Combat! - Page 342 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Greene loses!

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government November 3, 2010 1 Comment

Democratic Senate hopeful Alvin Greene suffered a heartbreaking upset yesterday in South Carolina, losing to Republican Jim DeMint by the narrowest of 34-point margins. Across the country—as one New York Times writer described it, the “wide battleground that stretched from Alaska to Maine,” which I think means Canada—Greene’s surprise loss prefigured Republican gains, including a 60-seat pickup in the House of Representatives. “We’ve come to take our government back,” newly-elected Senator Rand Paul told his victory party. “They say that the U.S. Senate is the world’s most deliberative body. I’m going to ask them to deliberate on this: The American people are unhappy with what’s going on in Washington.” Mr. Paul then shouted an obscenity after an aide told him where the Senate is located.

Hey, what are you doing today?

By Dan Brooks in Church People November 2, 2010 5 Comments

Is it voting? Because if it’s not, and you live in Iowa, you’re letting these people run the judicial branch. I know they look nice, but they are complete pricks. Consider: the pleasant young couple above chose to make their wedding, the symbol of their love, a symbol of their opposition to other people’s love. Was your wedding a public celebration of your commitment to letting gay dudes and lesbians marry one another? Therein lies the problem. Even though many of us—maybe even most of us—either support gay marriage or don’t care enough either way to try to make a law about it, the small number of us who have been commanded by a 6,000 year-old book* to stop gay people everywhere we can find them are way, way more fired up. Case in point: Bob Vander Plaats, who since losing his bid for governor has organized a statewide campaign to recall Iowa Supreme Court Justices for their decision in Varnum v Brien.

Sharron Angle’s “Wave” ad is just really awesome, you guys

By Dan Brooks in Tea Party November 1, 2010 6 Comments

Say what you will about the breakdown of our democracy—it’s been a great year for ads. Popping up with a gun and yelling at the screen was among the least crazy things a candidate could do, and the ads that didn’t contain candidates because they were paid for by anonymous shadow corporations were even weirder. So when I saw the headline “Robert Menendez calls Sharron Angle’s ad racist,” I figured we were in for some canny insinuation, a little where-did-the-jobs-go, maybe a picture of day laborers. I didn’t think we were going to get a freaking Masterpiece of Insanity, which is what I offer you after the jump.

Friday links! Fight the future edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links October 29, 2010 2 Comments

Scully. Scully! We have to get to the Sublime concert.

Ah, the future—a glittering world of flying cars, helpful robots and weird Singaporean dudes who will sell you a frozen eyeball. At least that’s what I always envisioned, but as the future keeps getting closer (2025,) it seems more likely to be defined by floods of corporate money and amazing technological progress in the field of explaining why we can’t do anything about it. The titanic forces we once imagined wielding threaten to wield us, as the ability to extract resources from anywhere on earth and magically replicate and distribute cultural products boils down to bottled water and rap albums that you can’t loan to your friends. It’s a digital world, and a democratized world, and possibly even a virtual world, but the money is still real. And what is money if not a force completely beyond our control that has existed forever apart from human whims? Today’s link roundup is all about the future, near and far, humorous and scary, greedy and greedy. So put on your shiny, buttonless shirt, affix your breathing apparatus, and set the DeLorean for 2010: we’re going sideways to the future!

Closure of SpamIt.com reduces global spam volume by 20%

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas October 28, 2010 4 Comments

Igor Gusev and his cat, EnlargePenisNow! (Not pictured: Gusev)

The global quantity of spam email has dropped by one fifth since Russian authorities launched an investigation of SpamIt.com, a Russian site that paid spammers to advertise online pharmacies. SpamIt was allegedly run by Igor Gusev, a 31 year-old Muscovite best known for repeatedly explaining the phrase “I run a website that pays the owners of automated email generators to promote online pharmacies” at cocktail parties. It turns out that’s all one word in Russian, and it sounds a lot like the word for “I am a total cock-gobbler.”