I don’t want to be a Negative Nancy, but the democratic experiment is pretty much over. It worked really good when we were yeoman farmers, but now that we’re VJs and customer service team leads, it sucks. Our politics is a shrill argument over whether the current crop of American rich people should be our last, and our electorate is voting values. It’s plutocracy time, now. Corporations can spend unlimited money on political ads; taxes are at an all-time low as deficits reach an all-time high; Congress is talking entitlement reform three years into a recession, and we’ve found a way to blame the President for hurricanes. America flew high once, but now the flyers must smash the nutsacks of those who facilitated their experiment. It’s called the other shoe, and the nation’s rich are dropping it with alacrity. Won’t you stare mutely eating a popsicle with me?
Category Archives: Friday Links
Friday links! Transcendent joys edition
Uncle Walt
It has been a week of transcendent joys here at Combat! blog, and one of the things we transcended was collecting links for Friday. You know I’ve been having fun for the last several days because my Evernote has not steadily filled up with internet articles, which initially presented a problem. Fortunately, joy—by which term I mean weirdo shit—is all around us. Today’s links are short, poorly articulated and striking in ways that thwart comprehension. They’re what the European Romantics called sublime, and the arbitrary unification of the sublime is what the American Romantics called transcendence. Around here, we just call it Friday. Drop your socks and grab your unkempt beards, because the transcendent brilliance of the internet is about to blow your face off. Believe it or not, it starts with Rick Santorum after the jump.
Friday links! Extremely lazy edition
It’s Friday, and Combat! blog is sweating up the futon in Aaron Galbraith’s palatial Manhattan apartment. Everyone in this city is beautiful and lazy, and by “everyone” I mean everyone but me in the first case and everyone especially me in the second. Today’s links are therefore very half-assed—like 49% assed—but they also inspire a certain satisfaction. That’s the key element of lazy, after all: the sense that despite your inaction, you are still doing basically okay, particularly compared to other people. In this case, the other people are mostly residents of the Middle East, plus one writer with a major depressive disorder. Don’t worry—it’s not me. I’m super good. I’m just gonna lie here a moment longer.
Friday links! Going out of business edition
An American patriot finally has the common sense to demand no more taxes and no more debt.
I don’t want to alarm you, but this is probably going to be the last weekend in America. Congress has until Tuesday to raise the debt ceiling, and to paraphrase the Magic 8-Ball, outlook not good. It is possible that ours will become the first generation in history to cause a US federal default, not by calamity or foreign depredation but by our respective insistences that we are right about everything. The Republican Party, having thus far produced a proposal guaranteed not to win any Democratic votes, has doubled down on partisanship by adding a balanced budget amendment. Harry Reid has announced that such a bill is dead on arrival in the Senate, even as he reminds us how important it is to pass something. With default 96 hours away, each party is working tirelessly to assure the American people that disaster is the other party’s fault. Being an American citizen on July 29, 2011 is like riding in the back seat of a car driven by a bickering couple, one of whom refuses to open his eyes and the other of whom won’t give directions.
Friday links! Problem of Others edition
As I write this, my neighbor Greg is watching me from his front stoop, which he does for pretty much the entirety of my workday. Greg is not employed; he receives Social Security disability payments and lives in a state-subsidized apartment, leaving him and his girlfriend free to drink beer on the stoop from 11am to sundown—which, in Missoula this time of year, happens around 9:30. Because my desk is in my window, Greg is under the impression that I spend all my waking hours on the computer. That’s only kind of true; Greg just sees me whenever I’m on the computer because he is always looking, and I am on the computer a lot because that’s my job. As a self-employed person, I pay double Social Security,* 
so I sometimes imagine that I am covering myself and Greg, too. I try not to, though, because he is super nice. Last night, when he drunkenly greeted me upon my arrival home, he noticed that I was sick and joked that I had caught a computer virus. It was pretty funny, especially for a guy who had been drinking for 10 consecutive hours. It was also infuriating, since I am not just a nerdy shut-in the same age as Greg but also one of the large number of people who work to ensure that he does not die. This is what we call the Problem of Others.