Friday links! Billionaires against elitism edition

Steven Mnuchin and Mike Meyers at a meeting of the Integrity Club

The 2016 election was about resentment toward economic and political elites. That’s why voters (nearly) picked the billionaire TV personality instead of the hundred-millionaire president’s wife. Now that the electorate has demanded Washington stop rigging the system in favor of rich people and their execrable children, Donald Trump is here to clean things up, along with his children. But he’s also got a posse of rich men. Here’s notorious bro Bernie Sanders with a fun fact:

If you really wanted to make America great again, you could nominate these 17 people to give up their fortunes and double the assets of the working class. How many people would not give one rat’s ass what Rex Tillerson did after he did that? You could give him room and board in the White House and let him live on his salary as Secretary of State. But that would be crazy—better to let him keep his money and also give him global power. Today is Friday, and the CEO of ExxonMobil is going to help a TV billionaire make things right for the little guy. Won’t you strike up The Internationale with me?

Continue reading

Fuck it, Trump figures, how many of them can there be?

nbc-fires-donald-trump-after-he-calls-mexicans-rapists-and-drug-runners

Donald J. Trump appeals to the better angels of our nature.

Character in a journalism student’s fantasy Donald Trump made headlines yesterday, because he said the United States should close its borders to Muslims. At press time, he keeps saying it. Finally, someone has the guts to tell it like it is. America has gone without a strong, loud, stupid leader for too long, and it’s also been too long since we made laws about kinds of people. Every time we made a law about a kind of people in this country—Indian removal, Jim Crow, Japanese internment—was a time Trump voters consider better than now. Yes, even Japanese internment. “What I’m doing is no different from FDR,” Trump told Good Morning America, referring to the worst thing FDR ever did. I know we recently said Trump had gone full racist, but now that he’s accused a domestic religious minority of conspiring with foreign enemies to obstruct his plan to make America great again, he has technically gone full Hitler. Unless, of course, he doesn’t really mean it.

Continue reading

Friday links! Unpopular policies edition

Nice to see Frank and Luanne back together

Nice to see Frank and Luanne back together

Well, that was fast: The Combat! blog team is pleased to announce the return of the comments section, after literally several of you wrote in to say you wanted it back. The people have spoken, and they will continue to speak in a designated protest zone under each post. You can all go back to threatening my brother and making in-jokes about SAT tutoring there, while posts themselves will remain the exclusive province of my ill-considered rantings. Today is Friday, and policy is for the people to respond to but not, you know, make. Won’t you gather torches and pitchforks with me?

Continue reading