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silveradeptThe year that was 2010, well, we knew going in that it was going to be interesting. It would be a slow roll to the United States midterm elections, which meant more politics than one could potentially digest (or want to), both inside and outside the country. We saw the nominally populist, small-government movement field candidates of the bizzarre, who may have turned out to be sheep in wolven clothing, strange assertions, and perhaps more abuse of dead politicians and Founding Fathers than a normal election year. There were also lots and lots of opinions and statements made against he current social safety net, tatterd and holey that it is, and many promises that it would be changed, dismantled, or otherwise removed.
Conservatives would continue to accuse the administration and the President of being socialists intent on destroying the free market, unable to run the government because they have no experience in running businesses and thus do not have the wisdom of the free market and it's obvious solutions to debt and deficit problems, and ideologues unwilling to compromise or accept suggestions from their opposition on anything. That opposition would set a record for number of filibusters in a Senate session, embrace the idea of the Party of NO, even to ideas that were their own suggestions, and continually insist that the private sector had all the solutions to the problems and deserved every dollar of the debt the federal government incurred to bail them out of the economic collapse they engineered.
The name Matt Taibi would become almost household, and Rolling Stone would suddenly be known as a magazine that did in-depth and smart political writing instead of pieces on, y'know, music. In some ways, it followed in the footsteps of Playboy, which also routinely had articled unrelated to sex inside.
And Muslims would continue to be demonized wherever conservative columnists could try - tying them to terrorists, accusing them of attempting to take over the country, accusing the President of being secretly one and exhorting their fellows to be as irreverent to Islam as they perceived the culture was to Christianity.
That was just one examples of the insane things that a lot of people would believe about the President, about his administration, their policies, or liberals and liberalism in general. A lot of discredited conspiracies continued to live in 2010 despite having been disproven early in 2009.
It wasn't all about politics, of course - part of the problem of getting older is that you have less people alive at the end of the year than when you started. I can only hope that they determine how to prolong life indefinitely before biology forces me to the end of mine.
And it wasn't all bad, despite the fact that I'm sure my news tends to the negative more than the positive. The year had a lot of talk about why we haven't decided that QUILTBAG people are people and accord them all the proper rights and privileges of such, and a lot of action on the same, for example. But there were also more than a few places that did accord QUILTBAG people the status of being people who can engage in all sorts of activities. The Century of the Fruitbat marched forward in many places, and backwards in a few.
And there were all sorts of literary terrorists around, doing their best to remove books they considered inappropriate from schools and libraries, making large loud complaints about the presence fo information in the library or the school, and continuing to make their case as to why they should be entirely ignored, based on their ignorance of the thing they were challenging, or their hubris in believing they knew best for everyone.
Anyway, January.
"Juno was mad,
he knew he'd been had,
so he shot at the sun with a gun.
He shot his wily one
only friend..."
The turn of the year saw us still in the very thick of the Green Revolution protests in Iran, where an ostensibly pro-democracy faction took to the streets repeatedly to demand the installment of the apparent winner of a popular election in Iran. While several columnists were attempting to make it into a pro-Western Democracy faction and urged the United States to use its overy and covert influence to support and try to bring down the regime in place, the demonstrators themselves always seemed more limited to the sphere of "we elected this man to be President, he must be installed", and they were willing to face both the uniformed police, but the secret police to get that done.
Furthermore, the Land Wars in Asia continued, although this year had a scheduled drawdown in one Land War, and next year was promised another from the other...and all the while, dark hints that at least one more Land War in Asia should be opened up.
Additionally, in the middle of the month, Haiti suffered a Richter 7.0 earthquake, which basically collapsed the shaky infrastructure of the country, and several aftershocks to compound the problem. Relief efforts were hindered by blockages preventing ports from operating as well as a small number of usable airfields to land supplies with.
The United States was also attempting to figure out what to do about a failed attempt to detonate an explosive pair of underpants on board a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Conservatives said the "enemy combatant" rules of disappearing someone off to an undisclosed site, to be interrogated and then tried by military commission should have been applied immediately, instead of the civilian arrest procedures and Miranda warnings accorded the attempted terrorist. This was not a new theme by any stretch, and it would continue for any and all persons who succeeded or attempted terror strikes in the United States or abroad.
The big political football of the time was the health care bill and its requirement that each person in the United States carry some form of insurance. During the rather raucous debate, where many liberals felt betrayed that the Democrats and Administration had taken their strongest argument off the table before it had a chance to be aired, the individual mandate was seen largely as a sellout to the insurance industry on one side and as an un-Constitutional intrusion into the lives of private citizens on the other - lawusits were promised, with more to join on later.
On the back burner, which would not explode until later, were the full-body, through-the-clothes backscatter radiation devices that would later become "the porno machines", but the powder keg for that, the "enhanced pat-down" involving genital touching, would not arrive until much later.
