October 25th, 2011 by John Feehery
The president does a pretty good job of declaring victory. He doesn’t do a particularly good job of explaining the cost.
He ended last week declaring that our troops in Iraq will be home for Christmas. What he didn’t explain was that decision was reached because the Iraqis are kicking us out of their country and that the likely result will be a dirty civil war that will make Iraq a puppet of Iran.
But the president has a history of these kinds of victories.
Sure, he signed a health care reform law, which he hailed as a victory for the American people. What he didn’t explain was that health care insurance costs would likely continue to climb for most consumers and that many businesses would be ending their health insurance programs in favor of these exchanges created by the law.
Sure, he signed the Dodd-Frank law, which he hailed as a victory for those who are frustrated by a banking industry that doesn’t work properly. But the law hasn’t even been fully vetted by the regulators and already it has made it harder for the banks to loan out their money to small and medium-sized businesses. Read more...
Tags: Anwar al-Awlaki, Congress, Dodd-Frank law, health care insurance, health care reform law, Libya, Moammar Gadhafi, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, Obama, Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan
Posted in Bad Decisions, Economy, Financial Crisis, Foreign Relations, History, Politics, Presidential election, Promises, Theory, election, health care, national security, terrorism, tragedy, war | No Comments »
September 6th, 2011 by John Feehery
My dad learned how to make his bed in the Army.
His bed-making skills are much more impressive than mine will ever be. He creases his sheets just so. He could easily get a quarter to bounce high off the finished product.
He tried to instill his bed-making skills onto his sons, but somehow, we never were able to follow in his footsteps.
Part of that was because we didn’t really care about making our bed. Part of that was because as teenagers, you are lucky to get to school, let alone worry about making your bed with military precision.
My dad learned a bunch of other things in the Army. He learned how to polish his boots. He learned all about physical fitness. He learned about different cultures in America (and in Korea).
He learned some things that he will probably never tell his grandkids, and some things he never told his mother.
My dad enlisted in the Army before he was drafted. But in all likelihood, he would have been drafted anyway. And many of the skills he first learned at boot camp, he kept with him his entire life. Read more...
Tags: America, Army, military, United States, war
Posted in Foreign Relations, Government, Theory, national security, war | No Comments »
August 29th, 2011 by John Feehery
A mighty wind blew in over the weekend. Television anchors were stretched to the limit as they desperately sought ways to fill airtime. Emergency workers looked far and wide to fill in their time cards. And plenty of people suddenly freaked out over the possibility that they might get wet.
New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg decided to close down the city’s mass transit system a full day before the storm was supposed to hit the Big Apple. When the rainstorm finally hit (without any of the promised flooding), a lot of the Mayor’s critics wondered in loud and not very pleasant voices, if he was over-reacting.
He said that he would rather be safe than sorry, and that is a very common reaction among politicians. “We must be safe, not sorry,” should be the catchphrase of the 21st century.
That sounds completely rational in the abstract. It makes perfect sense to be cautious, especially when it comes to a major storm like a hurricane.
But being overly cautious is not without its own risks. I call it the “Chicken Little Syndrome”. If political leaders continually warn that the sky is falling, and the sky does not fall, it can cause a huge problem with voters. Read more...
Tags: America, Chicken Little Syndrome, Economy, Government, hurricane Irene, Hurricane Katrina, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, politicians, Politics, war on terror
Posted in Bad Decisions, Government, History, Media, Politics, Radicalism, Theory, bad news, national security, terrorism, tragedy, war | No Comments »
August 23rd, 2011 by John Feehery
Muammar Gaddafi
If and when Muammar Gaddafi is finally deposed in Libya, President Obama probably deserves some credit. He backed Nicholas Sarkozy and NATO’s efforts to aid the rebels (whoever they are). He authorized the Navy and the Air Force to bomb the hell out of the bad guys. And of course, he has been boldly predicting that Gaddafi’s days are numbered, a nice counter-balance to the Libyan dictator’s assurances that he was going nowhere.
Will Obama get that credit? Probably not.
Most Americans don’t care what happens to Mr. Gaddafi. They are worried less about the economic future of Tripoli and more worried about jobs in their own community. Why should we spend our hard-earned tax dollars deposing a far-away dictator when we have a huge budget deficit and a struggling economy back here?
For the conspiracy theorists out there, there is a persistent rumor that we went into Libya to bailout Goldman Sachs.
Goldman lost 98% of Libya’s Sovereign Wealth Fund in 2007 (which amounted to $1.3 billion, a lot of it personal Gaddafi money, undoubtedly), and the Libyans were not very happy about it. Goldman could never come up with a solution to this problem that could make the dictator happy. Read more...
