If you’re looking for a good new comic book to read (and who isn’t) let me recommend Powers by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming. I read the first, second, seventh, eighth, and ninth trade paperbacks last week at the beach and it’s really solid stuff through-and-through. The basic premise is that you’re reading noir-style detective stories focused on two homicide comics working the “powers-related” beat. It’s a neat way of dealing with super hero themes, iconography, and other good comics-y stuff without making it a super hero book per se, since it has much more the look, feel, and tone of crime and detective stories.

The complete first story arc, “Who Killed Retro Girl?” is available online.

Okay, I forgot to tune this in until very late in the game and came on board just in time to see Joe Biden saying something moronic about Darfur.

On the “defining rich” question, Edwards kicked Obama’s ass even though he spent most of his time talking about the misguided element of his college tuition scheme.

On the deficit, Bill Richardson is sounding a bit like a slick Republican and I don’t mean that in a good way.

It’s too bad that Dennis Kucinich is such a weirdo, since while I don’t really agree with what he has to say, his message deserves to be taken a lot more seriously than it is.

Now my roommate is changing back to the MTV Movie Awards.

It’s good New Republic versus bad New Republic and I’m afraid that while it’s not much of a competition it’s certainly fun to watch.

Via Scott Horton, Congressional Quarterly‘s Jeff Stein notes that the geniuses in the Defense Department seem to have been deliberately courting US-China conflict:

While Bush publicly continued the one-China policy of his five White House predecessors, Wilkerson said, the Pentagon “neocons” took a different tack, quietly encouraging Taiwan’s pro-independence president, Chen Shui-bian. “The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”

This is, of course, no surprise. Francis Fukuyama has recounted that during the 1990s doldrums Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan discussed the fact that their “Neo-Reaganite” foreign policy required a new enemy, and that people in their circle debated whether to make the enemy China or Islamism. They reached the conclusion that China was the best option, only to reverse course after 9/11 and put the emphasis on Islamism. In either case, they regard US-China conflict — and, indeed, conflict between the United States and other countries generally — as something to be encouraged.

I agree with almost every word of Fareed Zakaria’s latest essay on what the country needs to do, post-Bush, in terms of restoring America’s position in the world.