasting the role risks a sort of George Lazenby Iron Man, but maybe you could transition the franchise to Ironheart if she turns out to be a hit? We’ve seen a proof-of-concept that audiences will accept a female Thor. Maybe this seems cynical, but sometimes the best way to get diversity advanced is to find a way for it to make it profitable, so I can’t complain.

There’s a lot more I didn’t cover (ComicBookResources redesigned their website in a way that made me sad!), but it was six whole years, and anyway, there will be time enough to talk about other things. I realize my little overview here looks a little harsh toward DC and pretty praising of Marvel. But would it surprise you to learn that I have trouble really connecting with Marvel books these days? And that this is not actually Marvel’s fault? Tune in next time, True Believer, for The Reason Why.

Recently got an email, the hey portion of which was (I am editing a bit for clarity):

“I’m not going to vote for Trump, obviously. But I have to admit I am leery of voting for Hillary. I mean – I understand that she’s been targeted by the right wing, I get it, but the Clinton Foundation stuff seems uncomfortably close to pay-for-play to me. Can you make me feel better about it?”

Sure. It’s actually remarkably easy.1

First off, a caveat: all of the following makes one assumption, which is “Hillary Clinton is extremely intelligent.” I’m not worried about her morality or lack thereof here, you can have your own beliefs about that. I personally think she’s a person who has a moral code she takes seriously, and has political positions – particularly with her views on the use of American military power – with which I disagree. But that’s me, you can think different about that. However, if you think Hillary Clinton is stupid – not “disagrees with me politically,” not “is crooked and amoral,” but stupid – then honestly, I don’t know what the point of this even is, you’re just a dipshit living in a mirror universe. But anyway.

Okay, caveat finished. Here are some important facts. Not theories about Hillary Clinton: just facts.

One: Hillary Clinton (and Bill) at this point have publicly released their tax returns for every year since 1977.2 Obviously their post-Presidential incomes are the most important. The thing about their returns is this: they are mostly very straightforward and kind of boring. The Clintons earn employment income from Bill and Hillary making speeches, and Hillary’s various government salaries as a Senator and then Secretary of State, and also there’s Bill’s presidential pension. Their investment strategies are as straightforward as their income: they have a large cash interest-bearing cash account and a large investment in a dividend-bearing mutual fund, and that’s it. They co-ordinate their charitable donations through a nonprofit charitable foundation, the Clinton Family Foundation (which is distinct from the Clinton Foundation that is the cause of all the concern and hubbub – that’s the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation): you can look at the CFF’s 2014 tax return here and there’s a list of charities they donate to at the end. A lot of Arkansas-based charities, unsurprisingly, but the charitable foundations of their alma maters are there too, their church in Chappaqua, New York, and the American Heart Association, and a few other things (and, yes, the WJ Clinton Foundation gets a lot from them as well). Basically the CFF is a bank account that serves as a hub for the Clintons’ charitable spending.

Two: For those concerned, a list of organizations that have paid Hillary to speak can be found here, albeit with some right-wing demonizing. But the list itself is correct.3

Three: Hillary mostly charges $225,000 per speech. This seems excessive to us proles, who don’t make that much in a year or even multiple years. However, it is certainly not excessive considering how much your average famous person charges for a speech. Here is one speaking organizer agency’s list of speaker fees of famous people who command over $200,000 per speech. You will note the list includes Dr. Oz, Chris Colfer, Nate Berkus, Kate Bosworth, Larry the Cable Guy, Steffi Graf, and a Dutch DJ named “Tiesto.” Hillary Clinton is much, much more famous than all of those people and is far more important/has done far more important things than all of them. It is entirely accurate to say that while speaking fees generally may be ridiculously high, Hillary Clinton’s are not particularly exceptional. (Bill, incidentally, apparently charges about $400,000-500,000 per speech. Of course, there are only four living ex-Presidents right now so it’s not unreasonable for them to have a higher rate.)

Four: The Clinton Foundation’s annual financial reports and tax forms are all public (they are here). They used to have a bad rating from CharityWatch because they had not publicly released all their records, but once they did release their records, CharityWatch gave them a very high rating. The Foundation’s overhead expenses constitute 12% of its spending; the average charity in the United States has overhead expenses of approximately 25%. The Clinton Foundation spends most of its money on, well, good works – their programs have been widely praised for their effectiveness – the Clinton Health Access Intiative, a subsidiary charity run by the Foundation which helps poor countries combat medical plagues such as HIV and malaria, gets the bulk of the operations money. There’s very little opportunity for the Foundation to enrich the Clintons (who haven’t been board members of it for years and do not draw a salary from the Foundation) or for that matter anybody else.

Five: There’s been some hubbub recently re: Clinton Foundation donors getting access to Hillary while she was Secretary of State, but the hubbub is mostly baseless. John Aravoisis pointed out yetserday that the AP’s reporting on this was actively getting numbers wrong to inflate the number of donors who actually met with Hillary. Others have pointed out that many of the donors who did meet with Hillary while she was SoS were people she would probably meet with anyway: the Crown Prince of Bahrain, who runs an OPEC member nation which sells oil to the United States, doesn’t really need to donate money to the Foundation to warrant a meeting with Hillary Clinton. Neither does Muhammad Yunis, Nobel Peace Prize-winning founder of the Grameen Bank. There’s evidence that a lot of Foundation donors wanted or hoped to meet with Hillary, but not a lot that most of them actually got to do so. As Kevin Drum summed up well enough:

So here are several possible takes on Hillary:

1. Powerful people all run in the same circles. They all know each other. They all ask favors from one another. Hillary is part of this circle.