Also biding its time before it became hot stuff was the Citizens United decision, a Supreme Court ruling that gave corporations unlimited ability to influence elections through the donation of money to political groups - although they were still forbidden from giving directly to official candidate campaigns. Furthermore, they could do so without having to disclose that they had given that money. For a look at how that played out beautifully to the corporation and the Republicans' hands, trace back the origins of all your campaign ads run by third parties...if you can.
The murderer of Dr. Tiller, Scott Roeder, was convicted of his crime. He is still currently the only person indicted in the case.
A sitting Congressman audibly called out the President as a liar during his State of the Union address, and a sitting Supreme Court Justice was caught mouthing the same sentiment. (I think it was the same address.) Opinion columns and talking heads exploded as to whether the Congressman should be praised or repudiated.
Lastly, the Proposition 8 case claiming that the ballot initiative against same-sex marriage in California was against the California State Constitution was getting all sorts of information and testimony.
And in the opinion columns, much of the push and pull was about themes that would expand dramatically the closer we got to the election times - the supposed "elitism" that characterizes liberals and intellectuals and makes them think they are "better than you" on one side, and the continued aggravation-to-despair on the other that this administrator was turning out just like his predecessor in all the wrong, torture-supporting, law-avoiding ways, the various accused affectations of the current administrator, many in direct conflict with each other, and the continued vicious fights, both liberal and conservative, over whether the Tea Party was a corporate-backed astroturfing organization, or a legitimate grass-roots angry populace seeking to return the country to an imagined past.
Finally, we lost Mip Gies, the last of the family that hid Anne Frank, Glenn W. Bell, creator of Taco Bell, J.D. Salinger, noted author, and Lee Archer, sole official ace pilot of the Tuskegee Airmen, to the warm embrace of the Dead Pool.
--
"...Number your thumb,
Impossible sum
Of the monkeyfist hung on a vine,
Organism assembly line.
Everything's gonna be fine
Play pretend..."
February began in many of the same ways as January had been. The question of The Tarantino was already resolved: any sort of legislation with importance would take the supermajority to even be considered for a vote, the matter of Don't Ask, Don't Tell continued to rage, even as African countries considered bills that would criminalize being gay, and the budget, released last month, began the howls about debt and deficit reduction that would continue on significantly through the rest of the year. And finally, the plight of the long-term unemployed and all the underemployed and newly unemployed started moving toward fever pitch, as it would do several times over the course of the year as benefit extensions expired. This year, more than others, it seems like the issues were brought up in January and then sustained through the news cycle all the way to the elections and beyond. At least, here in the States, that is.
By this point in the narrative, the Tea Partiers continued to out themselves as persons with dark motivations based on race, religion, fear, and misinformation, and moving in such a way that the glint of corporate puppetmasters was inferrable from their behavior.
In the world, the Olympic Winter Games came to Vancouver for a stay of athletic prowess and some really neat coverage of curling and ice hockey.
More seriously, a Richter 8.8 quake struck Chile. Two months, two major quakes. Not a good start.
In the United States, on top of the general narratives above, an importer of comics was sentenced to six months in prison for his collection after it was inspected by the Post Office and they determined it to be child porn.
School-issued laptops captured private images of students who took them home, due to remote activation of webcams.
In the opinion columns, a solid anti-unions sentiment surfaced for a bit and then ran deeper through the year, although never silently. Liberal condescension and elitist "better-than-you" thinking was never too far away from the pens of the opinion writers, regardless of how true it actually was.
And the Dead Pool got John Murtha, Representative, and Charlie Wilson, armer of Afghanis against the Soviets.
--
"...You understand
Mechanical Hands
Are the ruler of everything
Ruler of everything
I'm the Ruler of Everything
In the end..."
And then there was March.
One of the major parts of March that I followed were the continuing exploits of the Texas Board of Education as they did their level best to impose as much Christianity into history books as they could, which would subsequently change the textbooks of many other states that follow their model.
The opinion columns and articles were particualrly rife with all sorts of materials about discrimination against QUILTBAG peoples and the reactions to them, including students expelled from a Catholic school because their mothers were lesbians, and another student prohibited from bringing her date to the school prom because her date was also female, to the point of canceling the official school prom so as to stop her from bringing her date. We would later find out that the parents went even further and held a secret prom that they did not tell her about. The Catholic Church also won an exemption from UK law requiring equality so they could continue telling QUILTBAG people that they couldn't adopt from any Catholic adoption agency.
The health care bill made it easy for at least one commenter to proclaim how taxation in any form is slavery of upstanding people to give money and benefits to undeserving slackers and lazy people. Although that particular commenter would say this about any and everything, and would proceed to do so, sometimes alone, sometimes in chorus, over the rest of the year. One Congressperson, Bart Stupak, received far more attention that he should have in his raving that the health care bill would allow for federal funding of abortions, a ludicrous position because there were so many other things still in place that prevented that from coming to pass. But because Mr. Stupak was a potentially-crucial vote, he got mollycoddled instead of backhanded.
