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NRF Forecast Valentine’s at $26B. Marcellus, NY Hit $47 by 3 P.M.

Hal Cranston
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NRF Forecast Valentine’s at $26B. Marcellus, NY Hit $47 by 3 P.M.

MARCELLUS, N.Y. — The National Retail Federation projected Friday that Americans would spend $26 billion on Valentine’s Day. As of 3 p.m. Saturday, the village of Marcellus had contributed $47.13, derived from four separate transactions, two of which were the same man.

The breakdown, per receipts gathered at the Hannaford on East Main: one single long-stem rose ($8.99), a “Sorry I’m Late” card from the CVS card aisle ($5.49), a heart-shaped pepperoni pie from Pino’s ($18.00), and a six-pack of Genesee Cream Ale ($10.99), plus tax. The man who bought the rose returned forty minutes later for the beer.

“He paid in singles both times,” said Denise Trapani, who has cashiered at the Hannaford since 2009 and keeps a running mental ledger of the village’s romantic life. “I don’t grade. I just ring it up.”

The village’s only florist, Blossoms by Eileen, was closed Saturday. A handwritten note on the door explained that Eileen was in Syracuse helping her sister move and “honestly, the day got away from me.” A second note taped below it read CALL JOANNE — but did not specify which Joanne, or for what.

By 4:45, the CVS card aisle was down to a single Valentine’s option: a musical card shaped like a corgi that played a song no one could identify. It sold at 4:52 to a man who did not appear to want it.

Pino’s reported moving 11 heart-shaped pies, which owner Donny Pino called “about average for a Saturday with a gimmick.” He said the heart shape adds roughly four dollars and three minutes to a standard 14-inch and “doesn’t really hold the toppings as well as a circle, if we’re being scientific.”

Mrs. Loretta Henson, 71, who was walking past the Hannaford with a bag of sidewalk salt, said she had not received a Valentine since 1987 and did not consider this a tragedy. “Bill gave me good ones for thirty-one years,” she said. “I’m coasting.”

The NRF figure, if achieved nationally, would average roughly $78 per American adult. Marcellus, with a population of 1,800, would have needed to spend approximately $140,400 to hit its per-capita share. It will not.

At the Hannaford, Denise rang out the last Valentine’s transaction of the afternoon at 5:14 — a bag of dog food, a candy bar, and one rose pulled from the discount bucket, $13.27 total. The customer told her the rose was for his mother. She rang it up the same as everything else.

Marlene Wore Nitrile Gloves to Pick Out Valentine’s Roses at Aldi

Brooke Ellery
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Marlene Wore Nitrile Gloves to Pick Out Valentine’s Roses at Aldi

I should preface this by saying I love Marlene, and I love that she texted me from the floral cooler at Aldi yesterday with a picture of her own hand, gloved, holding a bouquet of red roses at arm’s length like it was a crime-scene exhibit. She had driven there specifically to do this. She wanted me to see the gloves.

The caption said, “Bogotá. Sprayed twice. Once before the plane and once on it.” I don’t know how she knows when the second spray happens but Marlene is rarely wrong about timing.

For people who don’t know: almost every grocery store rose in America in February was on a refrigerated cargo flight out of Bogotá or Quito approximately forty-eight hours ago. They are grown in greenhouses the size of small airports, picked by women in respirators, and treated with a rotating cocktail of fungicides because a rose that browns in transit is a rose nobody buys. I learned this last Valentine’s from a podcast called “Cut Flowers and the Quiet Damage,” and I have not been able to un-learn it, which is the whole problem with knowing things.

Marlene’s sister-in-law Renata used to work the front counter at a flower shop in Charlotte and she told Marlene that within about six months her hands looked, and I quote, “like she had been doing dishes since the Carter administration.” Renata is in her thirties. She switched to dog grooming and her hands healed up in a season. I am not saying florist hands are the canary in the coal mine of romance but I am also not, not saying that.

