Bors Blog

Never Forget To Pay

So the 9/11 museum will charge a whopping $20-$25 for admission when it opens. So much for taking the whole family. They have to charge a lot, they say, having spent close to a billion dollars on it and an estimated $60 million operating budget. No one really asked for anything that extravagant, that expensive, but we’re going to have the largest most expensive museum for a tragedy in the history of earth and you’re going to pay for it. Bin Laden once said his strategy was to bleed America dry of its financial resources. He could only dream of the victims families being gouged like this.

Gitmo Hunger Strike

Guantanamo is back in the news after a few years off. All it took was 100 detainees starving themselves for months to get the president to speak about it. He said some good stuff and said he’ll order an administrative review of what he can do, apparently unaware he’s the president and could literally close it tomorrow and is force feeding hunger strikers in violation of their human right to refuse medical intervention (the AMA has spoken out about this). More than half have been cleared for release for years now, and thus are not being blocked by Republicans as he would like you to believe. He could actually send these people home tomorrow, but there’s a ban on returning detainees to Yemen, where a good deal of them hail from. After his exhaustive administrative review Obama may be startled to find the person who put this obstructionist roadblock right in the path of his campaign pledge was none other than himself.

The World Is Flat

Over 600 people have now been found dead in the collapsed garment factory in Bangladesh, run by a gangster who paid workers $38 a month to make clothes for American and European markets. Cheery boosters of outsourcing insist these arrangements always benefit both parties, but it’s hard to understand how being dead might lift you out of poverty. Well, Matt Yglesias sort of did make that argument. I focused on Tom Friedman here instead Yglesias because I’m getting to it a bit late and Friedman’s work is far more popular.

Preparing to do this comic, I Googled to see if Friedman had written about the factory collapse. I was nearly to the end of this column before I figured it wasn’t actually him.

Dear Assad

Its seeming more and more likely that chemical weapons were used in Syria and the United Nations is urgently urging inspectors to be let in to verify. Chemical weapons is the so-called red line that may trigger interventionand its certainly a nasty way to die. But the amount of dead from these alleged attacks is a tiny fraction of the overall killed. I guess they died from conventional weapons, the internationally approved method.

Also, see my earlier cartoon Assads Pledge.

Rules Schmules

We cannot pass reasonable gun laws in this country, such as background checks, because “criminals won’t submit to them,” according to opponents of this entirely sane proposal. Opponents who, by the way, comprise about ten percent of the population, but much much more of Congress. If taken seriously, their argument against passing any laws that criminals would unspool centuries o laws that have shaped our society.

The Terrorism Lottery

The Boston bombing suspects turned out to be Chechen, so now that immigrant community gets to be associated with these guys for a generation or so.

Pressure Cooker

As news of the Boston bombing was coming in I was this rush to assign blame to either right-wing patriot types or Muslim terrorists depending on if you were a liberal or conservative. I guess the idea was to score some political points off the dead blown apart bodies by demonizing an entire group. I won’t be surprised if it’s either group, but maybe we should wait until there’s a shred of evidence pointing to a culprit before we make ourselves look like a horse’s ass. There will be plenty of time in the coming weeks for demonizing, overreaction, and further militarizing our local police forces.

The Path To Citizenship

Immigration reform is being rolled out by the “gang of eight.” Rubio went on all the Sunday shows to assure Americans that this new legislation would not be amnesty, but actually make it harder than it already is for illegal immigrants to become citizens through a complex system that draws out their punishment for over a decade before allowing them to apply for a mere green card. Bipartisan!

Margaret Thatcher Obit

Ebert At The Obits

I’m not sure that Roger Ebert, an outspoken secular humanist who didn’t believe in an afterlife, would have appreciated being depicted in heavenwith Gene Siskel, no less. They were co-workers who disliked each other, not soul mates. Unlike many in my field, Ebert knew how to do hilarious scathing criticism. His words in this comic are taken from some of his most brutal reviews.

Fetus Rights

So North Dakota has almost completely outlawed abortion by prohibiting them after a heartbeat can be detected in a fetus. Other laws are now in place or on their way in order to target the only abortion clinic operating in the state.

The Great National Gun Debate

Gun control legislation is shaping up to be more toothless by the day as the memory of the Newtown massacre fades. Not to worry. There will be another one soon enough and we can start the debate all over.