Close Readings: An alarming message from Healthcare.gov

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 0 Comment
You know that scene in Scanners where the guy's head blows up?

You ever seen that scene in Scanners where the dude’s head blows up?

Caption readers are hereby issued an apology for the compound movie reference. Link clickers are issued an apology for the quality of that video. And health insurance exchange customers are issued their usual packet of vague information and warnings. We also got an email beginning with this sentence:

You’re unique, so why should your health plan be any different?

Uh…[explodes.] Close reading of why this sentence is a threat to skull integrity after the jump.

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Missoula County Attorney enters endgame

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 1 Comment
Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg

Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg

Fred Van Valkenburg is back from vacation today, and I do not envy him his voice mailbox. Probably he checked it while he was away. We know he read the paper, because he sent attorney Jim Ghidella an angry email after Ghidella wrote a letter to the editor critical of Van Valkenburg’s fight against the US Department of Justice. For those of you who have not followed this story: in 2012, the DOJ announced that it was investigating the University of Montana, Missoula police, and the county attorney’s office for improper handling of sexual assault cases. The police and UM cooperated, and their investigations are now over. Van Valkenburg, on the other hand, has insisted all along that Justice has no jurisdiction over his office, and recently got $50,000 from the county commission to pursue a declaratory judgment against them. That lawsuit was filed earlier this week—just in time for us to learn about the agreement that Montana’s state attorney general made with the DOJ in 2012 to cooperate with investigators.

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Close Readings: Our glorious satellite, the Moon

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 1 Comment
A chart of science

A chart of science

My brother recently forwarded me a spam email wondering if he had yet made his decision re: the important lunar transit. “To be honest I was hoping for some kind of contact from you either by email for through my web-page as we are getting closer and closer to this date,” it reads, “a vitally important day for you as it marks the beginning of a period of 6 months of chance and fortune when you will be living under the full and beneficial influence of our glorious satellite, the Moon.” Thus begins a striking amalgam ancient and modern bullshit, as contemporary business prose enters the house of astrology on the cusp of internet phishing. Long excerpt after the jump.

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An extremely exciting day in the history of boring stuff

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 1 Comment
The US Senate looks the same every time.

The US Senate looks the same every time.

I still remember the day that I, a boy-child of 14, encountered Robert’s Rules of Order. Oh, I though to myself. Here is finally the thing I like least in the world. As a set of rules for meetings, parliamentary procedure is boring squared. Even in the most interesting kinds of meetings—the Machiavellian ones where everyone pretends not to hate one another’s goals—procedure is at best a synopsis of a plot. It is therefore maybe hard to get psyched about the possibility of today’s Senate changing the rules of the filibuster, an instrument that the world’s greatest deliberative body abuses now more than ever.

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Friday links! Personal problems edition (and update!)

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 10 Comments

Today’s edition of Combat! blog is late and extremely half-assed—we’re talking quarter-assed, really—because I have personal problems. As a crazy person who works for himself, I spend a lot of time balancing the demands of my unreasonable boss with the shortcomings of his incompetent employees. Some days it shakes out and I do the work. Other days I make a spectacle of myself, which is basically what we’re doing here. So buckle up: I’m an unreliable person whose shitty writing reflects his fundamental inner shititude, and I have tricked you into expecting better from me. It’s Friday, nothing matters more than my own disappointed narcissism except for possibly my narcissistic disappointment, and everything sucks. Want proof? I feel compelled to tell you anyway.

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