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2010 Mission Accomplished Awards

03-Mar-10

Yankee great Yogi Berra, a humble and wise man, once said, “I really didn’t say everything I said.” One thing Berra did say was “It ain’t over til it’s over.” It’s on his plaque in Yankee Stadium.

The plaque also calls Berra a “legendary Yankee.” While it is true that he is one of the greatest players ever (three-time AL MVP, fifteen-time All-Star, ten World Series championships as a player), Yogi Berra said those words while wearing the uniform of the New York Mets.

It was 1973. The Mets were stuck in last, as usual. Berra was managing the Mets at the time, and that’s when he said it: It ain’t over til it’s over.

The Mets went on to win the division, beat the Cincinnati Reds in the playoffs, and go up 3 games to 2 against the Oakland A’s in the World Series.

They lost the next two games. Proving, again, that it ain’t over til it’s over.

If you’re a Mets fan, this is what you cling to: World Series championships in 1969 and 1986 (when it ain’t over came through big time), two other appearances (1973 and 2000), and that’s it.

Most years, it’s over long before it’s over. We cling to seasons like 1973, even if the team didn’t win it all that year. And then we have to live with the quote that defines one quarter of our team’s glory, as it were, being engraved on the plaque of a legendary Yankee that hangs in the Bronx.

As if the Yankees need, on top of everything else, miracle comebacks and unlikely winning streaks.

The Mets collapsed in 2007. Seven game lead with seventeen to play? It ain’t over til it’s over. In 2008 (déjà vu all over again), they blew another comfortable lead and missed the playoffs on the last day of the season, for the second year in a row.

Injuries made last year less stressful (no chance for a late season disaster). Spring training just started, but it ain’t over til it’s over isn’t just hopeful any more; now there’s a hint of dread.

I like this new ambiguity. When it comes to the future, sometimes I’m an optimist and sometimes I’m a pessimist. I’m on the fence. The glass is always fuller on the other side. Hope for the best, be ready for the worst.

We need more it ain’t over thinking.

As crazy as this sounds, it would have made more sense if George W. Bush had stood in front of an It ain’t over til it’s over banner instead of one which read Mission Accomplished. It would have accurately described the situation in Iraq, informed Americans that there were years of hard work to come, and made it look like Bush knew what he was doing.

It ain’t over says you can’t give up, you better keep doing your best – and you can’t count on anything, even if you’re way ahead. That pretty much describes reality in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mission accomplished makes you think the hard part is over. You ease up. When you learn there’s still work to do, you’re demoralized, you can’t get going again. That describes what happened to us in Iraq and Afghanistan, before we got smart and realized it ain’t over til it’s over.

If it’s not good for us, why do we do it all the time? Let’s stamp out mission accomplished thinking. The best way to do that is to recognize it when it happens. So here are the First Annual Mission Accomplished Awards.

Our first finalist is President Barack Obama. On Dec 24 2009, after the Senate passed its version of health care reform, Obama said, “We are now finally poised to deliver on the promise of real, meaningful health insurance reform that will bring additional security and stability to the American people.”

Less than a month later Scott Brown won a special election in Massachusetts, and health care reform was on life support. Mission accomplished, Mr. President. Next time, try: it ain’t over til it’s over.

Our second finalist is Bill Cassidy (R-LA, who said this recently: “We don’t hear people complaining about the premiums on their health insurance.”

Then Anthem sent letters to their California customers telling them their premiums were going up by 37%. Anthem is owned by WellPoint, which had more than $4 billion profit in 2009. But, since young, healthy people are struggling to make ends meet, they’re dropping their health insurance. And when healthy people drop out of a plan, rates go up for those who are left… the ones who need it.

Cassidy’s prize is a quote from “First Blood” (not a movie about health care):

Trautman: It’s over, Johnny. It’s over.
Rambo: Nothing is over! Nothing!

I can hear the fat lady singing…

This year’s grand prize goes to Senator Jim Bunning (R-Ky). Bunning pitched for four teams from 1955 to 1971. He pitched a perfect game against the Mets in ’64. For that, I don’t like him already.

In a must-win game against the Yankees in ’61 Bunning, who describes himself as “meaner than a snake”, gave up back-to-back homers to Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra. And he was part of the Phillies late-season collapse in ’64. Sweet revenge!

In the past week Bunning, all by himself, stopped a bill that would have added $10 billion to a budget that was already $1.56 trillion in the red. Why? “If we can’t find $10 billion somewhere for a bill that everybody in this body supports, we will never pay for anything.”

