I don’t mean to make too much of Steve Kornacki’s Salon piece about how close John Edwards came to the presidency–I understand what he’s getting at and his macro point is valid. (When you look back through modern political history, it’s amazing/terrifying how many people get close to power and then later turn out to be crazy.)

But I think Kornacki has it slightly backward: The closest Edwards got the presidency was when he made it onto the Democratic ticket as John Kerry’s vp. I followed Edwards pretty closely during the two cycles in which he ran for president and it was awfully clear that he was a two-faced candidate. Sometimes he was very, very good with voters. Sometimes he was dreadful. If you believe that raw political skill matters in these things, then it’s hard to believe that Edwards was ever destined to win anything. (On his own, that is.)

I hate to keep harping on this, but if you want to measure the skill-set of a politician, it’s not that hard. A politician’s primary job is to get more votes than the other guy. So just look at their record in campaigns. Good politicians win more–many more–races than they lose. Bill Clinton, Harry Reid, Al D’Amato, and John McCain all have one thing in common: They won a lot of races.

John Edwards, on the other hand, was [not] good at winning elections. Not very good at all. Sure, he had the ability to self-fund, but over the course of his entire political career, he won two races: In 1998 he beat a 70-year-old first-term incumbent to win his Senate seat. And in 2004 he won the South Carolina primary. That’s it. Lifetime, that’s something like 2-45.

My point is, politicians who lose election after election after election do not tend to suddenly start winning elections and go on a tear. Despite what journalists and political professionals thought of John Edwards, the candidate, voters never liked him.

Over at the Standard I’ve got a long piece about the Great Comic Book  Bubble of 1993. Surely you’ve been dying to read about this epiphenomenon for years.

(The art is from my collection; it’s kind of fun.)

Steve Sailer goes yard with this one:

You always hear about the wonders of “Director’s Cut,” but I’d like to see an “Editor’s Cut” of quite a few movies. For example, how much more exciting would a 2-hour version of “King Kong” be than the 3-hour drag Peter Jackson released? You could lose about 45 minutes of “Tree of Life” and the overall movie would be twice as good.

Galley Friend D.M. sends along this truly fantastic trailer for George Lucas Strikes Back. Total effing hotness.

Santino has found a TheFireRises YouTube channel. Can’t tell if this is real, or fan-made. Or, for that matter, what the crowd-chant audio layer is.

In case it wasn’t clear with that Superman-renounces-citizenship stunt, DC Comics is completely out of control. They’re now going to reset 50 of their titles to issue #1 in September, redesigning character costumes, attitudes, etc.

It’s not like they didn’t just reset Flash and Wonder Woman and Justice League of America in the last few years. It’s not like they didn’t just “kill” Batman. And run a weekly pub-sched maxi series (52)all leading up to an absolutely final, last-ditch “universe defining” miniseries (Final Infinity Identity Super-Duper Crisis).

DC has lost now lost both the ability and the desire to tell stories. At this point, I suspect that the only thing which would cause Warners to rethink this pathetic division is a $50M opening weekend for Green Lantern.

(For what it’s worth, my guess is that GL will actually do great business, but I’m rooting against it on the hope that catastrophe might mean decapitation of the current DC regime.)

How bad is it? My non-nerd lawyer friend K.T. emails in that this is obviously “the New Coke of comics.” The letter from DC to retailers is even more pathetic:

In addition, the new #1s will introduce readers to a more modern, diverse DC Universe, with some character variations in appearance, origin and age. All stories will be grounded in each character’s legend – but will relate to real world situations, interactions, tragedy and triumph.

This epic event will kick off on Wednesday, August 31st with the debut of a brand new JUSTICE LEAGUE #1, which pairs Geoff Johns and Jim Lee, together for the first time. (Yes, this is the same week as FLASHPOINT #5.)

We think our current fans will be excited by this evolution, and that it will make jumping into the story extremely accessible to first-time readers – giving them a chance to discover DC’s characters and stories.

We are positioning ourselves to tell the most innovative stories with our characters to allow fans to see them from a new angle. We have taken great care in maintaining continuity where most important, but fans will see a new approach to our storytelling.