The Facebook group I’m in — “Imported Blooms: What’s Actually On Them” — has been posting all week about the pre-Valentine’s surge, and someone shared a leaked spec sheet from a Colombian grower that lists nineteen separate applications across the growth cycle. Nineteen. My tomatoes get water and a kind word and they barely make it to August. These roses are receiving more chemical attention than I received during my entire pregnancy with Cleo and they are going to sit on someone’s nightstand next to a glass of water and a toddler.

My husband, bless him, asked me what I wanted for Valentine’s and I told him absolutely nothing wrapped in cellophane that traveled in a plane’s belly. He took this to mean “chocolate,” which is a separate fight involving the word “chocolatey” that I am saving for another column. What I actually want is for him to walk down to the back fence and cut me some of the witch hazel that’s blooming yellow right now in defiance of the season. Witch hazel is free, it grew here, and the only thing on it is a little frost.

I have started doing foraged arrangements for friends in lieu of grocery bouquets and people respond to them in the most beautiful way, which is mild confusion followed by genuine smelling. Last year I gave Marlene a jar of dried yarrow and pine and she cried, partially from the gesture and partially, she admitted, from relief at not having to dispose of pesticide water down a drain that empties into our shared watershed.

Cleo, who is six and has the moral clarity of someone who has not yet had to compromise on anything, came home from kindergarten on Tuesday with a flyer about the class Valentine exchange. The flyer said “store-bought treats only, no homemade.” I am going to send her with a small bag of dried rose hips from our hedgerow and a note that says “these are technically roses,” and we will see what the room mom does with that information.

Marlene texted again this morning. She bought the Aldi roses anyway, for a neighbor whose husband just had a stent put in, and she said she wore the gloves the whole drive over and then washed her steering wheel. The neighbor loved them. They are sitting on her counter right now, slowly releasing whatever they release, and the neighbor is recovering, and the world keeps going, and somewhere in Bogotá a woman is putting on her respirator for the second shift. I am going outside to cut witch hazel.

The Earnings Beat Forecasts Thursday. Nothing Else Did.

Margaret Thorne
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The Earnings Beat Forecasts Thursday. Nothing Else Did.

What do we call it when a quarterly earnings report is the only good news on a Thursday, and the room agrees, by unspoken vote, that it counts?

I was at Eliza’s. She had moved the dinner up by an hour because the lobbyist — bipartisan, as he insists on being described, though I have never seen a check of his go anywhere but one direction — wanted to be home for the call. Not the conference call. The earnings call. He arrived with the number already memorized and a posture I last saw on a man whose biopsy came back clean.

Eleven cents above forecast. He said it twice. He said it the way my father used to say the score of a Notre Dame game in a year Notre Dame did not deserve to win one. Someone — I think it was the deputy something at Treasury, the one who keeps a vape in a leather sleeve — said “Thank God,” and meant it, and nobody at the table corrected him, because by then the television above the bar had been muted for forty minutes and we all knew why.

On the muted television: the map of Iran, which has begun to require its own chyron font. A B-roll of a Caracas tarmac that no one would explain. A weather graphic for the storm that has now killed enough people to qualify, in a less distracted country, as the lead. And beneath all of it, in green, a ticker, and on the ticker the number, and around the number a small circle of adults raising a glass.

The lobbyist gave the speech. You have heard the speech. It is the one about fundamentals. The fundamentals are strong, he said, which is the sentence Americans now use when they would like to stop describing what they can actually see. The fundamentals were strong in September, and in November, and were strong, I am told, the morning the boats went down. The fundamentals are a kind of weather you can choose.

My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and is the only person at any of these tables who reads the actual filings, asked whether the eleven cents had anything to do with the layoffs in November. The lobbyist examined his cufflink. Eliza asked if anyone wanted more wine. The deputy something said the layoffs were already “in the print,” which is a phrase I had never heard used about human beings before, and which I would prefer not to hear used that way again.