2. People who are big party donors and big policy influencers have more access to politicians than, say, you or me. On this score, Hillary is a garden variety politician.

3. Donating to the Clinton Foundation was a well-known requirement for getting a meeting with Hillary.

I’ve simply seen no evidence of #3, and that includes the AP’s strained effort yesterday. Besides, if this were truly well known, by now someone would have come forward to spill the beans. As for #1 and #2, I don’t doubt that they’re as true of Hillary as they are of every other politician in the country. This might be an unfortunate state of affairs, but it’s certainly no scandal.

So, all of that having been said: why am I not concerned about Hillary Clinton’s corruption? I am not concerned about it because, for the most part, there’s no there there.

Look. The Clintons’ income is, as I said, straightforward. It’s boring in a very telling way, because the Clintons could be earning much more money than they do. Neither of them sits on any corporate boards, and there are any number of boards that would be willing to pay them millions of dollars a year to attend a few meetings. They have a very large amount of money, to be sure – those speaking fees add up (the large majority of their money, by the way, is Bill’s). But there are so many tax accounting tricks they could use to pay lower tax rates, to invest more actively for higher returns, and they don’t do any of it. Go look at their effective income tax rates on their disclosure page: they pretty much always pay regular combined federal and state tax. They live by choice in a relatively high-tax state (New York), but there are plenty of tricks to pretend that one lives in, say, Texas to pay no income tax. They haven’t bothered. And this isn’t something they did just recently – you can go look at their entire tax history. They’ve pretty much always invested conservatively, paid their fair share of income tax on their income, and donated about ten percent of their income to charity.

Similarly: the Clinton Foundation’s financial records are public, and they too are very straightforward. The Clintons get a lot of donations from people who want the Clintons to think kindly of them: that is politics, like it or not. But there is no real evidence to show that the Clintons have done anything with that money other than a remarkable amount of good for people who desperately need it, and no real evidence that Clinton Foundation donors were unfairly favoured as a result of their donations.

Bluntly: these are not the actions of people who are overly interested in money. These are the actions of people who got to a certain level of material comfort (and are happy to keep earning at that same rate) and said “this is fine.” There is simply nothing in their financial history to suggest that the Clintons are particularly avaricious.

This is generally the point where someone might say “but what about the speeches to Wall Street” and my response is “the Clintons were paid for a service, and provided that service.” (Most of their speeches, it should be noted, aren’t to financial institutions anyway.) Nobody asks Larry the Cable Guy if he’s beholden to Wall Street. Nobody says “Hillary got paid $225,000 to give a speech to the American Camping Association, is she in the pocket of Big Camping.” In order for Hillary to make money the rest of her life, she is simply not beholden to Wall Street. She can go make speeches to campers and other people at $200K a pop for the rest of her life and she’ll be fine. There’s simply no evidence that she needs Wall Street.

(Granted: one can argue that Hillary is too cozy with Wall Street, in the sense that many of the monied finance elite are her contemporaries. That is fair. But she is hardly unique in this, and indeed the same can be said of practically all American politicians who actually have to work within the system, as opposed to the Gary Johnsons and Jill Steins of the world who like to consider their political irrelevance proof of a higher moral standard, which it is not.)

Now, the final argument at this point is that Hillary is hungry not for money, but power – this is something both sides like to accuse her of, and of politicians generally. It is mostly crap. Most politicians are not, in fact, power-hungry, because power is an abstract concept. Politicians who want power want it for specific reasons, and the two reasons are to get money and to advance their own ideological beliefs. (Political power is actually really kind of bad at creating longterm security for yourself. Most people who go into politics can say, accurately, they would have made more money simply working in their chosen fields.) And all the evidence is that Hillary’s interest in power is that she wants to do things with it to make the world a better place – granted, for her own personal definition of “better place,” and you might take issue with that definition. But her desires are purely political, in the most morally neutral sense.

In short: there is no real evidence of Hillary Clinton’s “corruption” beyond the sort of penny-ante everyday elbow-rubbing with elites that are the natural byproduct of the American system. Which is shitty in its own way, to be sure, but Hillary is not exceptional in this regard. Frankly, the evidence as to her character trends in the other direction: the sheer boringness of her personal finances and the effectiveness of the Clinton Foundation at what it does shows that Hillary’s personal priority (and Bill’s) is to work for her general concept of the public good. And that’s why I don’t worry about Hillary Clinton.

1. As a Canadian obviously I do not technically have skin in this game, but as a Canadian I follow American politics as a rule because it’s more interesting, and also our economy depends largely on yours so I kind of do have skin in the game, just not a vote. Much of the rest of the world probably feels the same way. [↩]
2. The link only includes the last decade. [↩]
3. I leave it to the reader to consider what type of supposedly liberty-loving American patriot uses the word “blitzkrieg” to name their site. Ahem. [↩]