Is this really the end of the year? We’re already to the end of 2008?

There’s frigid air beyond the studio windows and a soft layer of insulating fat around my belly, so it must be winter.

And my staff has been busy reviewing everything that we’ve produced since January, so it must be time for our review of the year’s news.

And it was quite a year. We witnessed some truly monumental events over the past twelve months. Undoubtedly the key event, the event that will be remembered as the defining moment of 2008, was the unexpected and unprecedented move of the Timothy Jordan Show from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening.

It was earth-shattering, I know. There were tears and anguish from regular listeners on that first Friday when Timothy’s dulcet tones didn’t issue forth from their radio speakers. To say nothing of the vacant stares around the table when people sat down to dinner with nothing to say, because they hadn’t heard our weekly News segment, or the latest Song of the Week.

Three days later our listeners went back to work bubbling forth with fresh talk and insights for the water cooler, after we returned to the air in a new and improved Sunday evening time slot.

We’re getting happily settled into that new time, and adjusting to the new rhythms of the mellower Sunday evening scene around the station. It’s nice, and we’re glad that all of you listeners out there have taken the time to join us.

Thanks for giving us reason to make the time to take up your time for an hour every week.

That said, this marks the last hour you’ll get from us this year, on the final Timothy Jordan Show News for 2008, on the evening of the 28th of December.

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Okay, so maybe there were a few more things that happened this year worth mentioning.

Around September the rest of the country caught on to what we knew back in January, that the country was in recession. Headless chicken running about quickly ensued, with panicked investors fleeing from the stock market. Index values declined by nearly half on the major U.S. markets. In places around the world it was much, much worse.

You think that your pension fund was hit hard? The average value of Russian stocks declined by as much as two-thirds. Sixty-six percent of their value was eliminated between June and October.

The next few months for the U.S. economy look quite good, despite what you may have heard. The freefall plummet of oil prices will reduce transportation costs across the board. Desperate to find customers, retailers and manufacturers will be quick to pass their savings in shipping costs along to consumers.

And then in January an 800lb gorilla will climb out of the shadows.

We predicted it here, on this program, in February of 2006, just days after he announced his candidacy that Senator Barack Obama would be our next president. We were 21 months ahead of the curve. I hope that at least one listener out there took us seriously and laid some money on our predictions.

On the 20th of January Mr. Obama will take the oath of office and sign into law a massive government spending program, focused on rebuilding our nation’s current infrastructure while laying the foundations for our next. It will be a digital infrastructure, bringing broadband internet access to everyone.

On the 21st of January the country’s major telecommunications companies will do their best to make sure that these new broadband services are over-priced and crippled by service restrictions.

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Though they wouldn’t have gotten the chance if Mr. Obama hadn’t defeated old McNasty and the Caribou Barbie in the November election.

It was a hard-fought campaign that seemed to go on forever. We began our coverage on this program a year and nine months before the election. Children were conceived, born, and gained younger siblings in that span of time.

One year ago we were gearing up for the primary season, expecting that it would all be decided on Super Tuesday, the February 5th primary election showdown. There were nine candidates on the Democratic side, but only three of them ever had a chance.

Senator Hillary Clinton did well in the major states, collecting wins in California and New York. Unfortunately for her aspirations the Clinton campaign overlooked that their party rules only gave a majority of votes to the winning candidate, not all of the votes. They thought that if they took the major states, they’d win.

It was a crippling oversight. They simply didn’t understand the rules, leading to the second critical mistake.

They disregarded the importance of smaller states like Montana. An insurgent campaign of volunteer organizers took the Obama message into states often ignored by Presidential candidates. Win after win for Sen. Obama in those smaller states denied Clinton her decisive victory, which was still possible. She won more votes on the 5th of February, but she lost the Presidential race.

On the Republican side it was even wilder. A divided Republican party struggled with its identity, and the names of all eleven major candidates.

They took to the campaign with a serious handicap: the most prominent member of their party was also the one man in the country most likely to get shoes thrown at his head. The Nixonian unpopularity of Mr. Bush was by far his party’s greatest challenge in this election year.

As the campaign unfolded former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney tried to go the route of moderate reformer, and was moderately rejected by his party.

