Occupy Wall Street is to the left of the Democratic Party and many liberal groups but has not shown the degree of extremism seen on the right. As noted above, the local Occupy group immediately repudiated the use of violence and did not try to defend those who promoted violence.

"In contrast," he notes, "it has been common for many in the conservative movement to show reluctance to dissociate themselves from those who promote violence:"

We saw this in the reaction of conservative bloggers to a report from the Department of Homeland Security on far right extremists. We were reminded of the frequent use of violent rhetoric by the conservative movement following the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. Ron Paul has pandered to neo-Nazis and white supremacists to raise money, bringing in elements to the conservative movement which would have been ostracized in past years before the move by the conservative movement to the extreme right.

Their attempts at political philosophy are just as unflattering. A Chronicle piece on right-wing political philosophy looks at Mark Levin's best seller, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America and asks, "What gives? How can so bad a book, on so serious a topic, sell so well?" After rebutting the claim of mainstream-media blacklisting, the author snarks that "Ameritopia is really Ameritastrophe. It's disastrously bad from beginning to end:"

Levin's tone throughout is alarmist--undoubtedly the chief lure of such books to angry readers bent on demonizing their political opponents. And he is nothing if not a name-caller. Ameritopia, like many polemical bad books in political philosophy, teems with misused abstractions and contains few empirical examples. [...]

When Fox Business News anchor Neil Cavuto asked him if Obama was a socialist, Levin replied that the president is "a Marxist." Only a benighted, philosophically illiterate ideologue could hang the sign of "utopian" on Obama, whose pragmatist bent, exhibited in endless compromise and readjustment of hoped-for goals, makes the judgment ludicrous.

Speaking of alarmist utopian ideologues, in Ayn Rand or Jesus, Mike Lux examines Paul Ryan's sudden disavowal of his former devotion to Rand:

This is the ultimate irony in American political life right now, the conservatives who swear on a stack of Bibles that they worship Jesus Christ when they really bow down to the philosophy of Ayn Rand and the golden idol of the free market to be placed at the center of all other things. They preach of an American exceptionalism blessed by a Christian God, and call for America to be a shining city on a hill which can be an example to the entire world.

Their vision of exceptionalism is a nightmare of Social Darwinism, with Supply-Side Jesus the object of official veneration--and they want to paint liberals as radicals preaching a discredited ideology with violent consequences.

Talk about projection.

His style was completely original. His characters flew across the page with fierce purpose and yet total abandon, fighting their hearts out against a backdrop of crazy machinery and abstract depictions of elemental energy. Though lacking in finesse, the drawings possessed a brute force that made the reader feel a pulse-pounding urgency that other cartoonists could not elicit. Every panel propelled the story forward at warp speed. Other cartoonists' work hit you with a water pistol; Kirby's slammed you with a fire hose.

Kirby's most creatively fertile decade (the 1960s) saw an output of about 800 pages of artwork per year, from The Avengers, Fantastic Four, and the X-Men to The Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, and Nick Fury. Later decades saw Kirby singled out for onerous contractual restrictions, and his heirs denied any share of Marvel's $4 billion sale to Disney in 2009:

What makes this situation especially hard to stomach is that Marvel's media empire was built on the backs of characters whose defining trait as superheroes is the willingness to fight for what is right. It takes a lot of corporate moxie to put Thor and Captain America on the big screen and have them battle for honor and justice when behind the scenes the parent company acts like a cold-blooded supervillain.

Hero Complex introduces some memories of Jack Kirby's son Neal this way:

"The Avengers," which unites the title characters from four film franchises -- Thor, Captain America, Iron Man and the Hulk - to save Earth from a cosmic threat. The only person who had a hand in creating all of those characters was the late Jack Kirby, a titan figure in comics, but his heirs weren't invited to the premiere; their presence would be awkward considering their legal quest to reclaim the rights to hundreds of his Marvel creations.

Neal writes, "I think about Dad a lot lately, especially when I see Thor, Captain America, Magneto, or the Hulk on a movie poster:"

My father drew comics in six different decades and filled the skies of our collective imagination with heroes, gods, monsters, robots and aliens; most of the truly iconic ones are out of the first half of the 1960s, when he delivered masterpieces on a monthly basis. I treasure the fact that I had a front-row seat for that cosmic event.

[Avengers #4 cover by Jack Kirby (1964), featuring the return of Captain America, a character he co-created in 1941]

Back to the movie, Comics Alliance speculates "it's not unlikely that The Avengers will earn a hundred million dollars on its opening day alone" and notes that "This represents a pretty big payday to a lot of people:"

...shamefully, the people who aren't making a big profit from these movies are the people (and the families of the people) who did the essential work of creating them in the first place. It's not just Jack Kirby, either, or (Black Widow and Hawkeye co-creator) Don Heck, but also Steve Engelhart, Peter David, Herb Trimpe, Jim Steranko, Roy Thomas and dozens more - the artists and writers who refined and defined the characters appearing in this movie, who fleshed out the original creations and molded them into the figures we cheer for when we see them on the screen.

Some very sensible people are calling for a boycott of this film on those grounds, but I think it's fairly obvious that a boycott of idealistic comic fans isn't going to accomplish much.

