Friday links! Going out of business edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments

An American patriot finally has the common sense to demand no more taxes and no more debt.

I don’t want to alarm you, but this is probably going to be the last weekend in America. Congress has until Tuesday to raise the debt ceiling, and to paraphrase the Magic 8-Ball, outlook not good. It is possible that ours will become the first generation in history to cause a US federal default, not by calamity or foreign depredation but by our respective insistences that we are right about everything. The Republican Party, having thus far produced a proposal guaranteed not to win any Democratic votes, has doubled down on partisanship by adding a balanced budget amendment. Harry Reid has announced that such a bill is dead on arrival in the Senate, even as he reminds us how important it is to pass something. With default 96 hours away, each party is working tirelessly to assure the American people that disaster is the other party’s fault. Being an American citizen on July 29, 2011 is like riding in the back seat of a car driven by a bickering couple, one of whom refuses to open his eyes and the other of whom won’t give directions.

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McCain connects AZ wildfires to illegal immigrants

By Dan Brooks in Just Sayin' Stuff 1 Comment

Photoshop is the lowest form of wit.

Arizona senator and former Republican presidential candidate John McCain—who, incidentally, doesn’t have any particular plans for 2012—remarked Saturday that a portion of the Arizona wildfires were started by immigrants. “There is substantial evidence that some of these fires have been caused by people who have crossed our border illegally,” McCain said at a press conference. “The answer to that part of the problem is to get a secure border.” As of press time, McCain has not provided said evidence to the public, nor has he described what its substance may be. But the important thing is that we used to start our own fires in this country, and being an arsonist/bolt of lightning used to mean something, but now—thanks to immigrants—decent, hard-working Americans have to sit home taskless, drinking their wives’ unsold beer and staring at their oddly deathless boobs. No word yet from McCain on who’s been poisoning wells.

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Friday links! Gimme that Rapture edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments

So long, dicks!

I just found out this morning, but tomorrow is apparently the Rapture. So sayeth Harold Camping, a former engineer who has painstakingly calculated the exact date of the faithful’s ascension to heaven and the subsequent period of natural disasters, war and plague that will precede God’s reign on Earth. Or maybe it’s his reign in heaven—it’s kind of unclear, but the point is that the world will end on May 21, 2011. That’s tomorrow. Presumably the internet will survive at least a few weeks into the horsemen’s pounding, throbbing ride across the virginal face of this land, so if you are reading this on Sunday, let me be the first to welcome you to an America with better science curricula and shorter lines to see that Atlas Shrugged movie. To paraphrase Robert Johnson, I’m not crazy about hell, but all my friends are going there. While we wait for the after-party, why not take a look at the last hours of the reception?

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Army officer ordered to use “psy-ops” on visiting congressmen

By Dan Brooks in lying 4 Comments

In this case, you should probably just use the plane.

 

First of all, lest you misjudge how it feels to have psy-ops used on you, the p is silent. According to this article in an evidently self-impressed Rolling Stone, Lieutenant General William Caldwell ordered members of his Information Operations unit to use psychological manipulation techniques on senators and congressmen visiting Camp Eggers* in Kabul. Lieutenant Colonel Michael Holmes claims that Caldwell told his unit to gather background information on John McCain, Al Franken, Armed Services Committee chair Carl Levin and other legislators, in order to use psy-ops tactics to convince them to devote more money and troops to the Afghan War. “How do we get these guys to give us more people?” Caldwell demanded. “What do I have to plant inside their heads?” As one might expect, the Army is prohibited from using propaganda and/or psychological warfare techniques on US citizens—much less members of Congress—and this shit is totally illegal. Also, it doesn’t take a military background check to figure out what will break John McCain’s psyche. Tiger cage: no; woman with nice jawline: yes.

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Lieberman to strip citizenship of guilty people, mostly

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 1 Comment

Senator Joe Lieberman (I–CT) taking a bold stand against imagined guilty terrorists

Yesterday, we got all up in our heads about what the search for meaning in terrorist acts might possibly mean, and despite that sure-fire discursive strategy, things got a little abstract. Fortunately, we’ve got Joe Lieberman to bring us back to hard, unforgiving, maybe-taking-you-away-in-the-night-with-a-velvet-bag-over-your-head reality. In the wake of the arrest of Faisal Shahzad, the senator from Connecticut proposed legislation that would revoke the citizenship of Americans tied to terrorist organizations. Incensed at the news that Shahzad, a naturalized US citizen, had been read his Miranda rights after his arrest, Lieberman was joined in his outrage by Rep. Peter King (R–NY) and John McCain, who apparently has some kind of personal hypocrisy bucket list. The Paul Theroux Man of Straw Award has to be given to senator Chris Bond on this one, though, for saying that “We’ve got to be far less interested in protecting the privacy rights of these terrorists than in collecting information that may lead us to details of broader schemes to carry out attacks in the United States.” When an extrajudicial authority strips you of your American citizenship so that you can be imprisoned indefinitely without trial or sent to Egypt for interrogation, it’s not your privacy that’s violated.

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