Some of the characters will have new origins, while others will undergo minor changes. Our characters are always being updated; however, this is the first time all of our characters will be presented in a new way all at once.

You can practically hear the editorial meeting as it must have taken place:

GJ: Jeez, people really loved those Ultimate books. The characters were so edgy.

DD: Yeah, they were super edgy. I think Quicksilver and Wanda were doing it. I mean, like doing it.

BH: But they were still brother and sister?

DD: Yeah! See? That’s edge. Kids love edge. You’ve gotta have edge if you’re going to sell comics. The only problem we had with sales of 52 and Trinity was that they just didn’t have enough edge.

GJ: So what if we did our own Ultimate universe? We could, I don’t know, revamp the costumes. I’ll get Lee to draw the women even sexier. Wait until you see what he does with Power Girl once we take the restricter plate off of him.

DD: Gotta go edgier than that.

GJ: Okay. How about we make Superman gay?

DD: Edgier.

GJ: And black.

DD: Now you’re getting close.

GJ: Well . . . we could put the Justice League back in Detroit and get some more Hispanic and gypsy characters.

DD: That’s fine, but what I’m thinking is this–and idea so big and sharp, it just cuts glass: We make the entire DCU into an Ultimate universe.

BH: Wait . . .

DD: The whole thing. Start every issue at #1; re-imagine all the characters. Scrap all the old, boring stuff. New continuities. New mythos. New origins. New everything! And best of all, new costumes. Because that’s why people buy comic books–for the costumes. We’ll out-Ultimate the Ultimates.

GJ: Suck-it, Stan.

DD: I know, right? Now maybe we could get some holograms on the covers of the new #1s . . .

Sometimes it feels like Steve Jobs wants me to leave Apple and pack it in for PC land. In an FT story about scareware coming to the Mac OS, there’s this:

For Mac owners running Safari in the default mode that enables downloading of “safe” files, the malicious programs began installing automatically and then prompted the users for their passwords to finish the job. If they complied, the software ran when the machine restarted, reporting bogus infections and asking for payment.

Apple’s initial response to waves of callers to its AppleCare tech support lines was unhelpful, according to leaked internal instructions posted on the tech news site ZDNet.

Staff were told to neither confirm nor deny infections and to steer callers to Apple’s online stores for security products.

As pointless as Twitter is for private use, it’s commercial uses are pretty interesting. For instance, if you’re a coffee shop you can push out alerts that you’re having a sale on baked treats at 2:00 pm. Twitter is basically an advertising pipeline that (1) you don’t have to pay for, and (2) your customers ask to be included in. Win-win!

Since presidential campaigns are essentially really big, abstract sales operations, it makes sense that they use Twitter, too. Again, you can see lots of interesting uses: fundraising, alerts on candidate appearances, rapid response.

But it strikes me that having a candidate use Twitter to attack his opponent is–at least at the presidential level–a really, really bad idea.

There’s a story out this morning about Mitt Romney trying to elevate himself (surprise!) by having pizza sent to Obama’s campaign HQ. Yes, Mitt, we get it–you’re such a front-runner that it’s like you’re already going mano-a-mano in the general election and all the other Republican are just minor side-shows. But buried in the story is a nugget that reflects even worse on Tim Pawlenty:

Presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty also took a swipe at Obama today with this tweet:  “@barackobama sorry to interrupt the European pub crawl, but what was your Medicare plan?”

Ugh. Presidents–even today in the internet/Facebook/Twitter age–act presidential. You know what presidents don’t do? They don’t attack their rivals with the kind of drive-by snark you see on gossip sites and blogs. I’m all for Tim Pawlenty (or anyone else–even Mitt Romney!) savaging Obama at every opportunity by pointing out the administration’s incoherent foreign policy, the continuing housing disaster, rising inflation, awful unemployment numbers, and total disconnect from America. Pawlenty could have simply Twit-picked these two pictures from Tuesday and asked if the president would come back to look after the people of Joplin:

But the low-rent Twitter flame should be beneath anyone who aspires to the White House.