CA suggests instead that "as a thank you to the creators who brought you these characters in the first place, who gave you something to enjoy so much -- you match your ticket price as a donation to The Hero Initiative?"

THI is a charity which provides essential financial assistance to comic book professionals who have fallen on hard times. For decades, the comic industry provided no financial safety net to its employees, most of whom it regarded only as freelancers and journeymen, meaning they were offered no health insurance, no unemployment insurance, no retirement plans -- none of the financial support most of us enjoy from our jobs and careers. A small donation will help this agency provide a valuable safety net in times of need to these beloved entertainers.

O -- Gas prices:
(1) High gas prices are due to President Obama's poor energy policies, and since they're high on his watch, it's up to him to resolve it.
(2) They're only dropping now, because of the Republicans in Congress, and Obama doesn't deserve any credit for that.
(3) Oh, and when gas prices were at an all-time high in July 2008 under George W. Bush, that wasn't his fault, it was the fault of the Democrats in Congress. See how this works?

Responding to this Daily Caller piece, Chris Mooney points out that ignoring contrary evidence is typical of right-wing rants. In addition to reality inversion and their penchant for political misinformation, he points out this "deep irony:"

If conservatives are so open-minded, then where is the Daily Caller's discussion of all the relevant counter-evidence?

For example, DC's analysis of political knowledge surveys is flawed:

The widest partisan gap in the survey came in at 30 points when only 46 percent of Democrats -- but 76 percent of Republicans --- correctly described the GOP as "the party generally more supportive of reducing the size of federal government."

Conservatives posture against financial profligacy, but their governance is radically different. Witness their support for deficit spending when it's driven by top-heavy tax cuts, pharma-friendly Medicare benefits, a bloated military budget, unfunded wars overseas, and a drug war at home. I could easily see how Democrats surveyed would be thinking to themselves, "Sure, they talk about reducing the federal government--but they don't do it!"

I would hardly say that "liberals don't understand how conservatives think because they don't recognize conservatives' additional intuitions about loyalty, authority and sanctity." As far their beliefs are concerned, out perceived lack of understanding may well be due to their inability to provide factual support for them.

No worries about future legal changes or technological discontinuities suddenly depriving me of books or making them unreadable. No fuzziness about whether you own or are just renting a book. Purchased and mine; simple and easy.

So it should be, for a book is far more than a mere transmission mechanism for words. It is a memory, an entertainment and a form. [...] The look, the touch, the smell, the convenience, the memories - they make books lovable.

A long view of the movement - beyond day-to-day sit-ins and arrests - reveals no "typical occupier" in New York City. Unless "typical" simply means that they are unhappy with and want to change one or more aspects of U.S. government or business institutions. Some advocates are crystal-clear in their critique and reform goals. Others are virtually opaque with vagaries.

That inevitably makes the loosely connected movement hard to parse from the outside.

Josh Harkinson writes that "the Occupy movement's May Day protests were a resounding success:"

...with demonstrations held in more than 100 cities and a march in Manhattan that drew some 30,000 people--more than any Occupy event last fall. But if the movement is going to sustain the kind of momentum that captured the nation's attention six months ago, it must begin to evolve in a different direction. [...] What Occupy really ought to do if it intends to live on is plunge directly into electoral politics on the local, state, and congressional level. It ought to co-opt the Democratic Party.

Occupy Election Day!

Right-wing America is old, white, rural, and religious -- a cohort that's shrinking with every passing year, and is even now in the process of being swamped by a tide of voters who are younger, urban, ethnically diverse, and largely non-churchgoing. It was that tide, mobilized, that elected Obama -- the first time it's been heard from, but by no means the last.

In 2010, she feared that "the far right [would] manage to consolidate power fast enough to hijack our democracy entirely, and institute the fascist theocracy of its dreams," but what else, aside from the glacial pace of genetic replacement, changed her mind?

Finally, after years of impotence, average Americans have done the one thing that will make all the difference: they woke up and got pissed. Wisconsin was the first sign. Then came Occupy. Now, this spring, it's sprouting up everywhere, to the point where our would-be fascists can't take a step anywhere without getting their feet tangled up by protestors determined to hold them to account.

The Right's sense that "the clock is running out" leads to desperation:

It's rushing to consolidate its gains as fast as it can, in the hope of slamming America as far to the right as possible in the time it has left -- and also building big, ugly legal obstacles that will make it much harder to undo the damage when the younger, more progressive wave that's rolling in finally does assume full control. [...]

Now that the pushback has started, the GOP has locked itself into a self-destructive cycle in which no change of course is possible. As long as it keeps spinning this way, the odds of a Fascist America will continue to diminish by the month [although] we can expect to see an uptick in violent retribution as the most militant members of the far right make a desperate last stand for their vision of the country's future.

I used basic arithmetic and some minimal Googling to calculate the carbon footprint of the average American reading an average number of average novels at an average speed both in print and on an iPad.

I determined that it takes five years (32.5 books) of steady eBook consumption (on the same device) to match the ecological footprint of reading the same number of print books the old fashioned way.

Here's his graph:

"If you live in a household with multiple eReaders," he writes, "your family's carbon emissions are more than 600-750% higher per year than they would be if you invested in a bunch of bookshelves or, better yet, a library card."