Here is what I keep getting stuck on. The administration announced new tariffs Thursday morning. An American carrier group is doing whatever it is doing in a body of water we are not supposed to ask about. A man we spent a decade calling a dictator is in a cell somewhere, or a plane, or a footnote — the cable producers cannot decide. And the consensus achievement of the day, the one event the assembled grown-ups of Washington felt comfortable celebrating in mixed company, was that a single firm in Cupertino sold slightly more of a thing than a group of analysts in Midtown had guessed it would.

We have grown very good, in this town, at deciding what is allowed to count as news. The number counts. The map does not. The print counts. The people in the print do not. The fundamentals are strong because we have agreed, around a table set for ten, to define the fundamentals as whatever is currently green.

I left before dessert. Eliza walked me to the door and said, the way she always says, “Margaret, please.” She meant the column. She meant don’t. I told her I wouldn’t name anyone, which is true, and which is also the smallest favor I have ever done a room.

The lobbyist took an Uber home in time for the call. He told me, on the way out, that the quarter had been a great quarter. I asked him for whom. He said: for the quarter.

CPI Runs Hot Again, ‘Bumpy’ Returns to Fed’s Active Vocabulary

Cody Thompson
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CPI Runs Hot Again, ‘Bumpy’ Returns to Fed’s Active Vocabulary

WASHINGTON — The Bureau of Labor Statistics released January CPI at 3.1% Wednesday morning, prompting Federal Reserve communications staff to retrieve the word “bumpy” from cold storage and pre-load it into Chair Jerome Powell’s next six public remarks.

The print, two-tenths hotter than consensus, was driven by shelter, auto insurance, and a line item that the BLS now refers to in internal correspondence as “eggs, again, sorry.”

On the 38th floor of a midtown tower, a rates trader watched the number cross his terminal at 8:30:00.4 a.m., set down a Sweetgreen Harvest Bowl he had begun assembling at 8:27, and softly said the word “okay” in a tone that moved nine basis points by itself.

“This is broadly consistent with our base case, which is that the base case will be revised,” said Maren Cassel, head of US rates strategy at Beacon Strategy, in a note circulated to clients before most of them had logged on. “We continue to expect cuts in 2026, in the sense that we are continuing to expect them.”

Fed funds futures repriced within minutes from three cuts to two cuts to one cut to a 4:15 p.m. desk note titled “Cuts: A Postmortem,” which one reader described as “bleak but extremely well-formatted.”

The two-year yield jumped eleven basis points, the ten-year jumped seven, and the term “soft landing” appeared in zero sell-side notes for the first time since November, having been quietly replaced industry-wide with “landing of some kind.”

Powell, scheduled to speak Thursday at an economic club lunch where the chicken is always slightly dry, is expected to describe the path forward as “bumpy,” “data-dependent,” and “not a straight line” — the third phrase having been workshopped in to replace “uneven” after the older formulation focus-grouped poorly with regional bank presidents.

The White House, asked for comment, said inflation was both lower than it was two years ago and the fault of the previous administration, the current Federal Reserve, and avocados.

The next CPI report drops March 12. Powell is expected to call it bumpy.

US and Israel Kill Khamenei, Plan to Wing the Rest of It

Nash Grayson
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US and Israel Kill Khamenei, Plan to Wing the Rest of It

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Hours after a joint US–Israeli air campaign killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and effectively decapitated the regime in Tehran, senior administration officials briefed reporters that the operation had succeeded in every phase that had been planned, which was the first one.

The strike, described in a four-paragraph White House statement as “surgical, decisive, and the beginning of a new chapter for the Iranian people,” was followed by a forty-minute pause in which several principals reportedly looked at each other.

“The kinetic objective was achieved with extraordinary precision,” said a senior National Security Council official who asked to be identified only as a senior National Security Council official. “As for what comes next, we are in the listening phase. We are listening very hard. If anyone in Iran is doing any governing right now, we’d love to hear from them.”

Asked at a Pentagon briefing whether the administration had a successor government in mind, the press secretary said the United States was committed to “a free, stable, and inclusive Iran” and then advanced to the next question with the controlled momentum of a man crossing a frozen pond. A follow-up about whether the State Department had been informed prior to the strike was answered with the word “broadly.”

