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I can appreciate that staff work on Capitol Hill is not always fast-paced and exciting, but when Republican aides are passing the time with wildfire office pools, there’s a problem.
Tens of thousands of firefighters employed by the federal government battled flames last year that scorched more than 8 million acres and caused billions of dollars in damage. And what were the Capitol Hill staffers responsible for their fates doing? Playing games — literally.
Officials with the Federal Wildland Fire Service Association, representing thousands of federal firefighters, complained this week to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee after learning that some committee staffers ran an office pool to guess how many acres are burned by wildfires each year.
The contest, run since 2003 by veteran staffer Frank Gladics, was open mostly to Republican staffers on the House and Senate energy and appropriations committees that oversee federal firefighting operations. While no money exchanged hands, Gladics would bequeath the winner one of several hats in his office, including a Wizard hat, a “When Pigs Fly” hat and the mechanical “Holly-Jolly Christmas Hat.”
Sarah Laskow first reported on this story last week.
As Joan McCarter noted, the spokesperson for the committee argued the office pool wasn’t intended to be callous: “It’s meant instead for the edification of eastern lawmakers who aren’t as experienced in wildfire. ‘It’s not an official way to educate them,’ [Robert Dillon] said. ‘It’s a fun, backroom way to do it.’”
Those who actually dealt with the fires, and their families, are struggling to find the “fun” in the Republicans’ game.
Lynnette Hamm’s 24-year-old son, Caleb, died last summer while fighting a wildfire with a Bureau of Land Management Hot Shot crew. She wasn’t pleased to learn of the GOP office pool, telling the Washington Post the Republicans’ antics are “truly appalling.” She added, “These men and women put their lives on the line daily, and to be so belittled by something like this? I would be ashamed of myself. Maybe they should trade a ‘cushy’ office chair for a spot on the fireline, and let’s bet how long they last at it.”
What were those guys thinking?
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estamm on January 13, 2012 8:40 AM:
'Thinking' and 'Republicans' don't belong in the same sentence. Unless, of course, the qualifier "aren't" comes prior to 'Thinking'.
so ... what's the problem again? on January 13, 2012 8:48 AM:
Thin-skinned, P.C. hysterics are a turn off. The wingnuts will be glad to see this article. Republican staffers are making an effort to educate themselves about actual facts (!) that are relevant to issues like FEMA funding and climate change - and you're complaining?
martin on January 13, 2012 8:50 AM:
What were those guys thinking?
Better them than me?
Perspecticus on January 13, 2012 8:56 AM:
I don't know, this sounds like a harmless thing that, when exposed to the general, uninvolved populace appears to be outrageous. If there were money exchanged maybe you could scare up a scandal regarding whether resources were provided or witheld in order to win the pot. However, my guess is since we are talking about staffers here, most of whom make modest incomes, even if money were involved it would not likely be significant enough to pull a stunt like that. The pool would be more rife for criticism with money involved but I still doubt it would be that significant.
Greg on January 13, 2012 9:01 AM:
I am more concerned about the lack of discretion in the offices that allowed this to become public than I am about an office pool.
This is one I will give a pass to. Work places are full of gallows humor, especially when inevitable awful things are part of the job. Coworkers wager on horrible things, like layoffs and such, all the time mainly out of tension-relief, and while I never thought of it as educational, often you do, indeed, learn from watching the process and results.
My father-in-law, a retired firefighter, tells stories of all sorts of bets that were made at the fire station:
-Which intersection will have the year's first fatal accident?
-How many alarms will be pulled by kids at the high school?
-Which knucklehead's illegal bonfire will burn down his barn?
... you get the picture.
The firefighters always did their jobs to the best of their ability, and occasionally someone went home with $20 for guessing correctly. I don't see the harm.
IMHO, it doesn't show callousness, but rather an accepted "macho" way of dealing with the inevitable.
c u n d gulag on January 13, 2012 9:03 AM:
I bet if some reporters dug deep enough, they'd find they have a "Terrorist Pool," too.
GUARANTEED!
Mudge on January 13, 2012 9:08 AM:
Any such pool is clearly very unsensitive, as Ms. Hamm's comment shows. Her son's death occurred during the addition of acreage that contributed to someone's win. An analogous pool would be one in the transportation committee on the number of airline deaths each year. There are far less macabre ways to have fun.
Republicans would seem to have little sense of what is insensitive. Or perhaps they do not care. This sort of incident does not help them shed the label of being sociopaths.
paul on January 13, 2012 9:14 AM:
It's one thing for people who are actually on the line to be making gallows-humor bets. It's another thing for the people who, say, decide whether the people on the line will have adequate equipment to be making those same bets.
If they wanted to have a pool, the least they could have done would be to have a pot and donate it to someone who takes care of firefighters.
But it's always been instructive to me that when some natural disaster strikers, wall streeters and their friends are first off the mark with the tasteless jokes.
JD on January 13, 2012 9:17 AM:
Have these people no shame? It's not enough to bet on human tragedy; they shamelessly defend the practice? How did one of the great political parties of the most powerful nation in the history of the world become almost uniformly and grossly callous to their fellow human beings? While these questions are somewhat rhetorical, they are also asked with a sincere and anguished spirit.
"So...what's the problem again": are you being sarcastic or are you for real? Are any of these people for real?
One other thing: I have not complained about captcha, but upside down letters are pretty confusing.