Tags: America, Assad, Barack Obama, Economy, Goldman-Sachs, Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, NATO, Nicholas Sarkozy, Obama, Politics, spending, Syria, Tripoli, Wall Street Journal, war, Zarti
Posted in Bad Decisions, Economy, Financial Crisis, Foreign Relations, Government, History, Media, Politics, Scandals, Theory, bad news, national security, spending, taxes, war | 1 Comment »
August 12th, 2011 by John Feehery
Nihilism rules the streets of Great Britain. A normal looking Norwegian kills scores of fellow countrymen in the hopes of sparking a war against Islam. Paris is still recovering from the Algerian riots of last year.
America loses it AAA rating. Europe struggles to stay fiscally afloat. Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Iceland all look like they are going to go bankrupt.
European birthrates can’t compete with European death rates, as more immigrants fill the workforce and create tension.
Gangs of black youths run around major American cities, beating up white people for the fun of it. Police forces in rural America spend the majority of their time trying to close down meth labs, as the percentage of people in the country who are addicted to the deadly drug inches up.
Teachers (not students) are accused of cheating when it comes to grading standardized tests, so that they can escape the brunt of the No Child Left Behind law.
Stories of abuse, suicide, rape, incest and a variety of other unbelievable evils dominate the headlines.
What the hell is going on with Western Civilization? Read more...
Tags: Catholicism, Europe, Evangelicals, Great Britain, Holocaust, Iceland, Ireland, Islam, Italy, Moral Majority, Nihilism, No Child Left Behind law, Portugal, Protestantism, Spain, the Enlightenment, Vietnam War, Western Civilization
Posted in Bad Decisions, Education, Financial Crisis, Government, History, Laws, Politics, bad news, national security, spending, taxes, tragedy, war | No Comments »
August 8th, 2011 by John Feehery
Democratic spinmeisters have concocted a nice little phrase to describe the actions of the Standard and Poor’s Ratings Agency, which was used to little effect over the weekend: The Tea Party Downgrade.
Nice try. That is kind of like blaming the fire department for not putting out the fire fast enough.
The S&P believes that we spend too much as a nation and that we don’t have the political will to stop spending. The Tea Party was formed primarily to send a message to Washington that America needs to stop spending money we don’t have.
The Tea Party won’t get the blame for the debt rating downgrade. President Obama will get the blame and it will hurt him with the American people in the next election.
This 30-second ad takes less than 30 seconds to create. A picture of the President hanging out with his Democratic colleagues fades in and fades out. A screen shot fades in: “The first President to ever lose America’s AAA credit rating. Had enough?”
The President’s men know this is a bad hit. That is why Tim Geithner is attacking the S&P so harshly. That is why the spinners are trying to pin the blame on conservative Republicans. But it won’t work. Read more...
Tags: AAA rating, America, American people, Barack Obama, Bush administration, Congress, Congressional leaders, Conservatives, debt limit, Democrats, election, FDR, George Bush, George W Bush, GOP, health care law, impson-Bowles deficit commission, JFK, Media, medicare, Politics, President Obama, Presidential election, recession, reform, Republicans, Senate, spending, Standard and Poor’s Ratings Agency, tax increases, taxes, Tea Party, Tim Geithner
Posted in Bad Decisions, Economy, Financial Crisis, GOP, Government, History, Laws, Media, Politics, Presidential election, Theory, bad news, election, health care, medicare, national security, spending, taxes, war | No Comments »
August 4th, 2011 by John Feehery
An interesting story caught my eye in the New York Times today, about the rise of a radical right-wing group in, of all places, Sweden.
Swedes are concerned that they are losing their national character because of the high influx of immigrants from Muslim countries. The Times noted the resentments of one typical Swedish family:
“Michael Ahlgren, who lost his job as a security guard for the Red Cross just before Christmas, wears a tattoo of the Swedish flag on his shoulder and voted for the Sweden Democrats, a nationalist party that shocked the country by winning nearly a quarter of the votes for the city council here in 2006. He and his wife are outspoken in their resentment: the government spends money on refugees, they say, but their daughters’ school lunches have barely any vegetables and, to accommodate Muslim religious practice, no longer offer pork sausages.”
The lack of vegetables doesn’t seem like that much of a big concern. The pork sausages? Now, that is a reason to get mad.
This is not just Swedish problem. It has spread to the United States. Read more...
Tags: America, bacon, Chicago Public Schools, Christian, Conservatives, Economy, Government, immigrants, Iowa, Jewish, Koran, Muslim, New York Times, pig farms, pork, Red Cross, Republicans, Sweden, Torah
Posted in Economy, Food, Fun, Government, History, Humor, Politics, Religion, Theory, war | 1 Comment »
July 29th, 2011 by John Feehery
I like to call myself a Libertarian, but I am really not.
