On the menu today: We might be getting a government shutdown for Christmas; California declares an emergency over bird flu; and PolitiFact desperately wanted to accuse a Republican of the “lie of the year.”
A Formula for the Worst Christmas Airport Delays Since Die Hard 2
The editors of National Review are blunt and direct, declaring that the most recent 1,547-page continuing resolution “deserved to die”:
A “clean” CR that keeps the government funded in the short term should be the way to go for the House right now. If Trump and Elon Musk want things to look different in the future, they should prioritize a complete reworking of the congressional budget process by rewriting the laws that govern it. The 1974 budget act that currently governs the process has never worked, and Congress has never actually passed an entire budget on time according to its rules.
The government funding runs out at midnight Friday.
Social Security checks, Medicaid Medicare, and veterans benefits still get paid if the federal government shuts down. While the government is shut down, most federal workers remain on the job if their jobs are deemed “essential.” This means they do the work, while their non-essential colleagues stay home. And nobody gets paid until the government shutdown ends; under a 2019 law, all federal employees must get fully paid for the time they worked or would have worked during a government shutdown. (The president and members of Congress still get paid during a shutdown, but some of their staffers do not.)
At the Department of Defense, 200,000 civilian employees will work without getting paid until the shutdown ends, and 439,000 civilian employees will be furloughed — told to go home until further notice. Active-duty service members are required to continue reporting for duty even if they do not receive a paycheck. At the Department of Homeland Security, roughly 185,000 federal employees will work without pay, and 31,000 will be furloughed. The Smithsonian gets closed, and national parks, monuments, and other sites would be closed to the public.
Federal government shutdowns do not save the taxpayers any money, because the workers get their back pay after the shutdown ends — whether they worked or not. In fact, shutdowns actually cost the taxpayers more, because the government ends up paying a chunk of the federal workforce for not doing any work, in addition to the diversion of time and effort involved in preparing for the shutdown and then getting operations rolling again after the shutdown.
Now, if Congress can get a clean continuing resolution passed by Monday, the disruption to American life will be minimal.
We’re less than a week from Christmas, one of the busiest travel periods of the year. Air traffic control workers are deemed essential and must go to work, with the promise that they’ll get their back pay after the shutdown ends. But it turns out that in circumstances like this, workers start calling in sick more, and when there aren’t enough air traffic controllers at their posts, delays start to add up. That’s what forced the end of the particularly long shutdown back at the start of 2019:
On January 25 — the 35th day of the longest-ever federal shutdown — something changed: 10 air traffic controllers decided to stay home.
The absence of those few workers — six in northern Virginia and four in Florida, numbers not previously reported — temporarily shut down travel at New York’s La Guardia airport and caused delays at other major hubs, including in New Jersey, Philadelphia and Atlanta.
Their actions, along with staffing issues already brewing at the Transportation Security Administration, helped tip the scales in Washington, driving President Donald Trump to agree to a three-week cease-fire.
Almost 60 percent of the staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be furloughed during a government shutdown. Which has a newfound relevance, in light of . . .
California: Hey, We’ve Got a Lot of Bird Flu Going Around
In a stark acknowledgment of the increasing seriousness of bird flu’s spread, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California declared on Wednesday that the outbreak of infections among the state’s dairy cattle constituted an emergency.
The announcement followed news earlier in the day that an individual in Louisiana had been hospitalized with bird flu, the first infected American to become severely ill.
According to the CDC, “Since April 2024, there have been a total of 61 reported human cases of H5 bird flu reported in the United States. . . . While an investigation into the source of the infection in Louisiana is ongoing, it has been determined that the patient had exposure to sick and dead birds in backyard flocks. This is the first case of H5N1 bird flu in the U.S. that has been linked to exposure to a backyard flock.” The CDC emphasizes, “No person-to-person spread of H5 bird flu has been detected.”
You can find where the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Inspection Service have confirmed findings of H5N1 here.
I wrote about this back in June, and almost no one paid attention:
The form of bird flu currently going around American farms is H5N1. It is widespread in wild birds, sporadically breaks out in poultry flocks and mammals, and there is an ongoing multi-state outbreak in dairy cows. . . .
Significant avian-flu outbreaks, with and without human infections, occur every couple of years. They are generally isolated to particular parts of the country and pass without serious incidents — unless you’re a chicken.
When you hear news about a virus spreading through some animal, it usually means it’s something to keep an eye on, but not a sign that we’re headed for another life-altering global pandemic. I’m going to quote the U.S. National Institutes of Health: “nearly all viruses and bacteria that infect other organisms are completely harmless to people.”
You’re most at risk if you work in the poultry industry or are handling a lot of birds, and severe human reactions to bird flu are very, very rare.
Come On, Fellas, We All Know What the ‘Lie of the Year’ Was
At the end of every year, my co-host of the Three Martini Lunch podcast, Greg Corombos, and I do a series of shows announcing our political awards, based upon the categories on the old McLaughlin Group show. One of our categories is the “biggest lie of the year.”
PolitiFact also names a “lie of the year” each year, and this year, the group decided the biggest, most consequential, and most dastardly lie of the year was . . . the claim that Haitian migrants in Springfield Ohio were eating cats and dogs:
PolitiFact, which for 16 years has issued a year-end lie of the year report, keenly understands that when emotions collide with facts, emotions often prevail. To wit: Trump increased his voter support in Clark County, Ohio, which includes Springfield, this year above what he garnered in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
In choosing the 2024 Lie of the Year, the claims by Vance and Trump about Haitians eating pets stood out.
Eh . . . really? Doesn’t the “in Springfield, they’re eating the dogs” story feel like it came and went in a couple of weeks in a rapidly changing news cycle? When’s the last time you even thought about that story?
I don’t want to give away my award winner, but allow me to share some headlines and opening sentences from some major news organizations in late 2023 and into 2024:
- NBC News, October 26, 2023: “Republicans float a quiet conspiracy theory that Biden won’t be on the ballot.”
- The Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2024: “Anyone hoping California Gov. Gavin Newsom or some other Democrat will take Joe Biden’s place on the 2024 presidential ballot is likely to be disappointed. Despite renewed anxiety over the president’s age — 81 — party officials and pollsters say swapping him out is a bad idea, and nearly impossible without his sign-off.”
- NPR, April 7, 2024: “Yes, Biden is really running in November. But a lot of voters say they doubt it.”
- The New York Times, July 12, 2014: “For years, far-right commentators have floated a conspiracy theory that Democratic Party elites were secretly plotting to replace President Biden on the ticket — a switcheroo that could give the party an advantage in November.”
Conspiracy theory, huh? It turned out “the great replacement” was referring to Biden.
ADDENDUM: As the year comes to a close, I hope you will consider a tax-deductible donation to the National Review Institute.