Obama threatens vets’ pensions, Social Security checks

In his quest to get the debt ceiling raised, President Obama issued a threat in his Wednesday press conference that troops won’t get paid and veterans’ pension payments will be delayed.  He warned of delays in Social Security payments as well.

It’s important to understand that these comments constitute a threat (which may or may not be a hollow one).  Obama is not stating some inescapable reality, to which he along with the rest of us is subject.  If retirees and vets see a delay in their payments, it will be because Obama himself decides to hold the payments up.  Moreover, Obama is not caught in a trap when it comes to paying the troops; he can make sure they get paid, if it’s his priority to do so.

The payments to retirees are going to go out unless Obama stops them.  The debt ceiling doesn’t prevent those payments from being made.  It requires that other types of federal expenditures

2012 election: Time-out from history definitively over

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay for the National Journal entitled “The End of History?”  The essay became the foundation of his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.  I read the book at the time – and disagreed at the time with its quintessentially-20th-century thesis that mankind had evolved firmly into Western liberal democracy, and that the social and cultural pressures that had hitherto created “history” would no longer be doing so.

That’s the 20th century in a nutshell: the ascendance of a shallow, even sophomoric belief