Combat! - Page 398 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Griff Jenkins has a blog, and it’s much funnier than mine

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized September 21, 2009 2 Comments

Excitable Fox News correspondent Griff Jenkins

Those of you who relished Barney Frank’s health care town hall as much as I did might remember Griff Jenkins, the Fox News correspondent who narrated the event in a way that, um, confirmed the expectations of Fox News correspondents. Jenkins appears to be a rising star at Fox, and has been the network’s point-man for covering Tea Party rallies, the 9/12 march on Washington, and other carefully orchestrated spontaneous outbursts of populist dissent. After hearing his name, I initially assumed he was a biplane pilot in an educational children’s show. It turns out, though, that Griff Jenkins is a real person who actually does stuff, most of which is hilarious.

Friday links! Keep [loving] that chicken edition

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized September 18, 2009 1 Comment

She's real fluffy, and she wants to disable you just enough that her offspring can learn to kill.

Man oh man, it is a beautiful day in central Iowa. The mist is rising off the (soccer) fields, the little dogs are yipping maniacally, and I am ensconced on my mother’s back porch, drinking coffee and watching the neighbor kid, who has been inexplicably dressed in a tiger suit. In such bucolic suburban milieus, one can easily forget that the world has gone absolutely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs or, if you prefer, retarded for Rice Krispies. Homo for Honeycomb? I digress. The point is, everything sucks and nobody can think except for you. And what are you doing? Sitting in your office reading blogs when you’re supposed to be working? Good. As Super Mario once said, all that is required for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing. If evil were to stop succeeding all of a sudden, Combat! blog would be about what I had for breakfast.* Nobody wants that any more than I do, and I want it very little, so here’s a bunch of stuff to get angry about instead. Coprophagic for Cap’n Crunch? Okay, I’m done.

How the sausage is made: PhRMA, Billy Tauzin and the Baucus Bill

By Dan Brooks in health care, health insurance reform, obama, representative democracy September 17, 2009 4 Comments

Former LA representative Billy Tauzin, who became the head of PhRMA the same day he left Congress

Since July, rumors have circulated that representatives of PhRMA—Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the drug industry’s trade group and lobbying machine—were meeting with President Obama to discuss potential pharmaceutical pricing regulations in health care reform. Back in 1994, when Clinton tried to overhaul the health care system, PhRMA was instrumental in blocking reform and funding a subsequent Republican resurgence in Congress that, among other services to the nation, forced the President to admit to getting a blowjob from a fat girl on television.* The drug industry is one of the largest sources of lobbying money in Congress, and their opposition to Medicare price negotiations has been vigorous and longstanding. During the 2008 campaign, Obama cited such negotiations, along with the importation of inexpensive prescription drugs from Canada, as a major objective of his reform plan. Now, however, a deal has been struck, Medicare negotiations are off the table, and PhRMA has invested $150 million in advertisements supporting the Baucus bill.

Senator Baucus: Make them eat cake

By Dan Brooks in health care, health insurance reform, obama, representative democracy, rumormongering September 16, 2009 1 Comment

Dear Patrician Overlords: When speaking to Congress, please try to resist the urge to adjust your spectacles, monocle or opera glasses. It only reminds us.

Dear Patrician Overlords: When speaking to Congress, please resist the urge to adjust your monocle, opera glasses or other eyepiece. It only reminds us.

Senator Max Baucus (D-MT, go Griz) unveiled his long-awaited health care reform proposal this morning, after a year of personal reflection and more than three months of wrangling with a small group of Democratic and Republican Senators. If you’ve got twenty or so hours to spare, you can read the full text of the bill here. The Finance Committee chairman’s plan is bipartisan in the sense that it is the product of his discussions with Republican Senators Chuck Grassley, Mike Enzi and Olympia Snowe, and not so bipartisan in the sense that they’ve all refused to endorse it. For his part, Grassley is still concerned about the two most important issues facing elderly white men who live in central Iowa: abortion and immigrants. “There are still some serious outstanding issues that have yet to be resolved,” Grassley said in a public statement. “Like preventing taxpayer funding of abortion services and the enforcement against subsidies for illegal aliens.” While Baucus’s legislation, like all other proposed health reform bills, expressly forbids federal funding of coverage for illegal aliens, Grassley does not feel that the wording is strong enough. He also wants to include a five-year waiting period before legal immigrants can be eligible for federal subsidies, as part of America’s longstanding Mow My Lawn and Then Get the Hell Off My Property policy.

David Brooks exposes our national douche culture

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized September 15, 2009 4 Comments

I can has cheezburger?

David Brooks has a pretty great column in the Times today, in which he compares the nation’s somber celebration of V-J Day in 1945 to the spectacular displays of personal aggrandizement accompanying virtually any achievement in 2009. Props to The Cure for the heads-up; I do not normally read David Brooks, as I find his foppish postures unbefitting the otherwise prestigious Brooks name. Brooks asserts that humility was the defining quality of America’s response to its victory in World War II, and any celebration of the defeat of fascism was dampened by a sense of the mind-boggling human suffering that achievement necessitated. He quotes the war correspondent Ernie Pyle: “We won this war because our men are brave and because of many things — because of Russia, England and China and the passage of time and the gift of nature’s material. We did not win it because destiny created us better than all other peoples. I hope that in victory we are more grateful than we are proud.”

That’s a far cry from Mission Accomplished and the nation that declared war in the Middle East on a mandate from god. Ask Tom Brokaw or any prep school history tutor and he’ll tell you that the United States was probably at its peak when it won World War II, and yet—at least according to Brooks’s perspective—our national touchdown celebration was more humble than most, um, local touchdown celebrations. Such assessments are risky, but I think we can safely say that we’ve become a more self-aggrandizing people than we were in 1945. The question is, what changed?