Combat! - Page 225 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

What’s wrong with the contemporary Republican Party?

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government March 27, 2013 3 Comments

The Green Bay Tea Party recruits via hostile placards.

Last week, Ross Douthat described what he called “the donorist view” of what the Republican Party needs to do. Hint: it should change. After a strong showing in the 2010 midterm elections and what appeared to be a groundswell of populist support from the Tea Party, the GOP has utterly failed to retake Washington. Its primary goal—by many accounts its only goal, given the last two years’ obstruction in Congress—was to beat Obama in 2012. That did not work. A lot of people spent a lot of money hoping that it would, and they want answers. They will settle for a plan to do better next time, however, in the form of the RNC’s Growth and Opportunity Project.

Supreme Court to hear gay marriage case

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government March 26, 2013 2 Comments

A trenchant cartoon reminding us that Obama made gay people want to get married in order to distract us from the economy.

A trenchant political cartoon points out that Obama made states ban gay marriage in order to distract us from the economy.

Today is the day, or one of several days this week: the Supreme Court has begun hearing arguments on Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage. Probably this it the first you have heard about this issue. To recap: the California Supreme Court affirmed the right of gay couples to marry in 2008. In November of that year, voters approved a ballot measure amending the California constitution to limit marriages to opposite-sex couples. In 2009, Theodore Olson and David Boies filed Hollingsworth v. Perry, No. 12-144, in which they argued that Prop 8 violated the federal constitution by allowing California voters to override their state’s supreme court. Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco’s Federal District Court agreed, but his decision was stayed pending Supreme Court review. That started this morning.

Why is this commercial so wonderful?

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas March 25, 2013 16 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_0fyUYB3cA

It is a very specific culture that produces this auto insurance commercial, in which Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo, a man from Africa who played professional basketball in Houston, knocks various objects out of the air. It is an ultra-specific culture that finds it hilarious, as I do. Probably it is helped along by my predilection for slapstick. I submit that certain elements of it are pure art, though, such as the sequence in the grocery store aisle that begins at :16. Motumbo has to be standing so close to the kid to get that reverse shot, such that he becomes conspicuously absent from the shot preceding it. Your brain has to go backwards in time and add him in. It is a visual expression of the incongruity theory of humor—something that was itself technically impossible until about a hundred years ago—and it makes it.

Friday links! Home again edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links March 22, 2013 1 Comment

Here I am standing at my desk, sunshine blaring through my window, and it is snowing: I must be in Montana. My glutinous subway cold tells me I was recently in New York, but now all that is as a pleasant dream; there is only the comforting routine of typing Combat! blog, plus a raft of deadlines I put off to enable my weeklong drinking/carousing/companionating binge. Let’s not think about those now, though. Today is Friday, and I am home again. Won’t you luxuriate in the comforts of the hearth with me? By hearth I mean internet.

Combat! blog flies through air, isn’t useful

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized March 21, 2013 0 Comment

With a head full of memories and a lung full of unidentified pathogens, Combat! blog returns to Montana today. There is no post to speak of, so how about you read the Personal History that Willy mentioned yesterday? It’s words are like ashes in my mouth, if you kept eating ashes just to figure out what it was that made them so ashy. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links, plus probably some kind of upper respiratory infection.