The senator complained about missing the Kentucky-South Carolina college basketball game, and declared his budget-balancing mission accomplished.

There’s little difference between $1.56 and $1.57 trillion. Bunning had to make a point. Here’s what else he accomplished:

  • cut payments for unemployment insurance and COBRA subsidies for 1.1 million laid-off workers;
  • cut Medicare payments to doctors by 21% (this will reduce availability of medical care to seniors and others);
  • cut a small business loan program;
  • cut funding for state highway projects, sending construction workers home;
  • cut 4,000 federal jobs (Department of Transportation) immediately;
  • cut federal programs to combat drunk driving and highway safety.

It will take more than $10 billion to undo what meaner-than-a-snake Bunning has done. He doesn’t care; he’s retiring. For him, it’s over. Not soon enough.

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2020 Hindsight

17-Feb-10

It’s been ten years since the historic winter of 2010. Much has changed since then. Now seems like a good time to look back and see if there’s anything left to learn from what happened.

It all started with the snowstorms that hit the east coast of the United States in February. The most snow Washington, D.C. ever got in one month before then was 35.2 inches in 1899. In one week in 2010, two large storms dumped as much as 52 inches of snow on the city.

Blizzard conditions were so bad at times that snowplowing and repair operations were suspended, leaving many people stranded and without power.

People called the unexpected weather Snowpocalypse or Snowmageddon.

Then things got worse.

So much snow fell by the end of the month that most people today don’t remember those first two storms. The third storm is the one people talk about when they talk about the winter of 2010.

Anyone who could get out of the city, did. All non-essential workers were told to stay inside, and not to risk travel.

As the snow piled up, one hundred of those non-essential workers found that they were trapped together in their place of work. They had not been paying attention to the growing crisis, or that everyone else had left. The first sign of trouble came when one of them got up to go home.

Senator Evan Bayh had announced only days earlier that he was retiring and would not seek re-election because he was fed up with the partisan politics that had frozen the Senate and made it incapable of passing even basic legislation.

When he saw that there was over six feet of snow just outside the doors of the Capitol Building, Bayh was stunned. He reached for his Blackberry. There were three things on his mind:

  1. I should call a press conference immediately, to tell my constituents that I am aware of this problem;
  2. I’ll have to fire my aide (after he sets up the press conference and gets me safely home), because he should have warned me about this;
  3. Why didn’t I go rogue like Palin and walk away early, instead of sticking around to finish my term?

Bayh’s Blackberry didn’t have a signal but he stood there and kept dialing for half an hour. He was eventually joined by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Reid took one look outside and asked Bayh whether he would support a motion to adjourn. Bayh wondered whether there were enough votes for it to pass.

“There’s only one way to find out.” Reid reached for his cell phone. “We’ll float the idea through the press.” But Reid also had no luck getting a signal.

“What’s going on out here?” It was the Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell.

“Look at this,” Bayh said, ignoring Reid’s signal to keep the Republican in the dark. Bayh opened the door and showed McConnell the wall of snow.

“I suppose you’re going to blame that on us, too,” McConnell chuckled. “So much for global warming.”

“I think we should adjourn,” Reid said.

“No way,” McConnell shot back.

The rest of the Senate was told about the situation. Joe Lieberman suggested an emergency bailout plan. “Last week a container ship carrying snow shovels hit an iceberg in the Potomac. We should rescue it,” Lieberman said.

When asked what the snow shovels were doing on a container ship, Lieberman had to explain his connection to the CEO of the company that made those shovels in a factory in China. Then he said he was against the bailout anyway.

“I happen to know someone who makes those shovels right here in the USA, in Texas,” John Cornyn shouted.

But John McCain asked whether there were any illegal immigrants working in that factory.

Secretly, McCain wondered which of his fellow senators would break first. With the rest of the building empty there would be no one to feed them. He could feel the chill creeping in as the heating systems failed. But he suspected that the absence of lobbyists to tell them what to do, and no way to appear on a TV or radio show, would be what hurt the worst. He knew that would be his own personal challenge.

“Look, this is a shovel-ready project. And I just happened to find a dozen snow shovels in the basement,” Chuck Schumer said. “I move that we take turns and dig our way out.”

“What, all of us? That’s socialism!” Jim DeMint yelled. “The Republicans won’t vote for it, so you can’t pass it.”

“Well, it’ll be 59-41,” Reid said. “All we need is 51 votes.”