On Capitol Hill, members of both parties praised the operation while privately confirming they had learned of it from the same push notification as everyone else. Senate Foreign Relations Chair Tom Cotton hailed the strike as “a generational blow against tyranny” before declining to specify which generation would be handling the occupation. House leadership called for a moment of silence, then a vote to rename a post office.

Inside the West Wing, aides described the prevailing mood as “cautiously victorious,” which insiders clarified meant nobody had yet been asked to define regime change in writing. A whiteboard in the Situation Room reportedly listed three bullet points under the heading PHASE TWO, the third of which was the word “Iraq?” with a question mark and a small drawing of a frowning face.

Iranian state television went dark shortly after the strike and returned several hours later showing footage of a fountain. Reuters reports that crowds gathered in Tehran with no immediately discernible agenda, while the Revolutionary Guard issued a statement promising retaliation, restraint, mourning, and elections, in roughly that order and without specifying dates.

The Pentagon confirmed that planning for the post-Khamenei era is now in the hands of an interagency task force, which held its first meeting Tuesday afternoon and ordered sandwiches. Officials stressed that the United States has learned the hard lessons of Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, and is determined this time to learn them again, in real time, on a country of ninety million people.

Markets Rally on News That America Cried at the Budweiser Ad Again

Tara Sparks
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Markets Rally on News That America Cried at the Budweiser Ad Again

NEW YORK, NY — The Dow opened 287 points higher Monday after pre-market analysts confirmed that a 60-second commercial featuring a Clydesdale and a yellow lab made approximately 41 million Americans audibly sniffle into a chip bowl, restoring confidence in a U.S. consumer who otherwise has not opened a brokerage app since November.

The spot, which cost an estimated $8.4 million in airtime and reportedly took eleven months to produce, contains no dialogue, no product, and no plot beyond a horse walking somewhere and a dog being briefly worried about it. Goldman Sachs called it ‘the most bullish thing to happen to the middle class since 2019.’

‘When the lab nuzzled the horse’s leg, the two-year yield moved nine basis points,’ said Pell Hargreave, a consumer-sentiment strategist at Beacon Strategy. ‘That is not a metaphor. That is the data.’ Hargreave added that if the horse had appeared to limp, even slightly, his desk would have moved to a defensive posture by Tuesday.

Other ads cited by analysts as ‘market-moving’ included a Doritos spot in which a CGI raccoon verbally abuses Glen Powell, a 90-second crypto commercial featuring Matthew McConaughey whispering into a fern, and a Rocket Mortgage ad that several traders described as ‘just words on a screen, but the words felt correct.’

The University of Michigan’s preliminary consumer sentiment index, released Monday morning, jumped 6.2 points, with respondents specifically citing ‘the part where the little girl gave the bigger girl her juice box’ as a reason they now feel optimistic about the labor market.

A TSA agent at LaGuardia who watched the game in a break room said she had no plans to buy Budweiser, a truck, a phone, an insurance policy, a tortilla chip, or a cryptocurrency, but agreed the horse had ‘real soulful eyes.’ She is, statistically, the American consumer.

Not all reaction was positive. The State Farm spot — in which Patrick Mahomes high-fives a senior citizen for 45 uninterrupted seconds — was blamed by one hedge fund for a brief sell-off in regional banks, though the fund declined to explain the connection on the record.

By midday, CNBC was running a chyron reading ‘IS THE DOG OKAY? (MARKETS SAY YES),’ and three separate guests had used the phrase ‘animal spirits’ without irony. Pepsi stock closed up 1.4 percent on the strength of an ad that, when surveyed, 71 percent of viewers remembered as ‘a Coke thing.’

Federal Reserve officials are reportedly monitoring the situation. One regional bank president, asked whether the central bank takes Super Bowl ad sentiment into account when setting policy, paused, said ‘we shouldn’t,’ and walked away.

