Combat! - Page 262 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Oh thank Christ

By Dan Brooks in health care June 28, 2012 3 Comments

The United States Supreme Court

I’m as surprised as you: the Supreme Court has ruled to uphold the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. The individual mandate is constitutional, albeit on the grounds that it is a tax and not a mandate. But no matter—minus some sticky stuff about federal coercion of the states to expand Medicare, health care reform stands, kit if not caboodle. “It is painful to recognize that the liberties which our forefathers fought a revolution to secure have been lost,” Karen Harned of the National Federation of Independent Businesses writes, “But it is clear that our original constitutional system has been thrown out, and we are left with only the democratic process to preserve our rights.” Let the hyperbole ~~begin~~ continue!

On being banned from Sarah Palin’s Facebook

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse June 27, 2012 5 Comments

The future (artist’s rendering)

Possibly due to my request that she “please stop,” I have been banned from posting comments on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page. My quote from the New England Journal of Medicine regarding what the IPAB actually does has been deleted, leaving Citizen Palin unchallenged in her assertion that “its purpose all along has been to ‘keep costs down’ by actually denying care via price controls and typically inefficient bureaucracy.” It seems unlikely that the Independent Patient Advisory Board was designed to prevent people from getting health care via inefficiency, but Sarah Palin can say what she wants. I can’t say anything back to her, but she is communicating on her own Facebook wall. That wall belongs to her and to Facebook, so they can delete whom they please.

Palin revives “death panel” claim

By Dan Brooks in lying June 26, 2012 6 Comments

Sarah Palin, sports anchor, 1988. You actually don’t need to put siding on the inside of the building.

Remember when Sarah Palin—fresh from her stint as the thing that proved John McCain was no longer reasonable—said that the Affordable Care Act would create “death panels”? That’s a service she provides. When the country can’t decide how it feels about an important piece of legislation, Palin is there to give us a false understanding of what it does. Her claim that faceless government bureaucrats would decide whether Grandma’s blood thinner is worth it was Politifact’s 2009 Lie of the Year. Pretty much everyone agrees that it exemplified the worst of contemporary politics, which makes it odd that she brought it up yesterday. Just in time for the Supreme Court’s ruling on Obamacare, Palin says her infamous lie was true all along.

Leonhardt on the national age divide

By Dan Brooks in Baby Boomers June 25, 2012 1 Comment

I’d better turn out to be really good at this thing.

As anyone who saw me gallivanting around Missoula with my mother will tell you, many Americans are much older than us. Some might argue that age is a continuum, with several Americans in fact younger than even we are, but that seems far-fetched. It ignores the monolithic concentration that is the Baby Boomers—those people who invented rock and roll, who ride around the farmer’s market on Harley-Davidson motorcycles, who can be found at the post office screaming that Social Security is unconstitutional. Sorry—everything but Social Security is unconstitutional. The increased conservatism of the Boomers accounts for much of the country’s rightward shift over the last few years, as David Leonhardt suggests in his excellent Sunday Times column.

Friday links! Straight shootin’ edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links June 22, 2012 0 Comment

Pictured: much radder American flag, same old Mitt Romney.

I’m a straight shooter. I tell it like it is, by which I mean I tell it like I think with little regard for other people’s opinions. People don’t like to hear the truth. It follows that what other people don’t want to hear must necessarily be true. Society may not always welcome a plainspoken truth-teller like me, but that’s the price I pay for being honest. It’s certainly better than admitting that I am a dick. Today is Friday, and we’ve got a whole mess of uncurved shooting in our link roundup. Much of it is not what strict rhetoricians call true, but the gun still fires with an impressive bang. Won’t you peer down the barrel with me?