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By Weldon Berger, on February 26th, 2012
Alan Fucking Simpson! is a former Senator from Wyoming. He hates Social Security and the “greedy geezers” who rely on it to sustain them in their later years, and he doesn’t understand why anybody who already gets Social Security cares about preserving the program for younger people when anyone can see that it’s none of their business. He is the co-chair of the current president’s completely gratuitous National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a name that translates to “the National Commission on Cannibalizing Social Insurance and Safety Net Programs.”
President Obama created the bipartisan commission when Congress, in an uncharacteristically sensible move involving some characteristically skeezy motives, decided not to. The prospective Congressional commission prefigured the late, unlamented Super Committee, which was designed to do the same thing—produce a list of proposals that Congress would either approve without amendment or disapprove. The president supported the plan, but most Senate Democrats opposed it and it went down when several Republicans who cosponsored the legislation voted against it on the grounds that the commission might somehow do something that could possibly redound to Obama’s benefit.
Good for them. Unfortunately, the president then appointed his own commission, but without the legislative imperative. He named Erskine Bowles, a conservative Democrat and wealthy investment banker, to represent liberals and the poor, and to hold down the cannibals’ corner he appointed the aforementioned cannibalistic Republican Alan Fucking Simpson!
Continue reading Alan Fucking Simpson! plus: SS v. ACA: comparing apples and a mouthful of tacks
By Weldon Berger, on February 16th, 2012
The European countries acting on behalf of Greece’s creditors are bullies. Americans are saps. And a group of sane doctors may get the right result for all the wrong reasons.
As is the bully’s practice, the more the Greeks concede, the more the bullies demand. To this point the bullying has worked (for the bullies) but now the country’s managers are in fear for their political lives, at least, so the country looks as likely to default on its debts as to accept the latest turn of the screw.
Continue reading How the patience of the Greeks spells doom; plus, Crazed Doctors for Sanity
By Weldon Berger, on February 10th, 2012
How many times have you said to yourself, “Gee, why is it that whenever something goes wrong in a war conflict operation military-related function, it’s always people who get the blame? Darn that accountability impulse!”
Yes, accountability has long been a weakness of the US armed forces. Just recently, absolving a Marine squad of any serious wrongdoing in the deaths of the two dozen women, children and old men they massacred in the Iraqi town of Haditha took more than six years. Who knows what damage was done to morale within the services and the reputation of the US military without during that protracted exculpation process?
Obviously something has to be done, and now, with the Navy in the lead, it is.
Continue reading The new and improved No More Tears drone! Now with even less accountability!
By Weldon Berger, on February 9th, 2012
First, let me say that those to whom Glenn Greenwald is anathema should just move along now, because his Salon column is where I ran across this item and I know some people just shut down their forebrains when they see his name.
For a very long time now, I have been saying that if George Bush did some of the things Obama has done, Democrats would be screaming for his head. We know this to be true because Obama has in fact done some of the same things that motivated Democrats to scream for Bush’s head. But Democrats are not screaming for Obama’s head; instead, more of them than not have simply decided to support the Bush policies that Obama has embraced and advanced. Or rather, they appear to be acting on instinct to support Obama regardless what he does, just as alleged conservatives acted to support Bush, whose administration was chock-a-block with the worst sort of radicals, regardless what he did. Support first, work out a rationale afterward.
Continue reading Democrats: slightly less inclined toward blind allegiance than Republicans. Huzzah!
By Weldon Berger, on January 26th, 2012
I have been lazy about referring the two of you to other blogs. I keep forgetting that it’s perfectly legitimate in this business to just quote stuff and then say I wrote something, which makes me feel better about not having written anything. Here are some things that people I like have found other people to be fantastically wrong about.
Jack Crow on the threat to traditional marriage:
If you’re looking for what degrades or corrupts the, heh, marriage bond, you ain’t ever going to find it the affections and affectations of homosexuals. But, you will find a whole lot of sundered wedded union in the wake of deployment, military industrial centralization and the austerity which follows war upon war. That shit is disruptive. The gays, not so much.
Continue reading Blogs on Parade: “They’re Wrong About Everything” edition
By Weldon Berger, on January 25th, 2012
I didn’t get around to reading the State of the Union speech until this morning because the idiot White House didn’t post a transcript on their web site before I went to bed last night, and be damned if I’m going to subject myself to the audiovisual torment of a major political speech ever again. So I apologize to both of you for not responding immediately, as I hear that some malevolent homunculus from my former home state, Indiana, did.
The speech can be divided into two parts: the part that recognized and cashed in on all the pressure toward economic justice that Occupy created* during the past four months, and the part that didn’t.
Continue reading So Tu, Bluto?
By Weldon Berger, on January 22nd, 2012
Now that Newt Gingrich has won the first round in the Confederate States primary contests—and O! what a victory it was; America’s demons are on the prowl and Newt is their advance man—it’s time to look at the various possible fates of the Soul of America depending upon who wins the battle for it.
Continue reading Scenarios for various outcomes of the Battle for the Soul of America
By Weldon Berger, on January 19th, 2012
A quick word (two, really) for liberals incensed that other liberals and leftists are attracted to the anti-imperialist, anti-authoritarian soundings of Ron Paul: fuck off. If you don’t like that people are praising a guy they would otherwise regard as just another demented freak filling out the field of demented freaks (and the one . . . → Read More: Why panicked liberals hate Ron Paul
By Weldon Berger, on December 29th, 2011
The latest scam spam in my inbox is a letter from a high-ranking official of the International Monetary Fund telling me to deal only with him in recovering my money from Nigeria. What is it with Nigeria?
Okay, so the war in Iraq is over, according to Obama. This is because the Iraqis rejected his energetic pleas to let him keep some troops in the country—”Okay, not 30,000. How about 10,000? 5? 3500? Okay, fine, we’re leaving, but don’t blame me if we have to come back in with guns a-blazing …”—rather than observing the exit plan humorously agreed upon by the Bush administration.
But even with that we’re not leaving, not if you count the 16,000-strong crowd manning the murder holes in the State Department’s gigantic downtown Baghdad bunker. By way of comparison, that’s almost as many people as staff every other US embassy in the world combined, minus Afghanistan.
Continue reading The IMF wants me, plus, Iraq Who?
By Weldon Berger, on November 7th, 2011
I have nothing of interest to say today, so …
Once upon a time my blog got a lot of traffic, or at least it seemed like a lot to me. Then stuff happened and now most of my traffic comes from spammers trying to log into the site or leave comments or both.
One consequence of the spam is that when it gets really heavy, my little blog exceeds the amount of CPU time my web site host allows an individual site to use, so the server starts limiting my usage and access to the blog slows way down. This doesn’t discourage the spammers at all, they just keep banging away, but it does annoy actual people trying to read something.
Continue reading Customer service
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Word of the Decade Ignoranus: An ignorant asshole.
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