Friday links! This sounds familiar edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 23 Comments

Mike Thurau—sorry it's pixelated. It's his headshot, because he's a columnist.

 

Yesterday afternoon, gentleman of leisure Aaron Galbraith sent me a link to this post on TabooJive.com,* in which Mike Thurau considers an odd phenomenon of the iPhone’s autocorrect feature. I was familiar with the name Mike Thurau from our own Combat! blog Comments section; I was also familiar with the post, since I wrote it. The beauty of the internet is that you can copy an entire piece of writing, paste it into a text document with your name at the top, and send that text document to some editor without even having to type anything. Okay, you have to type the query email—“attached is a short piece about an amusing iPhone function my friend discovered”—but there are a lot of templates out there. I initially thought that the Norberto King thing was the only piece of my writing Mike Thurau had plagiarized. Then I found this select-all copy of a Combat! blog post about unboxing videos. Then I found a whole bunch more.

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Spam blocker mailbag

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 6 Comments

Here at Combat! blog, we pride ourselves on the quality of our Comments section. Pound for pound, critical thought for critical thought, Combat! commenters are not only physically attractive but mentally acute. I attribute it to either the strength of our public school system or Aksimet, the WordPress plugin that blocks the literally dozens of spam comments made on each post every day. Occasionally, Aksimet will mistake one of you fine people for a Russian Viagra robot, which means I periodically go through the spam folder to check for comments from actual humans. This morning, I realized that my policy of only approving comments from sentient beings is totally bigoted, so I thought I’d take a moment to answer some questions from those members of the Combat! audience who can perform 1.7 billion operations per second. I call it Spam Blocker Mailbag, and it begins…now!

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S. 782 offers terrifying glimpse of how a bill becomes a law

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 3 Comments

"Would it kill you to bring two sandwiches? Is this so much?"

Yesterday, the US Senate voted on S. 782, a bill to reauthorize and fund the Economic Development Administration. The EDA has been around for forty years and commands a paltry $300 million budget, but S. 782 died in a 49-51 vote due to what The Hill calls “100 mostly nongermane amendments offered by Republicans and Democrats.” What was supposed to be an innocuous or even benign “jobs bill”—and those scare quotes should be taken as extremely frightened—sunk under an accumulation of proposed additions, including amendments to suspend Obamacare, repeal last year’s financial regulatory reforms, block the Department of the Interior from declaring the prairie chicken an endangered species, and abolish the Economic Development Administration. Jim DeMint proposed that last one, and I don’t imagine he did it with a straight face. After much debate and a speech about the importance of Rhode Island’s Gaspee Days, S. 782 died a lugubrious death. It was a hard outcome for the bill’s sponsor, Barbara Boxer (D–CA,) who just that morning opined that “this is a moment we can show we do what we say we are going to do. I am hopeful this bill doesn’t die today.”

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Hey, check out what it’s legal to do now

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 8 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ3B8WvVjL4

That masterpiece of American democracy was created by Turn Right USA with the help of “filmmaker” Ladd Ehlinger, Jr, perhaps best known for producing Dale “Get Away From That!” Peterson’s Alabama Ag commissioner ad in 2010. You can tell it’s a Ladd because there’s a gun in it. The subject of this advertisement—probably “object” is the more appropriate word—is Janice Hahn, a Los Angeles City Council member currently running for Congress. In 2008, an LA Fox affiliate ran an investigative piece about the city’s use of “gang intervention specialists”—former gang members who served as liaisons among police, community organizations and gangs—that accused Hahn of paying gang members and pulling strings to get them out of jail. You should probably know that it turns out that didn’t actually happen. Also, the rappers featured in this video are called the Splack Pack, in case you want to book them for your daughter’s bat mitzvah.

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McCain connects AZ wildfires to illegal immigrants

By Dan Brooks in Just Sayin' Stuff 1 Comment

Photoshop is the lowest form of wit.

Arizona senator and former Republican presidential candidate John McCain—who, incidentally, doesn’t have any particular plans for 2012—remarked Saturday that a portion of the Arizona wildfires were started by immigrants. “There is substantial evidence that some of these fires have been caused by people who have crossed our border illegally,” McCain said at a press conference. “The answer to that part of the problem is to get a secure border.” As of press time, McCain has not provided said evidence to the public, nor has he described what its substance may be. But the important thing is that we used to start our own fires in this country, and being an arsonist/bolt of lightning used to mean something, but now—thanks to immigrants—decent, hard-working Americans have to sit home taskless, drinking their wives’ unsold beer and staring at their oddly deathless boobs. No word yet from McCain on who’s been poisoning wells.

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