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asked for his take on Russell’s plight?

"A policy is a policy. The guys know the rules."

That sort of shit drives me crazy; the fall-back position of "Hey, those are the rules… I can’t do anything." How about this? How about looking at the big picture? If the guy’s got bottles of steroids falling out of his pockets, or looks like he’s re-enacting the last twenty minutes of Scarface , sure, sit him down. But failing to return a phone call fast enough?

I just hope there’s more to this one, is all, because that’s just stupid.

Another story that just had me shaking my head is the latest siege that Berkeley, California’s mayor and city council brought on themselves, by refusing to meet with a group of visiting Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts from Berkeley’s sister city of Sakai, in Japan. Of course, the decision to refuse to meet these travelling innocents and show them gracious American hospitality was made because of an abstract protest against the American Boy Scout’s ban on homosexuals. Japanese Scouts have no policy on homosexuals, but, according to a story in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle , since the troop would be accompa nied by Berkeley Scouts, the mayor and a city councilman took the oppor tunity to play up the fact that they just weren’t meeting with any group who discriminates against anyone. Which, this time, of course, proved nothing except to make the mayor and the city council look like idiots to the Pacific Rim. And this is in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, mind you, which styles itself as a haven for all. It’s unbelievable. So politicians trying to make political hay at the expense of innocents is a bad thing; check. Which the mayor and the city council might have realized had they used a bit of common sense. I’m a big fan of Warren Ellis and Chris Weston and Laura dePuy and Mike Heisler’s Ministry of Space , and I’d love to get a copy of the first issue for my dad to read, but it’s been sold out since the first week it came out. The fact that it’s unavailable absolutely stuns me. Now, like the Darrell Russell story above, I’m sure there’s a lot more to the tale than what is immediately obvious to comic book industry observers, but with a dash of common sense and just a pinch of think-it-through, we could have all enjoyed as much Ministry of Space as we could have han dled. This last one is a head-scratcher, too.

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