Obama Worth Less Than $51,000 in “Croc Attack Insurance”

Cold-blooded. Reptilian. Assassin?<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/briangratwicke/5110912142/">Brian Gratwicke</a>/Flickr

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If Barack Obama were attacked by a man-eating crocodile during this week’s visit to Australia, you’d think that his life would be worth significantly more than $51,000, right?

Right?

Well, AFP reports:

Obama will be the fifth president to visit…Australia, and his flying two-day visit will take in the staid capital Canberra as well as the Northern Territory town of Darwin, in the heart of “Crocodile Dundee” country.

Local firm TIO has snapped up the opportunity to insure the high-profile visitor, issuing a [sic] him with a Crocodile Attack Insurance policy which will pay out Aus$50,000 (US$50,870) if the president is fatally attacked by a reptile. …

The company, which has been providing crocodile cover for more than 20 years, hopes to present a framed copy of the policy — which features a menacing photo of the deadly predator — to Obama in Darwin on Thursday.

Just to be perfectly clear, if the Secret Service can’t prevent this from happening to the President of the United States…

…at least the First Family will be $50,870 in the black.

Thankfully, the chances of anyone (leader of the free world, or not) getting terminally wrecked by a croc in Australia are fairly slim, with an average of two reported fatalities each year. And if this BBC headline from summer 2010 is any indication—”Australian drunk survives attempt to ride crocodile“—Obama will have to do a little more than just show up to get assassinated by an Aussie crocodile.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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