Close readings: Unemployment extension defeated in Congress

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 3 Comments

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, presumably saying "yea" very quietly.

Late Thursday night—while the rest of us were having a dream in which we go to the bank and the teller says “Your account has accumulated substantial interest, Mr. Brooks,” before opening a vault full of zombies, zombies—Congress did not pass an unemployment benefits extension. Already we enter the realm of subjectivity. In strict, learn-about-it-in-high-school journalism practice, one is discouraged from constructing stories around what did not happen.* The headline on the AP story—Congress fails to pass an extension of jobless benefits—has the word “fail” right in it, as if passing the bill to postpone expiry of unemployment benefits for one million Americans were something the legislative branch meant to do and just couldn’t put together. In some sense, that’s kind of accurate. The Senate voted 57–41 in favor of the bill, but a Republican filibuster derailed it during procedure. Those are the facts. What happened depends on what news you read.

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Friday links! Gather your armies edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 9 Comments

Pebble Beach golf course. I can't believe it took two years for that one to occur to me.

It is suddenly, finally summer in Missoula, and after three consecutive days of 65+ temperatures I can’t remember there ever having been a winter.* Here we find yet another metaphor for the present age, when the internet—which, as the New York Times keeps reminding me, is changing everything—allows us to live in customized mental landscapes whose consistency elides everything else. From my perspective, this is awesome. I get to sit in my apartment, watching Frisky Dingo and reading about existentialism, weird punk bands and money policy, and rarely am I reminded of the existence of, say, Dave & Buster’s. Everyone once in a while, though, one catches a glimpse of another world, similar to one’s own yet horrifyingly different, and like a character in an HP Lovecraft story, one  has no choice but to go insane. Fortunately, tomorrow is Saturday. In consideration of a weekend in which you hopefully won’t have to judge true from false or right from wrong, Combat! presents glimpses of worlds baffling in their grotesquerie. You may just find the view…unsettling.

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The curious case of Alvin Greene

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 5 Comments

Perhaps you’ve heard of him—the 32 year-old unemployed Air Force and Army veteran who lives with his father, doesn’t own a cell phone or a computer, and is now the South Carolina Democratic Party nominee for the US Senate. In the primary, he beat Vic Rawl—a former state representative who had the support of the SC Democratic apparatus—despite having no website, holding no fundraisers, running no ads and hiring no staff. The next day, the Associated Press revealed that he was facing felony obscenity charges. Green allegedly showed pornography to a female student in a University of South Carolina computer lab, then said “Let’s go to your room now.” Vic Rawl, understandably surprised to have lost by 20 points to such a tactician, called for an investigation into voting irregularities. The South Carolina Democrats upheld the results, while simultaneously asking Greene to withdraw. But Alvin Greene has not withdrawn, and in November he will face Jim DeMint in the general election.

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Mike Cassady travels through time, amuses you

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 0 Comment

Combat! blog is buried in an avalanche of work today, but fortunately we have this video to brighten our spirits. Just when you thought there was no more work to be done in the field of discount electronics store sketches, Mike Cassady makes it new. Watch this video and then go see him at the Upright Citizens’ Brigade in LA, pretty much every night of the week because he is awesome.

God forsakes state of Louisiana again

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 2 Comments

Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, presumably saying "Come on, now."

I don’t know if you heard this, but BP poured like 80 millions gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. If you’re coming to this news for the first time, I’m sorry to alarm you, but so far nobody really knows how to stop that. The Deepwater Horizons well has been gushing pretty much uncontrollably for the last sixty-some days, despite a series of comically simple-sounding and horrifically complicated-actually-doing attempts by BP to plug the damn hole. At this point, our options seem to be to A) continue trying, even though everything we’ve tried has failed or B) give up. It should be noted that Option A has thus far yielded the same results one might reasonably expect from Option B. Maybe—just maybe, it’s starting to kind of look like, although of course none of us wants to think this way—all the oil that is under the Gulf of Mexico is just going to flow into the Gulf of Mexico, killing if not everything then most things. The key, under such circumstances, is to not lose hope—to keep trying no matter how difficult the trial, since to do otherwise is to guarantee the failure whose prospect so daunts us in the first place. Enter the Louisiana state legislature.

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