Rich on January 13, 2012 9:20 AM:
They probably work for the same GOPers who used to screech hysterically about the need for civility or personal responsibility. In fact, that's how the firefighters group should frame this.
Kris on January 13, 2012 9:29 AM:
Lighten up, Steve. A little too self-righteous.
JD on January 13, 2012 9:35 AM:
Kris: it's self-righteous to criticize employees who work for a federal agency that deals with fires for betting on the size of the fires when people lose their lives and homes from said fires?
REALLY????
It seems more like expressing the normal sensibilities of a civilized and humane person.
Maybe people are "lightening up" a bit too much in the face of GOP turpitude.
John on January 13, 2012 9:52 AM:
Eh. Is this any worse than, say, death pools? This seems like a tempest in a teapot.
White Irish Catholic on January 13, 2012 10:05 AM:
Futures on feinting couches just skyrocketed. Get them while they're hot!
Office pool?!?
The horror!
June on January 13, 2012 10:42 AM:
Seems to me that what the "it's no big deal" side is missing here is that this was so offensive to actual firefighters that they filed a complaint with a senate committee:
Officials with the Federal Wildland Fire Service Association, representing thousands of federal firefighters, complained this week to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee after learning that some committee staffers ran an office pool to guess how many acres are burned by wildfires each year.
Now, would I tell these men and women who are doing this dangerous work day in and day out that this office pool is nothing to get their panties in a bunch about? No. If they're offended, they're offended, even if for some on the outside this only rises to the level of "meh."
ronald64 on January 13, 2012 10:44 AM:
Steve your my favorite blogger but this is a bit
like the inane complaints you often rail against. Are we having a slow news day? Find youself a fainting couch and take a rest.
John Cross on January 13, 2012 10:51 AM:
My thoughts on this- "so what?".
This is a non-story.
The Pale Scot on January 13, 2012 10:53 AM:
Modern Society is geared to being run by psychopaths, it's as simple as that. Finance or politics, no matter.
"Cut to a pleasantly warm evening in Bahrain. My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.
He then makes an astonishing confession: "At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles."
Here was one of the biggest investment banks in the world seeking psychopaths as recruits.
Mr Ronson spoke to scores of psychologists about their understanding of the damage that psychopaths could do to society. None of those psychologists could have imagined, I'm sure, the existence of a bank that used the science of spotting them as a recruiting mechanism."
Brian Basham: Beware corporate psychopaths – they are still occupying positions of power
Hedda Peraz on January 13, 2012 10:55 AM:
Big Government, with too much time on their hands.
Like a Marine, pissing on a corpse. Nothing to see here folks, move along.
Th on January 13, 2012 11:51 AM:
I encouraged my first year math teaching niece to incorporate her love of writing short plays into her lesson plans. She reported great success in teaching tough math concepts through acting out plays in the classroom when I saw her at Christmas. I'm sure some of the parents were outraged.
If this really was an educational exercise (and we have no evidence it was not), I am all for it.
Werewolf on January 13, 2012 12:00 PM:
In a previous lifetime, I was a land surveyor in the SF Bay Area. Part of the job was looking for property corners, which on rural lots seemed to always be in thickets of thorns and poison oak. When we'd come back to the office with our clothes torn and streaked with poison oak sap, our supervisor would say, "Well, coulda been worse, guys. Coulda been me."
We gave him a pass, because we knew that until recently, it *had* been him-he had spent most of his life, from childhood, thrashing through the thickets. He was joking around, but empathetic.
These jokers on the Hill? Let them go out and fight a brushfire before they start betting on it (BTW, I've done that, too). Gah.
schtick on January 13, 2012 12:03 PM:
More outrage over an office pool on the number of acres that will burn each year, not deaths or injuries, and these same people probably think nothing of invading 2 countries based on lies, marines pissing on a corpse, raping then killing a family in Iraq, the torture of prisoners, letting people die rather then have healthcare or more tax cuts for the rich and corporations.
The priorities in this country are so backwards people think they are breathing fresh air when they are sucking up the cesspool.
majun on January 13, 2012 12:12 PM:
No Republican staffer is going to trade his "cushy" office chair in for a spot on the fireline because they know that risking your life doesn't pay nearly as well as risking somebody else's capital. And, being Republicans, they will always go where the money is.
I just wish that working Americans could see that fact for what it is. The 1%ers will tell you that the "market" sets compensation rates, so a firefighter has to risk his life on the job on a daily basis and still struggle to make ends meet with his meager paycheck, while a hedge fund manager risks other people's money and makes ten times more in a year than the firefighter will make over his working life - he should live so long. Not only that, but the hedge fund manager will pay a smaller percentage of his income in taxes as a reward for being willing to risk other people's money. The fact is, compensation aren't magically set by the market, they are fixed by back-scratching crony capitalists.
Kevin on January 13, 2012 12:17 PM:
I actually have a limited amount of outrage to go around, and frankly, this just doesn't rise to the level of notice. I actually don't even think it's insensitive. They're betting on how much acreage burns every year. It's not even directly correlated to the # of firefighter deaths. Firefighters actually fight less than 20% of the wildfires that occur in US properties every year. This is like saying, don't invest in the stock market -- some other person(s) this year are going to lose their retirement funds.
Big non-issue.
thebewilderness on January 13, 2012 2:50 PM:
Certainly there are children who need to have their learning experience framed as a gambling competition they may win in order for them to take any interest in the subject.
It is a bit disconcerting to hear that there are supposed professionals who have not matured past this juvenile stage of development.