Branford Legion TV Died at 6:43. Carl Is Now Calling the Game.

Hal Cranston
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Branford Legion TV Died at 6:43. Carl Is Now Calling the Game.

BRANFORD, PA — The 47-inch Sanyo mounted above the bar at American Legion Post 219 went dark at 6:43 p.m. Sunday, twelve minutes into the most-watched broadcast in American television, leaving 31 members and guests dependent on the spoken account of Carl Wendt, 76, who has been told twice already that he is two plays behind.

Post Commander Ray Dellinger confirmed the television had been "making the noise" since before Christmas and that a replacement had been discussed at the November meeting, the December meeting, and again at the meeting where they decided not to discuss it.

Wendt, seated at the bar in the only chair with a clean sightline to the small portable radio Mrs. Lillian Hoffer brought in from her Buick, is delivering the game in the careful unhurried cadence of a man who once worked in commercial insurance. "He threw it," Wendt said at 6:51. "I think it was caught."

A motion to drive to the Lowe’s in Stroudsburg for a replacement set was raised at 6:56 and tabled when it was pointed out that the Lowe’s in Stroudsburg closes at six on Sundays, and also that nobody currently in the building was in a condition to operate a motor vehicle.

Phones were considered. Three members attempted to stream the game on the Post’s Wi-Fi, which is password-protected with a password Ray’s late wife wrote on an index card sometime in 2017 and which has not been seen since the funeral.

At 7:12 a man named Walter, who had walked the half-mile from his daughter’s house to verify what he’d heard over the police scanner, arrived at the front door and was immediately met by four members asking him the score. Walter, who does not follow football, said he believed someone was ahead.

By the start of the second quarter a kind of order had settled in. Wendt called the action. Hoffer’s radio supplied the underlying audio at roughly half a beat’s delay. A retired math teacher named Doug kept score on the back of a placemat using a system only Doug understands. The room cheered, when it cheered, with the soft lag of a long-distance phone call.

Asked about the halftime show, which has been promoted for six weeks as a cultural event approaching the moon landing, Dellinger said the Post had no plans to attempt it. "We’ll just sit for a while," he said. "It’s a good time to use the restroom."

As of press time, Wendt had described what he believed to be a punt, and Doug had stopped writing things down.

Team USA Marched Into San Siro Holding Up Phones, Not Flags

Duke Holloway
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Team USA Marched Into San Siro Holding Up Phones, Not Flags

I watched the Milan-Cortina opening ceremony Friday night with the sound off and a notepad, which is how my old coach Lou DiMaggio said you should watch anything you want to remember honestly. What I wrote down, twice, underlined: they held the Winter Olympics in a soccer stadium. San Siro. The actual cathedral of Italian football, with no ice in it and no snow on it and no real reason for it to be the building where the Winter Games begin, other than the fact that it seats eighty thousand people and looked good from a helicopter.

That is the level of seriousness we are operating at. Nobody in the production meeting raised a hand and said, fellas, this is the wrong sport’s house. They just rolled out a flag the size of a parking lot and told the bobsledders to march.

And march they did, sort of. Team USA came in wearing what the broadcast called “heritage Western outerwear” and what my wife Denise called “Yellowstone cosplay.” Fringe. Wool. A bandana situation. I counted four cowboy hats on a curling team. The curlers, Lou. The curlers are dressed like ranch hands now. I’d like to apologize personally to every American who has ever swept a stone.

But the outfits aren’t what got me. What got me was that I’d say a clean third of our athletes walked into that stadium with a phone held out in front of their face, filming themselves walking, for an audience of people who were already watching them walk on television. I called Ray Kowalczyk during the Slovenia delegation and said, Ray, they’re recording the thing they’re inside of. He said, that’s been the whole century, Duke, where’ve you been.

One luger — and I don’t want to name him, the kid is twenty-two and probably very brave going down a hill on a tea tray — was doing what the kids call “a get-ready-with-me” while marching. Got ready for what. He was already there. He was already in the stadium. The getting was done. There is no further ready to attain. He was applying a chapstick.

