Well damn! In reference to yesterday's post... Amsterdam News is reporting ...

Reacting to the blaze, Harlemites were suspicious at best:

“Reverend Sharpton should know better that New York is still a Jim Crow town and he has no business trying to run for president,” said 75-year-old Mildred Williams.
Fred Davis warned that Sharpton should start to watch his back now that he has decided to play in the big league. “It’s a dangerous game and he should know how to play it,” Davis said.

Wow.

Read the whole thing. I'm not even sure paranoia is the right word--it's just assumed that there's a motivation behind the fire. Where to begin? And then, "This marks the second time Sharpton’s office has been destroyed by fire. About eight years ago, his office on 125th Street also burned, coincidentally as he ran for U.S. Senate." Instinct #1 says if anybody's doing this on purpose it would be Sharpton. As implied previously, it wouldn't be the first time something burned for his political career. Just to be clear, Sharpton hasn't said anything along the lines of the quotes above--all the quotes and implications are from his supporters.

To update the information from yesterday, "Fire officials told reporters about two hours after the two-alarm blaze was reported that it looked suspicious. But some 45 minutes later, they changed the story, saying that the incident was still being investigated." Sigh. This will go on for a while.

Here's this--the office is "...popularly known as the House of Justice." Yeah, this is a hyperbole-free zone! What time does Green Lantern show up for work? Where was the Flash when the fire started? I imagine a Jumbotron in the center of a huge computer-filled room where Sharpton takes the first reports of giant robots stomping through third-world villages and a voice that sounds just like a voice from last week's alert, but with a bad Indian accent, saying "Help us Reverend Sharpton! We are powerless against this menace!"

If I wasn't my only reader I'd come up with a contest to name my apartment.

There's been a fire at Sharpton's headquarters. No word on if he incited it or not. Okay, there actually is word--just an electrical fire. So I wonder who he'll blame it on.

NRO's Mr. J. Goldberg has revealed to us the Geek Hierarchy Chart. It's mostly accurate, but due to the dynamics of comic shops these days, I'd have to add the tensions between gaming types and comic book types. If I remember right there's also the tension between role-playing "craps-with-math" gamers have some issues with the card-based "poker-without-money" gamers.

Got some comic day impressions here. You can get reviews any place! But here you get "impressions." Lucky you. For those of you outside of geekdom, Wednesdays are when the new comic books arrive at comic shops. I assume there is a delay for Alaska and Hawaii. My rules are: I gotta read everything I got today before I talk about it. If it's good enough or bad enough (rarely bad enough) that it really sticks out, you get to hear about it. Thank you for letting me tell you what to think.

Y: The Last Man is this week's standout. Probably this year's standout. It's Preacher-grade fun with a deceptively simple concept. Yorick's probably the best character to come along since Jesse Custer, too. Not even going to bother with this month's plot synopsis--everything goes by story arcs now, and this is the second one (actually the first "real" one with what I assume is going to be the recurring cast). Brian Vaughan's got a good knack for characterization and dialogue and a firm grasp on born-in-the-70's pop culture. Read it or be dumb.

Batman by Jeph Loeb and Mister James Lee. Sure I could just say "Batman" but the creative team is the real killer there. I think these two could team up on Rocket Raccoon: Stripes and retailers wouldn't be able to keep it on the stands. The first issue of Uncanny X-Men I ever bought was #269, the second in Jim Lee's legendary run. And after he left for Wildcats and Wildstorm and Wildwhatnot, nobody ever drew Psylocke, Rogue, or Wolverine correctly. People, that was over ten years ago and Rogue still doesn't look right. Back to Batman. Good to see Lee back in action and Loeb is laying on the cliffhangers in this arc. I likes it all a lot.

After lounging through Joe Kelly's, err, "competent" run on Uncanny X-Men, Chuck Austen has been just dreamy. I wasn't surprised since I've never read anything he's done that didn't leave me genuinely happy, but Austen and the X-Men are just great. Got one of those sad little surprises at the end and Austen really makes it mean something. Long live Mr. Austen!

Fantastic Four... If you had told me ten years ago that I'd be reading FF, I'd have doffed my glow-in-the-dark Ghost Rider cover at you. Truth be told, I was surprised to find out in the late 90's that Marvel was still printing it. Mark Waid saved comicdom from its morbid little "edgy" pity-party with Kingdom Come, so making the Fantastic Four relevant, delightful, and meaningful probably drew nothing more than three beads of sweat off of him. We should be giving this man our thanks and buying everything he writes--those are two separate actions, people.

Back to our regularly scheduled garbage.

I'm not sure I agree with Mr. Gingrich on this one. His stipulation is that the exportation of American culture through movies, TV, and radio, has given the rest of the world a bad impression of us. I'm not going to defend popular culture (except comic books). It doesn't need defending--people like it. If they think the travails of four slutty New York women or a bunch of people in the "waste management" business is Metaphorical America, chances are we aren't going to convince them otherwise. If they can't handle Britney Spears, there's not much we can do for them.

The fact is the US isn't the only country peddling a vision of the US. This is true for just about any country. I'm not just railing on pissy little Reuters putting scare quotes around our issues or France calling us vulgar bullies--if that formula sells, more power to them. No, the countries with the populations that despise us the most are fed base lies by their governments and any attempt at deviation from that norm is met with a dark room with a big drain in the floor. Maybe that's the real issue. And a lot of these places... we give them money no matter what they say about us!

And I don't want to get mean here, but perhaps Mr. Gingrich isn't the best individual to chide us on our sexual immorality trade. I was a big fan back in '94, but he turned out to be another in the long line of Republicans sent to make us look like hypocrites. Way to fight the good fight, Newton.

Ruminate on that.

Mexico has asked the World Court to stop executions for Mexicans on U.S. death row. Ah yes, that one big U.S. death row. Tellyawhat, Mexico: Why don't you get that economy cranking, take care of the corruption in your economic and justice systems, and stop encouraging your expatriate citizens to break U.S. laws (not just the murder ones--let's start with... hmm... the immigration ones), not to mention acting as agents of a foreign power within our borders. THEN you can lecture us.

Now I'm dead sure the "World Court" is going to side with Mexico. So Mexico will have beat us. In a "court" whose legitimacy the U.S. hasn't recognized. With no real power to back up its bloviations. Beaten. Scared!

David Brooks takes a really nice swipe at the anti-SUV punks in OpinionJournal. Comes down to geeks v. jocks, and the jocks always win because, well, they're jocks. I've thought about this sort of thing, especially the puritanical elements of the Left. Mostly came down to Other People Were Having Fun and That Just Won't Do, but I really missed the other side of the equation. Mr. Brooks does not.