Combat! - Page 57 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

As Trump founders, Gianforte mailer strives to imitate him

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics August 25, 2016 1 Comment

The mailer Greg Gianforte, Republican for governor of Montana, sent last week

Yes, that’s Governor Steve Bullock, letting terrorist refugees from war-torn stock photos just loom over the mountains of Montana. He refuses to use his power as governor to ban Syrians. Greg Gianforte, on the other hand, promises to stop refugee resettlement—presumably after he takes a job at the State Department, since the governor of Montana does not have the authority to prevent foreign nationals with valid visas from entering the state.

That’s one problem with the mailer above, which the Gianforte campaign sent out last week. Another problem is that it arrived in Missoula at roughly the same time as a family of refugees from the Congo, where Islamist militias are targeting Christians. Welcome to Montana, scared and exhausted family of six! One of our two candidates for governor has promised to prevent you.

The third problem with this mailer is tactical. I don’t know whether Gianforte or Bullock is ahead right now. No one does, because Montana is too big and empty to poll. But Bullock has the advantage of incumbency, and Gianforte has the disadvantage of the giant albatross perched atop his ticket. Donald Trump won the Montana primary with 74% of the vote, after all the other candidates dropped out. The candidate who got the most donations from individuals within the state was Ben Carson. Wild for guns and freedom though they are, Montana Republicans prefer a soft-spoken type. They’re ranchers and small business people, and the immigrants with whom they compete are mostly Canadian. A lot of them are likely to stay home this year, because the Republican candidate for president is a shit-eating wildman.

Why, then, would Gianforte emulate him with this mailer? Low-information xenophobes are already turning out. He should be pitching his appeal to the lifelong Republicans in this state who are disappointed in the top of their ticket. He should show the Rotary Club wing of his party why he’s still worth voting for, even if Trump isn’t. Arab-baiting appeals to public ignorance are not the way to do it. That’s what I think, anyway; only November will tell. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Over half Clinton’s non-government meetings were with foundation donors

By Dan Brooks in 2016 Election August 24, 2016 1 Comment

Hillary Clinton hears the beat to “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” for the first time.

More than half the people outside of government whom Hillary Clinton met in her capacity as Secretary of State were donors to the Clinton foundation, the Associated Press reported yesterday. Beware autoplay video with sound at the other end of this link. According to the AP’s review of State Department calendars:

At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs.

Does that mean Secretary Clinton sold access to State in exchange for donations to her foundation? No. But if she had, she only would have needed to update about 45 percent of her calendar. Since this is an election year, we don’t have to worry about whether what she did was ethical. We only need to know what it means for the horse race.

American press remains free to defend itself against nine-figure lawsuits

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media August 23, 2016 2 Comments

Peter Thiel makes a grasping, strangling gesture.

The New York-based gossip website Gawker.com shut down yesterday, after its parent company, Gawker Media, lost a $140 million lawsuit to Hulk Hogan. Univision purchased Gawker Media from bankruptcy and will continue publishing many sites in the network, including Deadspin and Gizmodo, but the flagship has been eliminated. Yesterday, former executive features editor Tom Scocca published this scathing postmortem advancing two points, one of which I find more interesting than the other. First, he contends that Gawker was effectively gaslighted by its enemies, who convinced founder Nick Denton and other key members of the staff that they really were operating beyond the pale of respectable journalism. That seems both plausible and unfalsifiable. Second, and more compellingly, Scocca suggests that freedom of the press is complicated when billionaires can fund massive lawsuits designed to put media companies out of business. Background and consideration after the jump.

Autostraddle retracts Sausage Party review, citing problematic taco

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media August 22, 2016 2 Comments

Selma Hayek plays a sexually ambiguous taco in Sausage Party.

The problem with going on hiatus is that you invariably miss the year’s most important events, e.g. controversies over racial/sexual overtones in talking food. Probably, you already heard that Sausage Party has been added to the long list of Seth Rogen movies we agree to remember as funny. The film garnered mostly positive reviews, including one from Autostraddle written by a freelancer and subsequently unpublished. The site took down that review and ran a lengthy retraction/apology last week. It reads, in part:

After we published the review, we heard from Latinx readers who believe the portrayal of Salma Hayek’s taco was racist and that it reinforced harmful stereotypes. We heard from readers who were upset that we labeled the taco a lesbian when it seems more likely that she was bisexual. We heard from readers who questioned the consent of the sexual encounter between the taco and the hot dog bun. We heard from readers who found the taco to be a damaging portrayal of a predatory queer woman.

They are not kidding.

Manafort takes millions; Combat! blog takes hiatus

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized August 15, 2016 1 Comment

Before we take the picture, can we get some bats in here?

About two months ago, Donald Trump replaced campaign manager and occasional woman-grabber Corey Lewandowski with Paul Manafort. Manafort’s resume reminds you that Trump used to be friends with Roy Cohn. Before he took over the Trump campaign, Manafort advised the campaigns of Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole. He also worked with some exciting foreign leaders, including Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko and Ukraine’s pro-Russian former president, Viktor Yanukovich. That last gig appears to have been pretty lucrative. According to the New York Times, Yanukovich’s pro-Russian political party secretly paid Manafort $12.7 million in cash between 2007 and 2012.

That sets off a fun chain of implications, considering Yanukovich was an ally of Vladimir Putin, for whom Trump has expressed admiration and whose actions—if we are to believe Russia really hacked the DNC—have benefited the Republican nominee’s campaign. If you want to believe Trump is a ~~Manchurian~~ Muscovite candidate, his campaign manager’s multimillion-dollar deals with a Russian stooge in the Ukraine are kind of a smoking gun. It seems just as likely that Manafort will simply work for anyone who pays him enough, and he feels no more loyalty to Putin than to any other oligarch whose budget contains eight-figure consulting lines. But it’s thrilling story nonetheless, and it ads another convincing argument to the case that 2016 is the craziest US election of our lifetimes. I might be willing to put it ahead of the nutso election of 1824 for craziest of all time.

You’ll have to decide for yourself, because Combat! blog is taking a hiatus this week. Astute readers may have noticed the large number of days off we’ve taken recently. I’m on the verge of finishing the first draft of a novel, and I’m inundated with deadlines for other projects. Also, it’s summer, and no one wants to stay inside and read my groundless opinions anyway. So we’ll come back next Monday, by which time Trump presumably will have called the Pope a drug addict and killed a child in a duel. Good luck, fair reader. Good luck.