Combat! - Page 396 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Know your corporatocracy: The Lewin Group

By Dan Brooks in corporatocracy, health care, health insurance reform, representative democracy October 5, 2009 3 Comments

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Eric Cantor, the t-shirt. For Eric Cantor, the douchebag, see disambiguation.

If you’re on the mailing list of House Republican Whip Eric Cantor—and if you’re not, you are missing out on some absolutely delightful pictures of kittens wearing hats—you’ve probably already seen this memo about health care reform. Come to think of it, if you’ve watched C-SPAN or listened to Glenn Beck or been anywhere the reproduction of moving images of Republican congresspeople is not religiously forbidden, you’re probably familiar with its startling contention: If a government-run health insurance plan becomes a reality, 112 million Americans will lose their existing coverage. That’s two out of three working Americans, according to a study by the Lewin Group. And what is the Lewin Group? Only “the gold standard for this kind of analysis,” says Michael Steel (note: not the hilarious one,) a spokesman for John Boehner (R-OH.) He was probably paraphrasing a 2007 Wall Street Journal editorial, in which Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Bob Bennet (R-UT) said almost exactly the same thing. Unfortunately, the AOL has been all screwed up in John Boehner’s office since Father’s Day 2007. If it hadn’t, Steel probably would have mentioned that, as of June 18, 2007, the Lewin Group isn’t just the industry standard for health-care related independent analyses: it’s also a wholly-owned subsidiary of the UnitedHealth Group.

Friday links! Race to the boldest edition

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized October 2, 2009 5 Comments

One night at the club, eighteen years at home, dog.

It’s a beautiful day in Missoula, Montana, and I have spent the better part of the morning watching a man hack away at the eighty year-old willow tree next door. Based on the sheer quantity of cracking sounds, saw-binding, and last-minute-falling-limb-out-of-the-way-jumpng, I would say that he is not so much a tree surgeon as a chainsaw owner, but this is America, dammit. We don’t tell people that they can’t do something based on who they are, or where they were born, or how much money they make, or whether they’ve had any formal training, or how many times they swing a running chainsaw past their femoral artery in a way that makes even the dog jump nervously. That’s how they do things in England, and we didn’t have a tea party in Boston in 1773 just so the ignorant could be prevented from taking decisive action. No, the tree of liberty must be trimmed periodically, using a Stihl that’s way too small for the job and starting from the bottom up for some reason. That’s how nature renews itself, probably, and that’s how America stays strong, or at the very least extremely loud. You can either stand on the balcony with your coffee and watch, like a sissy, or you can get right up in there and start cutting at stuff and felling enormous limbs onto the chain link fence, like a patriot/unlicensed contractor. I think you know which you’d rather be, and we at Combat! blog do, too. Won’t you join us?

“I’m just saying” has become the big lie of right-wing politics

By Dan Brooks in conservative liars, glenn beck, health care, health insurance reform, help me kill zombies, obama, Obama citizenship, Reactionary Populism, representative democracy, rumormongering, Uncategorized October 1, 2009 2 Comments

Who doesn't love a military coup? It's like a county fair that nobody can leave.

Tell me that heavily armed Thai soldier isn't wearing a Livestrong bracelet.

Wouldn’t it be great if the American military seized control of the government, deposed our duly-elected President and enforced their own interpretations of the Constitution without the oversight of Congress or the judiciary? No? Um, yeah, I don’t think so either—I was just asking. I’m going to go over here now and absolutely not advocate the armed overthrow of the U.S. government.

That’s essentially the position of John L. Perry, who two days ago used his Newsmax.com column to advocate a domestic military coup to solve “the Obama problem.” I’m going to go ahead and use the word “advocate,” despite Perry’s assertion—possibly deployed to prevent, you know, his being arrested for sedition—that “describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it.” He says so just before reminding us that “Officers swear to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’ Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to ‘obey the orders of the president of the United States,'” rhapsodizing for 350 words about the possible reasons why this possible coup would be totally justified, and winding everything up with a completely hypothetical, non-advocating question: “Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a ‘family intervention,’ with some form of limited, shared responsibility?”

Thomas Sowell has estimated your intelligence

By Dan Brooks in conservative liars, help me kill zombies, obama, populism, Reactionary Populism September 30, 2009 6 Comments

Dr. Thomas Sowell, who did not realize the sour candy was going to be this sour.

The logical question, of course, is “Who the [fudge] is Thomas Sowell? I mean [gosh] [darn] it, why are you wasting my time with this [sugar], you [fudging] [dinner companion for business travelers]?” It’s weird you’d ask that, though, because Thomas Sowell knows exactly who you are: some kind of idiot. Witness his most recent column at Townhall.com,* in which he speculates that the vaunted intelligence of Barack Obama and his team of advisors is, in fact, a disadvantage. “There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people,” Sowell writes. “For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.” Specifically, you need people with high IQs to tell the dull and stupid how to think about politics—that’s when you can really started messing [shirts] up. I presume that part was cut for length.

Chuck Norris: I am basically crazy now

By Dan Brooks in glenn beck, help me kill zombies, Reactionary Populism, town hall protests, widespread dumbening September 29, 2009 10 Comments

Yeah, that's pretty much everything.

Remember when Chuck Norris was a harmless list of absurdist statements that your roommate read aloud to you from his laptop in 2006, and then your dad emailed to you yesterday? Well, he’s a real person now, and that person is completely, totally, scrambling-naked-out-of-the-shower-to-chase-his-marbles-across-the-kitchen-floor-during-your-dinner-party insane. Chuck Norris has a regular column over at Townhall.com, and he’s using it to push his agenda of radical socialism inspired by Fourier and inflected—nah, I’m just messing with you. All he cares about is taxes, guns and making sure everybody prays.