“We’ll filibuster. You can’t get cloture without 60 votes.”

“Well… we’re stuck here otherwise…” Reid said.

And so they did. Filibuster, that is.

They started by taking turns reading shorter documents, like the Constitution. They worked their way up through some recent bills, thousands of pages that confused them, that when read aloud didn’t make sense. At first it was just Republicans, but then Democrats joined in. Sometimes, they didn’t read; they talked. They taught themselves to cook and clean and get along.

They kept warm by burning some of the bigger bills.

The rest of the nation was busy with its own problems, didn’t expect their help, and didn’t notice they were missing. Finally, the food started to run out.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Reid said. McConnell nodded.

“I’d support that,” he said. “But first, let’s see what else we could do.”

“How about we start with that idea that any bank that’s too big to fail is too big to exist?” someone shouted.

There was a chorus of cheers. Bipartisan cheers.

Looking back, it seems so simple. But it was also too late. Americans were too angry, and recent changes to election law allowed corporations to spend freely in political campaigns. The mid-term election of 2010 swept in a group of reactionaries and Wall Street puppets, and things fell apart from there.

So think about what could have been as you wait for this year’s Summer Olympics in Vancouver, Canada.

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Groundhog Day

02-Feb-10

I don’t care what the groundhog said;
There’s six more weeks of winter ahead.

Groundhogs don’t have calendars or jobs, so they don’t know that weeks have seven days or when baseball players fly south for spring training.

People have much bigger brains than groundhogs. Our brains are too big, and sometimes that gets us in trouble.

We have calendars and jobs. We split our days into weekdays and weekends. We didn’t split these as evenly as we could; we made only two weekend days and the other five belong to the week. We’re supposed to work on the weekdays. That doesn’t seem fair. To make things worse, the weekend days are weekdays too, sometimes, and become workdays. But that never works in your favor when you need a check to clear. And only one of them ends the week; the other one starts the next week.

Our big brains love to categorize and define and predict. These things are useful, but our brains have too much horsepower for us to handle, so much that they can do something called imagination.

This has mostly worked to our benefit.

But sometimes, not so much.

Memory is another thing that has its ups and downs. It helps us follow a train of thought, no matter how badly it might get derailed, like right now. It gives us traditions. But some traditions get in the way, some grudges need to be set aside. It would also be nice if there was a way to stop this song from playing inside my head. Much as I like Simon & Garfunkel, the sound of silence would be a pleasant break from The Sounds of Silence.

I had to know, so I looked it up: getting a song stuck in your head is called an earworm. The Wikipedia entry suggested calling it an aneurhythm or humbug.

That reminds me: I was talking about groundhogs. Our big brains, with their powers of imagination and tradition, gave us Groundhog Day. If the groundhog sees its shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter. Otherwise, spring is near.

Our brains are way too big.

Their real jobs, which involve analysis and definition and prediction, bore them. So they make stuff up.

Groundhog Day is February 2. The first day of spring is March 20 or 21. There’s an extra day in February every four years (except on century years, except when those century years can be divided by 400). So there are 46-48 days between Groundhog Day and the first day of spring. Always. Every year.

Since that’s almost seven weeks, whether the groundhog says there’s six more weeks of winter or that spring is coming a little quicker this year, it’s always almost right. Or wrong. It depends on how much of a stickler you want to be.

The first day of spring is, by tradition, the vernal equinox. That’s the day when there are equal amounts of daylight and nighttime. (This is different in different parts of the world, but these rules were made in the northern hemisphere, and that too is tradition.)

The earth goes around the sun in a little less than 365.25 days; that’s why leap years are not always every four years. It’s all designed so the vernal equinox falls on March 20 or 21 every year.

(About 1000 years ago it fell on March 16, which was six weeks from Groundhog Day, but then we fixed the calendar.)

Our brains figured all this out for us. But like always, they got some things wrong. And not just the bit where groundhogs can predict weather.

Spring ends on June 20 or 21, when summer starts. That’s called the summer solstice. It’s the longest day of the year. It’s really just as long as all the rest, but it’s when the northern hemisphere gets more daylight than not. Tradition, again.

The changing lengths of days has to do with how the earth is tilted as it goes around the sun. Things would be a lot more boring if days never changed.

It doesn’t make sense that the days should get shorter starting with the first day of summer. But that’s what happens, the way our brains set things up in America and Britain. Summer starts to die on its very first day. This is less fair than weekends. Thanks a lot, big brains.

