Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

By Dan Brooks in Tea Party 0 Comment

"We set out early. Light was poor."

The Tea Party took another step toward actuality last week with the approval of a congressional Tea Party Caucus, headed by none other than Michele Bachmann. And you know what that means! Okay, technically that does not mean it’s time for another edition of Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head, since that series is explicitly not about Michele Bachmann. It seemed like a genius system at the time, but in retrospect our decision to make MIMBH about everyone but the person whose name is mentioned in the title was an editorial oversight. Henceforth, Combat! blog will use Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head to talk about Michele Bachmann. This paragraph is surely of little interest to anyone, except various web crawlers that are, as we speak, making this page the definitive result for people who type “michele bachmann” into Google. For the purposes of attracting that traffic, let me just wind things up by saying michele bachmann hot, michele bachmann legs, michele bachmann crazy bitch who looks at me while i’m asleep.

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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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Oh, Steve King. You so, um, racist

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 3 Comments

Fun fact: This picture of Steve King came from a Fox News article headlined "Rep. Steve King upset that group of Democrats opposed Christmas resolution."

Fellow Iowan, US Representative and probable crazy person Steve King appeared on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show Monday, where he discussed Liddy’s role in the Watergate break-in President Obama’s systemic racism. Mad props to Jacek for the link. According to King, Obama’s policies consistently favor blacks over whites. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from this series of words that he said: “The president has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race on the side that favors the black person in the case of professor Gates and officer Crowley.” Later in the program, Frankenstein accused the President of having bolts in his neck.

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It’s hypocritical to expect privacy from Facebook

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 6 Comments

This tactic also worked on Iraq.

The increasingly hungry uroboros that is the World(-)Wide Web has been aglow with anger this week over Facebook’s new policy of sharing user information with third-party websites. The social networking site has propagated its “Like” button to a number of partners, including the Washington Post, whose users immediately took exception to their friends seeing a list of articles they’ve shared with their friends. Facebook has also made all the bands, movies, hometowns and whatnot on its users “About Me” pages into active links that point to other pages—a move which, as of this writing, has led to the creation of fanpages for the movie, TV show, book and activity “fuck you.” If you clicked on that link, you probably saw not only the groups but also a list of your friends’ status updates containing that phrase—the top of my list was a picture of my friend Aaron saying, “Fuck you, Broncos,” which was enormously satisfying—followed by, disturbingly, a scrolling list of people you don’t know who’ve used “fuck you” in their various posts.* Herein lies the problem. If I can see everybody who wrote “These Banana Republic chinos totally kick/accentuate my ass!” on Facebook today, then so can Banana Republic. The idea that Facebook has compiled my likes and interests and favorite bands for ready sale to whatever weird marketing ghosts are constantly trying to drag me into their fashion spirit world seems like a betrayal. That’s my life, Facebook! Except, of course, that’s what Facebook has been doing all along. Their entire dang raison d’etre has always been to aggregate marketing data and serve online ads. The new linking and information-sharing policies are objectionable for only two reasons: first, they put it out in the open, and second, it forces us to confront the reason why we all signed up for Facebook in the first place.

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Friday links! So angry I’m happy edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links, Uncategorized 3 Comments

Tea Party protestors outside the Missoula post office, where I heard the phrase "blacks and Democrats" three times while trying to mail my taxes

When I was a kid, I used to love reading Cal Thomas. For those of you who did not grow up with the Des Moines Register, your premiere newspaper for stories about pie and dogs that saved their owners from fires through barking, Thomas is a syndicated political columnist who combines the confidence of a small-town minister with the intellectual curiosity of a small-town minister. As near as I can tell, he hasn’t been right about anything in 30 years, and a surprising number of his columns begin with dictionary definitions, but I couldn’t stop reading him. At the risk of oversimplifying my fascination, getting angry at Cal Thomas made life feel important. Some perverse quadrant of my fourteen year-old brain knew that the baffled, sputtering indignation I experienced trying to follow a Cal Thomas argument expanded the sum total of my consciousness.* As a series of girlfriends would later remind me, the more you feel, the more you are alive—even if that feeling is bitter, frustrated anger. Today is Friday, and soon the weekend will enfold us in its boozy, maybe-trying-to-tell-us-something-and-maybe-just-being-affectionate arms. It will demand from us a new, more vibrant mode of living, and as usual five days of drudgerous toil will have deadened us until we feel somehow unequal to the task. As a palliative—by which I mean an irritant—Combat! blog offers a collection of links to things that enrage us, whether by their ignorance, their audacity, or their audacious ignorance. Sure, they’re horrifying, but we can’t look away. What separates us from the animals, after all, if not our love of lingering upon what separates us from the animals?

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