The broadcast kept cutting to a sideline reporter — sorry, an “Olympic correspondent” — who was interviewing athletes about their “journey,” which is a word that used to mean a trip and now means anything that happened to you between January and now. One snowboarder said her journey involved “unlearning perfectionism,” which I think means she fell down a lot. I respect the falling. I do not respect the rebrand.

I will give credit where it’s due. The Italians put on a show. There was opera. There was a real live tenor, not a Spotify tenor. There was a moment where they lit something on fire in a way that suggested somebody on the planning committee still believed an opening ceremony is supposed to feel like an event and not like a Super Bowl halftime audition. For about ninety seconds I forgot I was watching the wrong sport’s stadium host the wrong season’s games, and that’s the closest thing to magic the modern Olympics gets to.

Then NBC cut to a commercial for a parlay app that lets you bet on which country’s flag-bearer is taller, and we were back.

Petey Corrigan texted me from his couch around the Norway delegation. Petey was the kind of high school center who’d play a half on a sprained ankle and not tell anybody until Monday. He wrote: “why is the speed skater crying.” I wrote back: “because she’s at the Olympics, Petey, you’re allowed.” He wrote: “no the one in the stands. with the phone.” I had no answer for that one. The whole building was crying into a phone.

The Games start for real tomorrow. People will ski very fast down mountains and slide very fast on ice and a Dutch person will win something we’ve never heard of, and for two weeks I’ll remember why I loved this in the first place. The athletes are still the athletes. The hill is still the hill. Everything around it is the problem, and everything around it always has been; it’s just louder now, and vertical, and sponsored.

Denise is bringing chili over for the downhill tomorrow morning. She says it’s from a podcast. I’m going to eat it anyway.

Olympics Opening Was 90 Minutes of Drones and Eight Minutes of Athletes

Duke Holloway
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Olympics Opening Was 90 Minutes of Drones and Eight Minutes of Athletes

I sat down Thursday night with a beer and a notebook to watch the XXV Winter Olympics open in Milan, and what I got was the largest indoor LED show in human history followed, eventually, by some people from Lithuania carrying a flag.

I counted. Ninety-two minutes of drones, light grids, and what the broadcast kept calling “immersive narrative segments.” Eight minutes of athletes walking. The luger from American Samoa got roughly four seconds of camera time. A floating cube representing “the spirit of alpine collaboration” got two full minutes and a key change.

Coach DiMaggio used to say that pageantry is what you do when you don’t trust the game to sell itself. He said it about a halftime show in 1981 and I think he’d say it again about whatever was happening on my television, which at one point appeared to be a hologram of Leonardo da Vinci skiing.

Then they lit the cauldron. I’m not going to tell you how they lit the cauldron because if I describe it out loud my wife is going to ask me again why I’m yelling at the TV at 9:40 on a school night. I’ll just say it involved a child, a robot, and what I can only describe as a confused-looking goat.

I called Ray Kowalczyk during the second commercial break. Ray coached wrestling in Steubenville for thirty-one years and watches every Olympics start to finish out of what he calls “duty.” Ray said, and I’m quoting him exactly, “Duke, they spent more on the opening than my entire high school spent on heat in the 80s, and we still beat Mingo Junction.” Ray is not wrong about most things.

Then this morning the figure skating team event started, which is a competition where the same skaters who will compete individually next week skate the same programs they will skate next week, except scored as a team, so that countries with deep benches can collect a bonus medal for being countries with deep benches. Russia used to win it every time until they weren’t allowed to anymore. Now Japan probably wins it. The whole thing exists so that NBC has something to put on at 4 a.m. Eastern.

I want to be clear: I do not blame the skaters. The skaters are incredible. The skaters are doing quadruple jumps off a four-inch blade in front of a billion people while wearing rhinestones glued directly to their skin. Petey Corrigan from the old paper used to say that figure skaters are the toughest athletes nobody calls athletes, and Petey was right about that and also about the diner on Route 30. I respect the work. I just don’t need the work served to me in three different formats.