The longest day of the year should be smack in the middle of summer. Some traditions do celebrate midsummer’s day. We should immediately adopt this new calendar, if we have money in the budget.

If you look at it this way, if you let your brain repartition your calendar for you as I’m suggesting, then the first day of winter (the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year) is actually the point where you are already halfway through winter.

Days have been getting longer since December 21. Knowing this is a comfort. I’m almost out of firewood.

Go ahead and look this up for yourself. Ignore the stuff about thermal lag; it’ll just depress you. Warm yourself with this: because the earth moves at different speeds along an elliptical orbit, the seasons don’t have equal lengths.

The earth takes 88.99 days to get from the winter solstice to the spring equinox, but there are 92.75 days from there to the summer solstice. Nice, warm days.

Groundhogs don’t know all this. Or if they do, they’re not telling.

If you break the seasons up this way, and I recommend that you do, then the first day of spring is… Groundhog Day.

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Words Fail

20-Jan-10

I see two things in the pictures coming out of Haiti over the past week, and they contradict each other.

The first thing is the resilience of humans confronted with overwhelming adversity. Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the world. More than 80% of the population was already living in poverty before this disaster. Tonight I saw pictures of children receiving a bottle of water – that’s it, no food was available – and they were saying ‘thank you’ and smiling.

There is a fear that hunger and thirst is going to lead to violence. Seven days after the earthquake most of the survivors were holding on, waiting patiently for the help that was coming. But violence and anarchy were spreading.

The second thing that is clear in the pictures, the one that makes me worry, is how hard it is going to be to get enough food, water, and medical aid to the survivors, no matter how patient they are.

When disasters get this big, they become hard to comprehend. There have been reports that the number of dead from this earthquake is anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 people.

Haiti has a population of 10 million, and the area around Port-au-Prince holds between 2.5 and 3.5 million people. The government didn’t function well before the earthquake and doesn’t seem to exist now.

Many nations have sent rescuers, equipment, food and water, and medical supplies (including field hospitals) but the port is damaged and the airport can hold less than ten large planes at any one time. Air traffic control is being managed by United States Special Forces using a folding table on the side of the runway.

One report from the UN announced that 130,000 food packets and 70,000 water containers were distributed by Saturday. That’s four days after the earthquake. When you compare those numbers to the three million people in the disaster area, you start to comprehend how difficult the situation is.

The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson arrived loaded with 600,000 emergency food rations. It doesn’t seem like enough.

Almost as soon as the news of the disaster spread around the world, nations responded with pledges of aid. But it is starting to seem like we can’t move fast enough, even when we want to.

People are fleeing the city, and one report said that few of them had access to a “traditional food source.” Which got me thinking: who does, these days?

Words fail. They fail to describe the suffering – and strength – of our fellow humans. And sometimes words fail because the actions they promise are beyond our means.

Words fail us in other ways, too.

Actions speak louder than words, and sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can never harm us. Right? Wrong.

Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Columbus claimed the island for Spain in December 1492. (Columbus lied about lunar eclipses, but that’s another story.) The original population of the island was almost completely wiped out by a combination of guns, germs, and steel.

Haitians are descended from African slaves brought to the island, the remaining natives, and Europeans.

French pirates settled on the island too, in the part that is now Haiti. The French word for pirate is flibustier, or freebooter.

A filibuster is a way to pirate or hijack debate. The Constitution specifies that a simple majority is required to conduct most Senate business, and gives the Vice President the power to break ties (those times when the vote is split 50-50).

But any one senator has the right to talk about anything for as long as he wants with a filibuster. The Senate can stop a filibuster only if 60 Senators agree to something called cloture to end debate. These things are not in the Constitution; they are Senate rules.

So even though it only takes 51 votes for the Senate to take action, filibusters and cloture requirements keep the Senate from approving anything that has less than 60 votes. To make matters worse, Senators don’t even have to actually talk – they just have to threaten to do so.

No matter how you feel about the bills currently being debated in the Senate, it is clear that over the past thirty or forty years, government has failed us. And this may be the reason for it.

Cloture Voting, US Senate 1947-2008

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Oh No More

06-Jan-10

Let’s start the second decade of the third millennium with some things you might find confusing, pointless, or mildly controversial.

The Tennessee Titans lost Super Bowl XXXIV in January 2000 when wide receiver Kevin Dyson was tackled one yard short of the goal line as time expired. I mention this because January 2000 was one year short of the new millennium.

If 2010 is the tenth year of the third millennium, 2001 was its first year.

