Verizon Droid commercial in your face, completely baffling

By Dan Brooks in advertising, consumerism, corporatocracy 5 Comments
Previously the most terrifying advertisement involving phones

Previously the most terrifying advertisement involving phones

First of all, those of you especially perceptive readers may have noticed that Combat! blog now contains ads. Right now, for example, it contains a big, full-color ad urging you to fight against the government takeover of health care, which I think is frankly hilarious. Also right now, the ads are completely effing up my layout, because I haven’t yet determined how to configure them properly. We should be working that out shortly. I’m going to be honest with you: I was vehemently against putting advertisements on the site, but the five unpaid interns who actually write the posts in Combat! blog and answer the Combat! phone while I’m out getting illicit massages outvoted me. Now they’re getting paid those sweet sweet Google AdSense bucks, and you—just like you do everywhere else—will have to start averting your eyes from certain portions of Combat! blog so as not be hypnotized by genius marketing. Finally—and this is actually very important—DO NOT JUST CLICK ON THE ADS A BUNCH OF TIMES. Seriously—that won’t help me, and Google will only realize what you’ve done and ban me from AdSense, as they did Sarah Aswell when I tried to help her in the same fashion last year. Don’t click on the ads unless you’re actually interested in buying gold or night vision goggles or whatever. Also also, I’ve been screwing around with the sidebars, so now you can see a live-updated list of the most recent comments on the left side of the page, which today features my exchange with a dude who is strongly against the interracial kiss in that Levi’s commercial. So it looks like my grandpa finally figured out DSL.

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As of Monday, Fox News is not a news organization

By Dan Brooks in conservative liars, corporatocracy, health care, health insurance reform, help me kill zombies, Reactionary Populism, representative democracy, the crank factor, widespread dumbening 5 Comments
Simple, unvarnished facts, people. You decide.

Simple, unvarnished facts, people. You decide.

When the White House first announced that it would be treating Fox News as an opinion outlet rather than as an objective news organization, it raised a lot of thorny questions. How, exactly, do you define objectivity? High school journalism textbooks are full of charts and bulleted lists, non of which mix serif and sans serif fonts, but any regular reader of the New York Times knows there’s objective and there’s objective, and never the twain shall meet. The problem is that bias is usually a sin of omission; what slants a story is not what you say, but what you don’t. When your annual Christmas card reports that I threw up at your wedding, that’s bias, because it neglects to mention that I also made a very nice toast. It’s exceedingly difficult for me to prove that your Christmas cards display a consistent anti-Brooks bias, though, because one can’t really prove a negative. Sure, you didn’t mention my toast, but you didn’t mention what color jacket your uncle was wearing, either, or what the temperature was, or which year the Inca empire experienced its first flu epidemic. Bias is usually absence, and the scope of absence is, by definition, infinite. Every once in a while, though, somebody straight-up lies. Fox News did it last week, and the public outcry has been far less that it should be. Video after the jump.

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Snake that controls Sarah Palin’s body worried about new dollar coins

By Dan Brooks in conservatism, conservative liars, health care, health insurance reform, Internet, populism, Reactionary Populism, rumormongering, snake that operates sarah palin 9 Comments
The inexperienced but determined snake that controls Sarah Palin's body

The inexperienced but determined snake that controls Sarah Palin's body. (Not pictured: body)

Since August, when Sarah Palin was eaten by a Grue as a result of staying in a darkened area too long while studying foreign policy, a replicant version of her body has been operated by a funny snake. We know this. What you may not know is that the snake finally finished writing that book—which is currently being edited to remove numerous and baffling references to the warmth of field mice—and he is now free to pilot Sarah Palin’s body around the country, collecting multi-thousand dollar speaker fees and making his views known. Like most snakes, the one controlling Palin’s body is friendly and inquisitive, and spends most of his time scanning the ground in search of candy and coins, which he hopes to barter for social acceptance. In that capacity, he’s discovered a possible left-wing conspiracy and a change in our minting policy that may shock and disturb you.

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Fat acceptance raises some big issues, which sit next to you on the plane

By Dan Brooks in consumerism, counterculture, health care, health insurance reform, oppositional culture, widespread dumbening 9 Comments

Ronald McDonaldThe enormous pink jacket industry received a windfall this week, as representatives from the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance lobbied Congress for a public health care option that would not consider excess weight a pre-existing condition. It turns out that when a bill is going around the House, it really goes around the House. Hey-o! Seriously, though, there really is a fat acceptance community, and according to the New York Times, they really do think that fat people are being unfairly scapegoated in the national debate over health care reform. Certainly, there’s no question that fat people get used as scapegoats. Every time a diving board breaks or one end of a park bench shoots straight up in the air, we look around for the fat person. The question is whether this scapegoating is unfair.

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