Walker appoints, promotes, demotes lobbyist’s son

By Dan Brooks in lying 4 Comments

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, seen here on school picture day

Is this the face of a machine politician who unquestioningly executes whatever obscure directives party apparatchiks give him? Um, yeah—now that you mention it, it kind of is. Especially if you mention it along with the news that Scott Walker appointed 27 year-old college dropout Brian Deschane to a $65,000-a-year supervisory position in the Wisconsin Bureau of Licensing and Regulation. Deschane has no management experience, only a short history of full-time employment and two drunk driving convictions, but he is the son of Jerry Deschane, head of the Wisconsin Builders Association, which sent Walker over $120,000 in contributions during the 2010 campaign. Two months after he was hired at L&R, Brian Deschane was promoted to a supervisory position in the Wisconsin Commerce Department, where he got a 24% pay raise. Then a bunch of articles came out about that, and Walker demoted Deschane to his earlier job. He’ll also be in charge of Walker’s exploratory team for the 1882 election.

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Anthony Weiner runs Congressional Correspondents Dinner

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 2 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj_yProUnEI&feature=player_embedded#at=678

That, dear friends, is US Representative Anthony Weiner (D–NY, net worth $108k) laying it in there like an old pro—okay, like a gifted amateur—at the Congressional Correspondents Dinner. The CCD is to the White House Correspondents Dinner as Congress is to the White House, which is to say as Larry Wilmore is to Stephen Colbert.* And yet Weiner rose to the occasion, delivering a series of remarks re: his own name even better than that one—at one point he pleaded with John Boehner, “Come on, brother, I’m not Anthony Way-ner”—mocking CNN’s declining ratings, and gradually isolating Rand Paul until Weiner was examining his every response like Don Rickles. He also showed a picture of himself looking eerily like Horschach from Welcome Back, Kotter. In short, he was funny—which when you think about it is kind of surprising, considering that Weiner is a rising star in possibly the least funny political organization in American history.

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Monday is for wild, logarithmic speculation

By Dan Brooks in Invective 2 Comments

Logarithm, player! Woo! Take your shirt off.

In part because we wake gripped by existential terror every morning, we at the Combat! blog offices like to paint the present American moment as one of unusual discord. In this way, we resemble our predatory stepbrothers in the more, ahem, widely-consumed media, who often act as if American politics were more fractious now that it was in, say, the 19th century. Such claims seem convincing—I totally see more modern people accusing one another of not being citizens than I see knickerbockers settling disagreements with sword canes—but how can I know? If only there were some means of quantifying intranational dissent, so I could know with mathematical certainty how the partisan turmoil of my age compares to that of my forebears. I suppose I’ll just have to give up and read the Bi—boom! Logarithmic plotting of correlation between stock market crashes and secessionist movements, pussies! Props to James Erwin, not only for the link but for much of the original research used in the link. He’s also raising a child.

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Friday links! April General Public Day edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment

Persian actor/comedian K-von, who I guess appeared on an MTV prank show called Disaster Date. All the April Fool's images involved cats, but not the funny kind.

It’s April first, and you know what that means: time to meditate in solemn silence on the betrayal of mankind perpetrated by Pontius Pilate at the behest of his master, the Jew. No, I’m kidding—time to pour Malt-o-Meal into your spouse’s nose while he or she is asleep. As any child with oppositional-defiant disorder will tell you, April Fool’s Day is the best holiday, because you’re allowed to commit any act of deception and/or cruelty provided you declare afterward that your victim is a fool. If you don’t do that last part, it’s just a regular day. Today’s link round-up contains a variety of pranks, ranging from parody to completely serious actions undertaken as state-level legislation to David Brooks’s career. None of it is as good as K-von, though. His name is really Kevin, right?

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Stars align to deliver message re: American politics

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 7 Comments

"You guys are retarded," says the Cancer Crab.

Back in the day (4000 BC–1948,) people looked to the alignment of the stars for broad assessments of their cultures. They did not know that the universe is constructed around lopsided circles like a child’s science project—probably because they had neither science nor, for very long, any particular child—so the seemingly random movements of the heavens constituted huge, baffling signs. Basically, the sky of our forebears was like the first dude your mom dates after the divorce: vast, inscrutable, and by those virtues ominously significant. If it looked all pretty, like Sagittarius the Dog was chasing Polonius the Squirrel across Poseidon’s Scales or some shit,* then they were doing good. If there was a comet or the sun went out, their culture was doing Bad, and they had to ransack their homes looking for gay dudes or pork or books or whatever. It completely sucked to live in our ancestors’ world, is what I’m saying, which is why being alive is so much more popular among people who were born recently. Recently we have the germ theory of disease instead of pogroms, and instead of the stars we have the news. If you look up at the news just now, I believe you will discern a terrifying omen.

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