Rudy Giuliani reminded us that 9/11 happened, and that he was there while 9/11 happened, and that he responded with leadership while 9/11 happened, and that 9/11 had been in his thoughts since 9/11 while he prepared to protect us against another 9/11 if the Democrats didn’t let 9/11 happen in the meantime 9/11.

Mike Huckabee (Huckabee!), played the role of the “aw shucks” Southern Evangelical, briefly gaining national attention before everyone realized that he’s a bible-thumping jesus-freak who doesn’t believe in evolution.

Ron Paul, representing the paranoid whackjob faction, continues to run for President, if the lawn signs from his more lunatic fringe supporters are to be believed.

Fred Thompson, Senator and actor, briefly energized his party with a few weeks of “maybe he’ll run, maybe he won’t”. Remember those weeks? There was talk in the media of Thompson bringing his Hollywood charisma to the campaign, of his being a great threat to the Democratic party because of his populist appeal.

In the end he agreed to run for office, but only if it didn’t interfere with his rigorous daily schedule of six hour-long naps. He quit the race two weeks before Super Tuesday, and is presumed napping.

This left John McCain, returning to the national stage after his defeat by G.W. Bush eight years before.

The McCain campaign spoke about leadership, experience, and a history of honorable service, before proceeding to run one of the worst-lead, mis-managed, and dishonorable campaigns in history.

From the shameless flogging of Obama’s tangential associations to Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright, the campaign suspension stunt, to the choice of Sarah Palin, and the laughable attempts to contemporize the image of McCain, his campaign stumbled from one week to the next.

Their press conferences may have been the worst of it all, particularly when the Bush media advisors took over. Senator Obama would appear before a half-million people in Berlin hanging on his every word, and the McCain campaign would respond with their candidate stumbling over his TelePrompTer script in a high school auditorium while fifty retirees gently dozed off in plastic folding chairs.

If not for the millions of Americans so ignorant that they still think we found Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, the election would have been virtually over on February 5th. Look at the campaigns past that date and it was only President-elect Obama’s tide rising.

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And speaking of Iraq, 2008 was the year where the national media proclaimed the surge a success without really understanding what happened.

In late 2006, October, there were thousands of Iraqis being killed in sectarian violence every day. While civilians with the means to do so fled the city our military began constructing barricades around rapidly depopulating neighborhoods in Baghdad.

Meanwhile we were beginning to offer direct cash payments to prominent Sunni tribal leaders involved in the insurgency. We paid better, and so they turned on the foreign fighters in their midst.

Two months later, President Bush announced that we would undertake a surge of ground personnel to Iraq, five Army brigades worth.

They began to trickle in over the next few months, reaching peak strength in August of 2007. The focus on regular patrols and smaller forward bases integrated into the communities around them, and the application of classic counter-insurgency tactics has been sold as proof that the surge was a success.

Ignored by our media are the two critical factors that I first mentioned: Bagdad’s civilians fled, leaving fewer people to kill; and then we paid off the Sunni tribes most responsible for causing trouble. Yes, the U.S. military contribution was important, but surge was only pressure on a bandage already applied.

The underlying problem, the sectarian divisions within Iraq, still remain under that bandage, an open wound no longer septic, but still bleeding.

The debate this year was about timetables for a U.S. withdrawal. Mr. Obama was criticized for saying that he’d withdraw U.S. personnel within 16 months of taking office. The administration and the Republican candidates all said that this was admitting defeat, that it would threaten our security, that it was a sign of weakness in the face of terrorism; and then the Iraqi government asked that we withdraw within the next two years.

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Also withdrawing within the next two years will be the Arctic sea ice. In the year that we saw Al Gore win a Nobel Prize for his work to generate awareness about global warming, we also saw the predictions about our future getting worse.

Just this week the United States Geological Survey released the results of a two-year long multi-agency review of the most up-to-date research and climate change predictions.

The news is not good.

The report focuses on four factors that could cause catastrophic changes in our global climate, changes rapid enough to threaten civilization.

These range from rapid melting of the ice caps and glaciers, resulting in ocean levels rising by dozens of feet; to dramatic changes in rainfall patterns, creating deserts in presently arable land; the collapse of the Gulf Stream, leading to a new ice age; and finally an eruption of frozen methane deposits on the continental shelves and permafrost that would release enough greenhouse gasses to cook our planet into a lifeless crisp.