I don’t really want government to disappear. While I read The Fountainhead in college, and I admit I have found it to be influential in my life, I think Ayn Rand was a little kooky and her objectivism philosophy is unworkable in the real world.
My brother, the Tea Partier is a Libertarian. He wants government to shrink dramatically. He wants police forces to be shrunk, he wants teacher’s pensions cut, he wants most regulatory bodies eliminated. He finds government to be oppressive and he wants it to be gone.
He also believes that for the last forty-five years, America has been living a lie. He hates the military industrial complex, he hates the Federal Reserve, he wants to go back to a Gold Standard. He thinks we should never
have gone into Iraq and believes that the Soviet Union would have fallen without the Reagan buildup, and he believes that the banking system in this country is essentially corrupt.
He also finds Michele Bachmann to be appealing and he appreciates what Joe Walsh is doing in stopping the debt limit extension. Read more...
Tags: Ayn Rand, Federal Reserve, Gold Standard, Government, Internet poker, Iraq, Joe Walsh, John Boehner, Libertarian, medicare, Michele Bachmann, national defenses, Social Security, Soviet Union, taxes, Tea Party, Tea Party libertarians, The Fountainhead
Posted in Economy, Financial Crisis, Food, Foreign Relations, GOP, Government, History, Laws, Media, Politics, Promises, Theory, corruption, election, health care, medicare, national security, spending, taxes, war | 1 Comment »
July 27th, 2011 by John Feehery
John Boehner is doing an exceptional job as Speaker under extraordinarily tough times.
When I first started working in Congress, Tom Foley had just taken over from Jim Wright as Speaker of the House. Unlike the dictatorial Wright, Foley ran a decentralized process that gave too much power to Committee barons like Dan Rostenkowski, Jack Brooks and John Dingell.
Foley could never quite get the Chairmen to work together enough to overcome their jurisdictional squabbles, and Democrats faltered under the House Bank scandal, the Post Office debacle and a series of other damaging revelations about a Congress that was out of control.
When Newt Gingrich came to the Speaker’s Office, he leap-frogged over the gentlemanly Bob Michel (my former boss) who unfortunately announced his retirement before he could see the promised land of a Republican majority. Gingrich learned the lessons of the ineffective Foley, centralized power in his chambers, and bull-rushed an ambitious Contract with America legislative agenda. Along the way, Gingrich alienated some of the new Freshmen, his committee Chairmen, and some key members of the leadership, so much so that a few of them launched a failed coup against the embattled Speaker. Read more...
Tags: America, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Bob Michel, Congress, Conservatives, Dan Rostenkowski, Democrats, Denny Hastert, Dick Armey, George Bush, GOP, Government, Grand Bargain, House Republicans, Jack Brooks, Jim Wright, John Boehner, John Dingell, Mark Foley scandal, Nancy Pelosi, Newt Gingrich, President Obama, Republican, Republican Conference, Republicans, Speaker of the House, spending, taxes, Tea Party, the Iraq War, Tom DeLay, Tom Foley, White House
Posted in Bailouts, Economy, Financial Crisis, GOP, Government, History, Media, Politics, Promises, Reviews, Scandals, Theory, election, speeches, spending, taxes, war | No Comments »
June 23rd, 2011 by John Feehery
President Obama took 13 minutes to say something he could have said in 30 seconds. He is taking 10,000 troops out of Afghanistan immediately and plans to take out 30,000 or so more by the end of the year.
The rest of the speech was pure puffery, told with some dramatic flair, and with a left hand that kept stabbing the air for emphasis.
He left both sides unsatisfied. The left is clamoring for an immediate withdrawal, joined by more and more libertarians on the right. Neo-conservatives saw the President’s decision as dangerous sign of creeping isolationism. Most members are stuck in the middle with the President, hearing from their constituents that this war should be coming to a quick close but also being briefed by the Pentagon, which warns that too precipitous a withdrawal could have negative ramifications for our national security.
I am not an isolationist, but that doesn’t mean that I think we should stay in Afghanistan. I think you can make a case that leaving the Afghans to their own devices could be dangerous, but I mostly think that because of the heroin problem, not because of the Taliban. Read more...
Tags: adam belmar, afghanistan, America, Barack Obama, Conservatives, Democrats, Economy, Government, Iraq, Iraq war, Joe Manchin, national security, Obama, Politics, President Obama, Roy Blunt, spending, war
Posted in Economy, Financial Crisis, Government, History, Politics, Theory, middle-east, speeches, spending, war | No Comments »
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