That means December 31, 2000 was the last day of the last millennium. Oops.

We are an impatient bunch. We showed it by celebrating the turn of the millennium a year early.

Unless… was there a really big party at the end of 2000? Why wasn’t I invited?

Bad planning and short attention spans are a couple more of our failures that have been on display over this past decade.

It started with a sigh of relief when the world was not destroyed by the Y2K bug.

The bug was created by people who didn’t expect us to make it to 2000. When that became likely, there was a mad scramble to fix it.

Some people, seizing the opportunity, made a fortune talking about how the world was about to end. These could be the same ones who recently discovered the Mayan calendar has no refills after 2012.

When Y2K didn’t kill us, a lot of us wrote the whole thing off as a hoax.

My feeling is, we spent millions of dollars to make sure nothing bad happened, and then nothing bad happened. It might not have been a waste of money.

I don’t go for countdowns or watching the ball drop in Times Square. Maybe it’s because I’ve stayed up past midnight far too many times already. Nothing really changes at midnight.

If you want to think something special happened at midnight on December 31, 1999, go ahead. I won’t stop you.

But if you count things my way, and 2010 is the first year of the second decade of the millennium, that means the first decade only had nine years.

It was a lousy decade anyway. So I don’t mind that it’s come to an end.

The millennium really started when everything changed on 9/11/01.

I’ve been uneasy ever since. I think we’ve all been uneasy since oh-one. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the threat level is orange (high) for air travel. The national threat level is yellow (elevated, or “significant risk of terrorist attacks”). It seems like it’s never been below yellow.

I used to think the terrorists made a mistake attacking us like that. Remember how we pulled together? But lately we’ve been at each other’s throats worse than ever. Mostly for little things. When we fight among ourselves, terror wins.

If it wasn’t terrorists, we’ve been threatened by SARS, avian flu, E. coli, salmonella, and now swine flu.

You wouldn’t know these were the big health risks of the decade if all you did was watch TV. It’s full of ads for drugs that will lower your cholesterol, strengthen your bones, or shrink your prostate, if they don’t kill you with side effects first.

Then there are the ads for performance enhancing drugs. No, not the ones that Barry Bonds took to hit more home runs.

These are the ones that sound like luxury performance sedans. But if you find yourself driving your Lexus Levitra for more than four hours, call your doctor.

Watch any sporting event and you’ll be hit with one after another of these ads, all with the same message, that you need to be ready because you never know. The threat level is yellow. And in between there are ads for what’s probably causing the problem in the first place: beer.

Other ads hint at the state of the economy. Some people are doing fine and were giving jewelry for Christmas; other people were selling their gold.

By the sheer volume of car insurance commercials I saw, each one promising to save you money, each one offering lower prices than the competition, you would think there was no profit in car insurance. But from the number of commercials, I can tell that car insurance must be a big and profitable business. Maybe it’s because we are legally required to buy it.

I expect that we’ll see lots of health insurance commercials in the next decade, since it looks like that’s becoming mandatory, too. It turns out that health care reform is going to help companies more than people.

Apparently there is a tradition of giving cars for Christmas that I was not aware of. I didn’t see any big red bows in my neighbors’ driveways again this year, so I’m not sure if this ever happens.

Maybe I don’t live in the right neighborhood. Or maybe I do.

In oh-eight we went through a financial crisis, and for all of last year I worried that there was worse to come. I’m still worried about it, but we made it through and the world has not been destroyed. Yet.

The stock market rebounded, some kid who spends too much time on his webcam got rich last year, and a lot of us wrote the whole financial crisis off as an excuse for the government to bail out Wall Street with our money.

My feeling is, we spent billions of dollars to make sure nothing worse happened, and then nothing worse happened. Yet. So it might not have been a waste of money.

I’m happy to be done with the oh’s.

As bad as it was, the short decade was good for a couple of baseball teams that hadn’t won a World Series in a while. When the Boston Red Sox won in oh-four, it was their first championship since 1918. And when the White Sox won in oh-five, it was their first time since 1917.

The only people who aren’t glad the decade is over are Chicago Cubs fans. They’ve been waiting since oh-eight. That’s nineteen-oh-eight.

The Mayan calendar is fast approaching what we could call MY2K (12/21/12, or maybe it’s 12/23/12). None of the guys who did the original programming are around anymore, although I think they expected to be. We’ll just have to wait and see if they were wrong about this, too.

Keep an eye on the Cubs. I expect them to come up short as time expires.

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