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By Weldon Berger, on December 21st, 2012
John Boehner’s next job could be as a safety buoy bobbing gently in the waters of the Fiscal Shoals, warning off the unwary. (“These are not tears,” he will say with a sad little smile; “it’s only the life-giving waters of the sea in my eyes.”) If he falls, he’ll likely give way to one among the group of 40-something white guys who call themselves The Young Guns, which right there gives you multiple insights into some of the things troubling the Grand Old Party.
House and Senate staff members will take an 8.2% pay cut if their bosses don’t get a tax and deficit deal done before the end of the first federal pay period in 2013. Collectively, the staff are looking at more than $100 million in cuts for the year. Possibly this will have an impact on the negotiations. Their bosses, who included themselves among America’s Warriors and others so valuable or vulnerable as to warrant protection from any budget reductions, face a 0% cut (although their foreign currency conversion allowance will take a brutal hit). Even John Boehner will still get paid despite demonstrating live on national television that he can’t do the job for which he draws a larger pay check than anyone else in the House.
(“Who should get pay cuts?” “Well, let’s start with the obvious: not us. VA nurses first.”)
Continue reading Bobbing for sharks with Orange John Boehner
By Weldon Berger, on December 13th, 2012
The surprise in the Obama administration’s deal with London-based HSBC, the money-laundering enterprise moonlighting as the world’s third-largest bank, is that it came in the guise of a criminal prosecution. The bank has pleaded guilty to breaking some laws. Nobody who works or worked at the bank is guilty, though; just the corporate person, . . . → Read More: The Obama justice department: never met a bigfoot badman they couldn’t work with
By Weldon Berger, on December 5th, 2012
Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this before.
One would like to believe that in the face of a massive and growing emergency, our benevolent governors will recognize the need to do something, figure out what to do and then, do it. With respect to climate change, none of that is happening. I have created a very modest little mechanism through which anyone concerned can help exert some pressure on the Obama administration to at least begin developing a plan for coping with climate change, which I’ll get to downstream a bit.
Everyone who acknowledges the reality of climate change recognizes that it constitutes a crisis. Five years ago, a staid military think tank called the Center for Naval Analyses commissioned and published a report on the national security threat posed by climate change.
In the national and international security environment, climate change threatens to add new hostile and stressing factors. On the simplest level, it has the potential to create sustained natural and humanitarian disasters on a scale far beyond those we see today. The consequences will likely foster political instability where societal demands exceed the capacity of governments to cope.
CNA is populated by retired admirals and generals whose climate change concerns run mostly toward preparing the US military to cope with the consequences of long-term, escalating global unrest. They’re not a group of flamboyant alarmists. Neither are the technocrats and fat cats at the World Bank, whose concerns are keeping the world safe for development, and who last month issued a frankly terrifying report on climate change called “Turn Down The Heat,” in which they predict a 4-degree rise in global temperatures by the end of this century if the threat is left unaddressed. There is, say the authors, “no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.”
In other words, if we proceed as we are then the next generation but one may get to witness the fabled end of the world as we know it, and we’ll all walk down a long mile of very bad road in the meantime.
Continue reading Pressuring the Obama Administration on climate change, redux
By Weldon Berger, on October 16th, 2012
The giant sucking sound Ross Perot wants you to hear these days is him endorsing Mitt Romney on the basis of Romney’s presumed fiscally responsible policies. Perot, who wasn’t born yesterday, posits that history began in 2009 and says experts support Romney’s contention that the mome raths outgrabe.
Democrats, meanwhile, are shocked, shocked! that the company Romney once owned and still profits from is outsourcing jobs to China in a particularly callous fashion — requiring American workers at Sensata, an auto parts maker, to conclude their own employment by training their Chinese replacements. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin (who recently declined to sign a letter pledging to block Social Security cuts) is joining Sensata workers today in a show of solidarity.
Continue reading Free trade, terracotta candidates and cardboard bicycles
By Weldon Berger, on August 28th, 2012
The invasion of Afghanistan and the overthrow of Libya’s Qaddafi are supposed by liberal interventionists to have been good wars. Most of them have by now had their fill of Afghanistan and want out, but getting out is likely to be a nightmare. The Libyan adventure is still quite popular, when it is remembered, but is well on the way to becoming a classic case study in blowback. A recent story in Foreign Affairs magazine, the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations, named some of the harsh consequences of the war for nearby countries and Libya herself.
