They know it.

Turnabout is fair play to them.

I truly fear for the Japanese with an ascendant China. They have not forgiven them for the humiliations and terrors of WW2, nor have they forgotten the humiliation and terrors heaped upon them by the European colonial powers. The only good news here is that the US actually hasn't really done anything to wrong China in all our history of interaction.

I normally wouldn't defend Carter, but the guy was a nuclear engineer.

That said, technological smarts =/= economic or political smarts. I've met plenty of smart and well educated people who you'd never want to put in charge of things. Carter seems to be one of those.

Been there, done that, got the degree.

I actually got one professor to shut up after constantly ripping her apart, to the point where she would get this look if I was in her class and she was about to go on one of those tangents.

Err, I know this is old, but for posterity:

A Federal Judge's ruling ONLY applies to the area they are given charge over. So that judge in Illinois' ruling only applies in his jurisdiction, not anywhere else. The only court that applies to the entire US is the Supreme Court.

Though a quick way to get Supreme Court review is to have two different rulings on the same matter in two different regions. When this happens at the Circuit Court level a Supreme Court review is pretty much ensured.

Better still:

Move the conference to a nice posh hotel just over the river in Virginia.

Then exercise your right to Open Carry in Virginia. I have my doubts that the Occupy folks will try to physically assault armed folks. And if they do, well...

...sucks to be them, don't it.

If you read the comics, Spidey was mopey a long time before the Progs made it popular to be so, it is actually a part of the character.

Job problems and trouble with the cops were also done back in the original comics, in the 70s there was an entire period where technically Spidey was an actual fugitive (he'd not actually done anything wrong, I don't remember the exact details, but I think it was a misunderstanding or a frame-up), so again, not new.

A huge amount of human emotion comes from the eyes and mouth.

If you look at many of the Spidey comics, pay attention to the mask eyes. It's sometimes subtle, sometimes exaggerated, but they change with his emotion, narrow when appropriate, widen when surprised. Many masked super heroes have this kind of "malleable mask" and it's never commented on because it's a venue (not genre, as all comics with masked characters tend to do this, not just super-hero comics) convention designed to help the reader connect with the character. When animated, a similar venue convention applies, and so it is never noticed or commentated on there.

Live action, however, is limited by being live action, and cannot do it. Further, when a movie is live-action, the venue convention is that things should behave generally more like real life than comics and animation. The shifts in the size and shape of Spidey's mask would be noticed and be jarring, it wouldn't help the story, and would detract from the overall picture.

So the mask, unfortunately, has to come off.

Ack, I just realized that I forgot the quotes around "no-name" up there to indicate the sarcasm.

For the not-so-much comic geeks out there, Steve Ditko was the artist behind such characters as:

The Question
Blue Beetle
Dr. Strange

And last, but certainly not least:

Spider-Man

Always shoot for the Moon.

Even if you miss, you land among the stars.

Well, back in the late Golden Age/Silver Age of Comics, one of the Big Names was this no-name artist named Steve Ditko, he is/was an avowed Objectivist, so not a old school Conservative, not a liberal either, and he left his belief in absolute morals on many of the characters he worked on. Further, in general the early era set the tone for how comics were understood by the population.

In the Bronze Age and Dark Age of Comics we have fewer defined allies, but the pop-culture comic book heroes that people know and love are not from those periods, but rather are the Golden and Silver Age versions. So when movies and TV shows are made, they are reflective of that period rather than the "darker and edgier" of those periods.