Yes!

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 0 Comment
A screen cap from Friday's Missoulian

A screen cap from Friday’s Missoulian

The best-case scenario in the Ravalli County treasury fiasco got a little more likely over the weekend. Part One—Valerie Stamey turns out to have done almost no work at all between her appointment in September and her suspension in February—is already in place. That’s more fun than the news consuming public reasonably could have asked for. But dare we hope for Part Two? I am referring, of course, to the unlikely but entertaining possibility that county commissioners really have been illegally selling tax liens, as Stamey alleges. Probably they haven’t. But now the FBI is involved, so oh man—if they have.

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Friday links! Human endeavor edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments

Epic sport and games fails

Ah, the human: so much more ambitious than the object, yet so much less reliable. It seems that wherever you look, human beings are trying various stuff. Be it opening a pickle jar or writing a play about an ambivalent Danish prince, people can’t get enough endeavoring. Does every endeavor succeed? Probably, is what I’m thinking, but let’s just run the numbers and make…okay, nope. It turns out history is littered with failed endeavors, be it opening a pickle jar or writing a comedy series about a handsome lawyer. Today is Friday, and you don’t know until you try. Won’t you hurtle down the ramp with me?

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Paul Ryan invites us to save money by embracing false dichotomy

By Dan Brooks in lying 0 Comment
Paul Ryan, who has not held a job since 1999

Paul Ryan, who has worked in politics since graduating college in 1992.

After over-composing to make deadline yesterday, I am enjoying my first semi-day off in weeks. While I propagate a culture of laziness and entitlement, how about we check in with a guy who knows all about that stuff from the perspective of righteous election? I refer of course to Paul Ryan, who recently complained that poverty is largely due to people in the inner cities “not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In case this blog post falls into a time machine set for 1954, “inner cities” is futurespeak for “people who are not white.” We need to stop spending money to help them, or this poverty thing might spread to another demographic.

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Merkel Effect strikes Senate Intelligence Comittee

By Dan Brooks in War on Terror 1 Comment
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the results of a hoagie-eating contest.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the results of a hoagie-eating contest.

Yesterday, Dianne Feinstein told the Senate that the CIA had hacked into and deleted files from computers the Intelligence Committee used to investigate agency waterboarding and interrogation techniques, calling the spying a “defining moment” in the oversight of American intelligence. It sure felt that way. Back when whistleblower traitor Edward Snowden revealed that the agencies were spying on the American people, Feinstein vigorously defended the secret electronic surveillance as an indispensable tool in the fight against terrorism. Later, when we learned that the NSA and CIA had also spied on foreign heads of state including Angela Merkel, our elected representatives lost their minds—a hypocrisy Snowden identified in Feinstein again yesterday. Call it the Merkel Effect.

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President appears on “Between Two Ferns”

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media, Uncategorized 4 Comments

That’s the president of the nation, not just California, appearing in a Funny or Die video with Zach Galifianakis. He would be the first sitting president to appear on an internet humor program, were it not for James K. Polk’s hilarious “What Treaty?” telegraph comedy routine with Sitting Bull. Still, it seems important that the president of the United States would do a low-budget video with a waning film buffoon. It’s something Reagan probably would never have—oh, wait.

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