First, there are the weapons: The neighborhood, especially Algeria, Mauritania, and Niger, was always uneasy about Libya’s civil war. Many feared that it would pry the lid off Tripoli’s sizeable weapons cache and lead to the dispersal of arms across the region. It turns out that they were right to be worried. Then, there is the money: Locating Libya’s financial assets after the war has been another complicated matter. Members of Qaddafi’s inner circle who know where the money is stashed are missing or unidentifiable. Basically, billions of dollars might wind up in the hands of individuals who could use the cash to sponsor terrorism or otherwise destabilize Libya. And finally, there are the refugees: Tens of thousands of Africans, no longer welcome in Libya, returned home this year. Besides the fact that many of them are ripe for jihadi infiltration, they will further strain the region’s weak economies. Already, food security is becoming a major issue and famine looms.
Continue reading The good wars: Libya metastasizes and Afghanistan has a cobra snake for a necktie
By Weldon Berger, on August 25th, 2012
Yes, folks, it’s “Lesser of Two Evils” season once again. I’ll keep this short, everybody can ignore it and we’ll return to the theme in August of 2016 when once again, the Democratic candidate will most likely be less horrible than the Republican one.
Barack Obama is a bad president. Liberals are stupid to support him.
His signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, was written by a former health insurance company executive following a conservative blueprint devised to forestall government-funded universal health care such as the residents of every other developed nation, and most developing nations as well, enjoy. It massively subsidizes for-profit insurers and enshrines them as the government-sanctioned health care gatekeepers for most Americans. It kicks the prospects for genuinely universal care at least a decade down the road beyond where they already were. People will continue to expire in large numbers for lack of affordable care.
That’s the good news. That’s the upside.
Continue reading If Mitt Romney beats Jill Stein, the blame will lie squarely with Obama supporters
By Weldon Berger, on April 14th, 2012
The law is a ass, and it wants to see yours. Watch what you think; don’t think it out loud; don’t think it in the vicinity of a marijuana dispensary. Good news: the one candidate who can truly unite Americans of all political stripes has jumped into the race.
In a decision supported by the Obama administration, the Supreme Court ruled earlier this week that security services can strip search anyone they arrest even when they have no reason to think the search is necessary. Given the latitude police have to determine probable cause for arrests, the ruling licenses police to arrest and subject anyone to a strip search for no particular reason.
In his dissent to the ruling, Justice Stephen Bryer paraphrased the language of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Breyer described unwarranted strip searches as an “affront to human diginity.”
Continue reading Bad things your mad dog government has got up to lately; the Unity Candidate arrives
By Weldon Berger, on April 4th, 2012
He’s concerned that the Greeks won’t have as much money to spend on killing humans in other countries as the US would like.
“Today Secretary Panetta met with Greek Defense Minister Dimitris Avramopolous at the Pentagon to discuss a variety of mutual defense interests including the upcoming NATO Summit, the missions in Afghanistan and . . . → Read More: US Secretary of War Leon Panetta ponders the human cost of the Greek financial crisis
By Weldon Berger, on March 31st, 2012
BTC News has learned that senior Congressional Democrats are quietly directing staff members to organize an effort to pass Medicare-for-all legislation in the event the Supreme Courts strikes down the individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act, also know as Obamacare.
The staff members are reaching out to leaders of key advocacy groups for support of the effort. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee official told BTC News that the fight for universal health care in America will play a critical role in the reelection campaign of President Obama, and in the efforts of Democrats to regain control of the House and solidify control of the Senate.
Continue reading Democrats agree to push for single-payer health care system if mandate falls
By Weldon Berger, on March 22nd, 2012
Not long after the big Republican win in the 2010 elections, the Obama administration’s best and brightest gave up on explaining that putting people to work is really good for both the economy and for people who need work. The concept was too complicated for voters, they thought, so instead the president went off to negotiate with a crew of irresolute drunks and psychotic killer termites over how best to tighten the belt of government around the necks of the poor, the sick, the old and the unemployed.
This is according to David Corn’s new book, Showdown, which is apparently meant as a generous portrait of the administration.
Continue reading An epitaph for Obama: “I think we’ve all learned a valuable lesson.”
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Word of the Decade Ignoranus: An ignorant asshole.
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