What I miss — and I know this makes me an old man yelling at a snowflake — is when the opening ceremony was a parade and a song and somebody lit a torch and then we went to bed. You woke up and there was hockey. The hockey was the thing. The hockey did not need to be introduced by a forty-foot inflatable Pavarotti.

The athletes themselves, the ones the camera finally found around the ninety-third minute, looked the way they always look: cold, exhausted, twenty-two years old, holding their phones up to film the crowd filming them. A short-track speed skater from Hungary was crying. A Norwegian biathlete was eating what appeared to be an entire baguette. That part I liked. That part is what the Olympics actually is, before the cube floats in.

I’ll watch the rest of it. I always do. I’ll complain about the team event and then I’ll be up at 3 a.m. watching the team event, because that’s the deal you make when you’re a person who loves sports — you take the drones to get to the downhill. You take the floating cube to get to Petey’s tough kids in rhinestones.

Denise is bringing chili over for the men’s downhill on Sunday. She says it’s from a podcast.

We Don’t Pass Budgets Anymore. We Pass Postponements.

Margaret Thorne
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We Don’t Pass Budgets Anymore. We Pass Postponements.

When did “averted” become the highest praise we offer Congress?

I went to a dinner Tuesday in Kalorama — the kind of room where the place cards are handwritten and someone always mentions, casually, that they used to clerk for somebody. The host had cued up C-SPAN on the kitchen monitor with the sound off. The House was voting on the appropriations measure. The lobbyist next to me — bipartisan, as they all are now — watched the tally climb and said, without irony, “Good. We bought ourselves six weeks.”

Six weeks. He said it like a man describing a layaway plan.

I should explain. The bill the House passed Wednesday is not a budget. It is not, in any meaningful sense, an act of governing. It is a permission slip we have learned to write to ourselves every few months so that the air traffic controllers continue to show up and the meat inspectors continue to inspect meat. We call it a continuing resolution because “we couldn’t agree on anything but we’d like the lights to stay on” does not fit on a chyron.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives for twenty-two years, told me last fall that she now keeps a go-bag at her desk. Not for a fire. For a shutdown. She has been furloughed four times in her career. She has stopped buying green bananas in January.

This is the part where I am supposed to assign blame to a party, and I will disappoint you. Both parties have discovered that the actual budget process — the one with hearings and markups and floor debate stretching across the calendar — is politically suicidal, because it requires somebody to vote, on the record, for a specific number next to a specific program. The continuing resolution requires no such courage. It funds everything at last year’s levels and dares the other side to be the one who turned off the lights.

Eliza — you’ve met her in this column before, she runs a foundation now after a stint at State — leaned over the branzino and asked, almost dreamily, whether anyone at the table could name the last time Congress passed all twelve appropriations bills on time. A woman to my left, a former staffer for a senator I won’t embarrass by naming, said, “1996.” She said it the way you’d identify a fossil.

The bipartisan lobbyist refilled his wine. He told us, smiling, that his clients prefer it this way. Long-term budgets create predictability, and predictability is for civilians. The CR economy — his phrase, not mine — keeps everyone on retainer. You don’t need a lobbyist to maintain a status quo nobody is interested in disturbing. You need a lobbyist to make sure your particular line item survives the next six-week scramble.

I asked him what happens if, one of these times, the can finally hits the wall instead of getting kicked further down it. He examined his cufflink. He said: “Margaret, the wall is the next CR.”

I came home and watched the cable wraps describe Wednesday’s vote as a “win for stability.” Stability. We have agreed, collectively, to call the absence of governing “stability” because the alternative word would require somebody to do something about it.

A republic that funds itself in six-week increments is not a republic that is planning to be here in ten years. But we are not supposed to say that at dinner. At dinner we are supposed to say “averted,” and pass the wine, and ask about the children.

We asked about the children. The branzino was excellent. Judy bought bananas the next morning that won’t be ripe until March.

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