Greetings from the food court at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where my breakfast burrito has barbecue sauce in it for some reason! I’m midway to our nation’s capital, where I will inflict humiliation on my brother for turning 30 before passing out without considering my own advanced age for even a second.* Between that crucial endeavor and Micky’s wedding the following weekend, Combat! blog will probably be extremely half-assed for the rest of the month. Fortunately, American culture continues to write itself. Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the news that Paul Ryan, the man who wants to privatize Social Security and Medicare, paid for college with the Social Security benefits he received after his father’s death. The grandmother he credits with raising him got ’em, too. Of course, Ryan was not yet a rising conservative star who recognized that the nation’s budget crisis was so dire as to require the dismantling of 60 years of public safety nets back then. He was also not yet a college graduate with a dependable stream of income. I will leave it to your discernment whether this news shows that Ryan is an incredibly principled idealist who considers what’s good for the country independently of his own personal experience or if, now that he’s on board, he thinks we should pull up the lifelines so the boat can go faster. I suppose it could be both.

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