Any one of them would threaten to end human civilization.

The good news is that rapid release of methane deposits and a collapse of the gulf stream, leading to either runaway global heating, or to a new ice age, are unlikely.

The bad news is that the worst predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are looking more likely.

According to the report we should expect to see widespread flooding of coastal regions as the northern and southern ice sheets melt. A the worst case it’s melting that could be unexpectedly rapid, on the order of a decade, resulting in the displacement of hundreds of millions of people.

Meanwhile rainfall in already arid regions is likely to decrease. Of particular concern are the U.S. Southwest and Rocky Mountain regions. Agriculture will become and less less viable in areas without their own rainfall. This includes the areas fed by the Colorado, Rio Grande, and San Joaquin Rivers, which are likely to become arid shadows of themselves within the next 25 years.

• USGS, Abrupt Climate Change PDF

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On that uplifting note, we should add that over this last year virtually no progress was made in shutting down the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.

While a major effort to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was undertaken by Congress back in June, supporters of the program were able to derail efforts in both the House and Senate to enact serious oversight of the program.

The 2008 Amendments to the Surveillance Act included a highly controversial immunity provision. It allows the Attorney General to issue what amounts to a “Get out of Jail Free” card to telecommunications companies who assisted in the NSA-lead program.

Passage of the bill in late June meant legal limbo for the nearly 40 lawsuits pending against AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and their sister companies.

While the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU continue their battle against the program, now alleging that it’s unconstitutional for Congress to legalize unconstitutional behavior, all expectations for progress rest with the Obama administration.

While the Senator did vote for the 2008 FISA amendments, breaking his promise to join in a fillibuster against any bill containing immunity for the telecoms, he’s been a vocal critic of the wiretapping program in the past. He’s raised the hopes of wiretapping opponents with the nomination of Eric Holder for the office of Attorney General.

Holder has publicly questioned the legality of the program, but it isn’t yet clear if that skepticism will survive his first few days in office and the realities of administering the secretive wiretapping system.

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The reality of this News segment is that we end each and every show with excellence. It’s just how things are done around here.

There was a lot of excellence this year, but as December comes to a close we have to pick just one for our most excellent moment of the year.

Looking back through all of the Awards of Excellence brought up tough decisions for my Staff and I. We featured flying cars, potential cures for AIDS and Alzheimers, the consumption of giant hamburgers, and bacon in all its glorious forms.

A year’s worth of excellence, but only one to win the whole shebang.

And that’s when we noticed our first Award of the year, marking the birthday of an amazing scientific tool.

In one week it will be January 4th, a day that marks the fifth year of operation for the Mars Rover Spirit.

Spirit, and its twin, Opportunity, were only designed to last for three months. They each had a ninety-day warranty. Any time after that was considered a bonus to the mission plan.

Their warranties expired nearly four years and nine months ago. Since then they’ve crossed miles of the red planet’s surface, providing the first concrete evidence of water on the surface of Mars, and providing critical information about the planet’s climate.

The unexpected evening windstorms are largely responsible for keeping the rovers going as long as they have. NASA engineers expected the rovers’ solar panels to be covered with dust within a few weeks, but kept finding them mysteriously cleaned every morning.

Instead of a slow death by light starvation, the rovers were given a chance to go to their material limits. Their solar panels have been scoured with dust and rocks, cutting the available power levels while frozen suspension joints and balky wheel axles make ever greater power demands.

NASA has both rovers in a state of hibernation through the low sunlight of the Martian winter months. They’re still making scientific measurements, but Spirit is looking weak. Mission Control at JPL briefly lost contact with Spirit back in November, and the rover is expected to fail within the next few months.

Then again, they didn’t expect them to last through the first winter, so what’s one more?

For five years of consistent scientific excellence, we’re giving our 2008 year-end Award of Excellence to the Mars Rover team at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

May your luck carry over into the rovers’ big brother, the Mars Science Laboratory, a one-ton Mack truck of a rover set for launch in a little over two years.

• NASA Mars Rover mission page

And that’s the News for 2008. We’re set for launch into 2009.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 8:20 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.