The U.S. government is going to shut down in an hour and 5 minutes.

While I hate to see the inconvenience this will impose on hundreds of thousands of federal workers and contractors, I applaud Chuck Schumer for taking a principled stand. The republicans have worked themselves into a corner where they have absolutely no credibility with respect to a promissory note to fix important issues later.  Schumer and the democrats recognized that it’s now or never.

With the ensuing chaos that will start tomorrow morning where Dick Mulveyney will need to decide what stays open and what closes, there exists a clear inconvenience to republicans to come to the table and negotiate.  Trump might have to postpone a golf game or two.  The party celebrating the one year anniversary of his inauguration is in jeopardy.  It’ll be interesting to see if he holds it.  It would be incredibly bad optics.

Schumer played this poker hand pretty well this time.  Basically called republicans’ bluff that Dems would take the heat for a shut-down.  On the contrary.

If he’s able to negotiate a deal for the Dreamers and get funding for CHIP, he’ll have accomplished two things.  One, his principled stand will get looked at as what resolved the Dreamers issue.  Two, he will have established credibility that democrats are willing to call McConnell’s bluff if they feel like public opinion is on their side.  These are two very important accomplishments that need to happen in order to fix the ‘tude problem on the other side of the aisle.

I’m reminded of a funny story I was told by local musician, producer, singer, songwriter Jim Walker a few years ago.  One day we got off on the topic of people who, with no talent of their own, like to sit there and launch criticisms of bands and how they suck or whatever.

So as the story goes, Jim and a friend were at a bar watching a local band and there happened to be an obnoxious guy standing behind him who kept making rude comments about the band and how they sucked.  You can only ignore someone like that for so long.  Evidently Jim’s friend had had enough of this guy, turned around and asked him “Where’s your song, man?”  I guess he got a lot more quiet after that.

I’m reminded of this humorous episode as I watch Republican infighting over the DACA solution.  It’s humorous for a couple of reasons.  First, Lindsay Graham tries to be Trump’s buddy and get into his inner circle by going golfing with him and flattering him afterwards.  Then he makes what I would say is a good faith effort to work with democratic senator Dick Durbin on a bipartisan solution to DACA.  Does the President want to hear about it?  Sure, c’mon over.

To his surprise, Trump had invited a few of his hardliners to the meeting as well.  Graham’s idea got shot down by Cotton and Perdue who have no intention of working in a bipartisan fashion with any democrat, even though 80% of U.S. citizens want to see a solution for Dreamers.  So Graham is out there strumming his tune, laying out his proposal and Trump gets indignant about it complete with shithole comments.

But as bad and racist as that was, that’s not the point here.  The point is, okay, you don’t like my plan.  Where’s yours?

So, Senators Cotton and Perdue.  Where’s your song, man?

It’s not what you think.

We have to hope that the procrastination of the Hanford cleanup doesn’t kill us all.  Our home values would be the least of our concerns.

It’s really true there’s no free lunch.  Yes, the United States beat Russia in the race to develop the first nuclear bomb.  There are many books on the subject and The Manhattan Project was one of the most ambitious undertakings in the 240 year history of this country in size and scale.

The downside is, we’ve been trying to clean up the site for over 70 years and are nowhere near complete.  Current estimates are $2 billion per year until cleanup is complete in 2050.

There are 53 million gallons of radioactive waste in stored in 177 underground tanks.  One third of these tanks are leaking radioactive waste into the soil and groundwater.  Aquifers are containing 270 billion gallons of contaminated groundwater. As of 2008, 1 million gallons of radioactive waste was traveling through the groundwater toward the Columbia River.

I don’t know about you, but that makes me lean towards Alaskan Salmon at the seafood counter.

From a recent article comparing the risk of Hanford to what happened in Fukushima, Japan.

On 29 September 1957 a tank containing waste similar to the waste in the Hanford Tank Farms exploded at the Mayak plutonium production site in the former Soviet Union, known as the Kyshtym Disaster. The cooling system for one of the tanks at the Mayak site failed and the temperature inside the tank rose eventually causing a chemical explosion that sent a radioactive cloud for over 350 km downwind and heavily contaminated an area near the plant with catastrophic levels of cesium-137 and strontium-90. This was one of the worst radiological disasters in human history at the time, and remained so, along with the fire three weeks later inside a nuclear reactor core at the Windscale facility (now called Sellafield) in Cumbria in the United Kingdom, until the Chernobyl meltdown and explosion in 1987. The Kyshtym Disaster, which a Soviet study concluded resulted directly in 8,000 deaths (not to mention illnesses) was the consequence of an explosion in one tank. At Hanford there are currently 177 such tanks, each containing similar disastrous potential, and located beside one another.

If you do the math on the population of people downwind, all I can say is we’d better hope those cooling systems continue to work or this place will be uninhabitable for a century.  And that’s just one scenario.

I’m anxiously awaiting the Trump administration to roll out its infrastructure plan.  Rumor has it a small, private outfit in Montana with connections to Ivanka Trump’s wedding planner will be put in charge of the cleanup.  If that happens, I’m moving.

In 2003, a documentary titled The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara was introduced.  Here’s a link to a 2 minute trailer on it.

The reason this movie comes to the forefront of my mind these days has to do with the banter going back and forth between the U.S. and North Korea and Iran.

In the movie itself, McNamara was interviewed where he talked about the discussions of the Kennedy administration cabinet, strategizing around the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The most revealing aspect of the interview was the fact that much of the strategy conversations had to do with ‘guessing’ at what Russia and Cuba were thinking.  What their motives were.  They didn’t know for sure so they had to guess.

McNamara’s point was, had they guessed wrong, they could have a nuclear event on their hands that was a result of a big misunderstanding.  It was entirely possible for this to happen.  He strongly emphasized the need for diplomacy so that any events centered around war were fully understood and not the result of second guessing wrong.

This is perhaps the scariest aspect of the Trump Administration for me.  The probability that he will initiate military action based on his impulses without a full understanding seems extraordinarily high.  This is why level-headedness matters in the oval office.

It looks to me like the movie is available from Netflix but on DVD only.  There may well be other streaming sources.  If you get a chance to see it, I found it very enlightening.

Below is a summary of the 11 lessons from McNamara.

1. We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
2. We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience … We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
4. Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
5. We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine. We failed, as well, to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
6. We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.
7. After the action got under way, and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening, and why we were doing what we did.
8. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
9. We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
10. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.
11. Underlying many of these errors lay our failure to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues.

This probably won’t happen, and it’s a huge political gamble, but I think the Democrats should shut the government down if they don’t get the deal they want on DACA.

My reasoning is, a shutdown would send shock waves through the world, and when that happens, people start looking at the underlying reasons.  In previous years when the Republicans / Tea Party shut the government down, the took the heat big-time.  But that was different.  The underlying reason had to do with money and greed.  The decision to shut down the government over that issue was extremely unpopular.

This is different.  This is about sticking up for a group of people who have been marginalized.  It would be a principled stand and I actually think the Democrats would not face much backlash for a shutdown.  On the contrary.  And the timing of the “shithole” comment couldn’t be better.  The support for bigotry in the US has not risen to majority levels.

The question is, do they have the intestinal fortitude to take the gamble?