The measure passed both houses and was signed into law this month. The lawsuits began immediately thereafter, mostly focusing on the idea of whether the legislature could demand that all persons carry an insurance policy, and the calls for repeal followed swiftly from that. And then there were the threats made once the bill was passed, threats that has started with angry shoting at town hall meetings and seethed all the way through the debate and passage.
And in the "future predictions" department, I accurately guessed that deficits would be a noise-making machine, and also, at the end of March, the new START agreement was reached...and would then sit for a significant amount of time while Republican Senators stalled, filibustered, blustered, and otherwise tried not to pass it, if they could get away with it.
Tran Van Hay, possibly the person with the longest hair in the world, Corey Haim, 80s heart-throb, and Peter Graves, known well for the Mission: Impossible TV series all joined the Dead Pool.
Oh, and one last thing - the LHC fired successfully and the universe did not unravel immediately. Another end-of-the-world scenario that turned out to be a dud. Geronimo.
--
"...Do you like how I dance?
I've got zirconium pants!
Consequential enough
To slip you into a trance..."
April. Four months in, and it seems like we've already had a year's worth of material. The cloud was akin to the volcano that was producing ash clouds that were diverting and grounding planes, because they could not be seen but would cause severe damage to jet turbine engines.
Scott Roeder, the killer of Dr. George Tiller, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 50 years time. It is justice, but Roeder's assault had it's intended effect as well - the clinic that Dr. Tiller practiced at closed, leaving one less person performing legal abortions in the country. And I'm betting a lot of women who might have been able to get abortions decided against it, because of the possible threat to them from persons like Roeder. Or from legislatures like Oklahoma's, that passed, and then would later override vetoes of, laws that put onerous requirements on medical providers to try and discourage women from having abortions, even of those who were raped, and then also shielded those providers from lying about the developmental disabilities of the fetus if they thought it would lead to an abortion.
The President of the United States opened up some previously-closed locales for offshore drilling for oil. He couldn't have known that offshore oil rigs would figure much more prominently later on, with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the subsequent months-long containment, cleanup, and blame efforts.
A mine explosion in West Virginia highlighted one company's consistent record of negligence and safety and provided a glimpse into a company that was being run as if it were a Dickensian business. Mines would return to the news later on in the month, with another safety problem in Kentucky, and then later on in the year.
And then, a river in Tennessee flooded Nashville and a lot of other cities along its path, thanks to heavier-than-usual rainfall.
Wikileaks released a major item - video of a 2007 helicopter attack that killed journalists and civilians, apparently without any confirmation that those people were supposed to be targets of an attack and were confirmed insurgents or terrorists. Even with all this information and a lot of ther bits, the current administration made no moves to prosecute the previous administration, and would, in fact, expand upon their framework and claim more powers than the previous administrator had.
The Republican Party took a trip to a lesbian bondage-themed strip club and charged it to the company dime.
A ruling indicated the FCC could not simply impose "net neutrality" on customers. That issue will resurface later on, as well. It's kind of interesting how major issues in the news have foreshadowing earlier on, with little bits and pieces here and there before they go exploding.
The Tea Party's continued flirting and outright kissing or racist beliefs was defended by other columnists claiming they were merely concerned about the size of the government and "creeping socialism". This despite pohotographic evidence of many rather racist signs at Tea Party rallies, statements by persons who are Tea Party leaders, and columns written in defense of them that claim black people were civilized through their slavery to white people. To be fair, though, Tea Partiers and their supporters also often believe that taxes are slavery, freedom-loving people should secede and form a Randian paradise, and that there's enough charity in the private and religious sectors for everyone that needs it, so the government should not be in the business of providing a social safety net, so there's a lot of things in there that are fairly incoherent.
Two men who had arranged for as much legal protection as possible for one to be the caregiver and inheritor of the other had all of their careful legal protections and documents ignored by the local government, separated the two men, putting them in separate nursing homes, and then sold their possessions and terminated their lease. One of the two men later died from his medical complications, without his partner being there to see him or to act as his medical advocate, despite having the legal paperwork in place.
Arizona passed a law that required persons to carry their proof of citizenship on them at all times or face deportation. The response to that was to point out that only people that looked like illegal immigrants would be asked to show their proof, and how did the governor and others plan on defending themselves against the onslaught of racial profiling claims. That question was never answered satisfactorily.
The beginnings of the strange characters that would dot the political landscape before November appeared - Mr. Paladino's affinity for racism, bestiality, and naked women, for example, appeared first in this month, to be referred to later on. Sue Lowden made a soundbite that would be played for a little bit as a viral thing, advocating the barter system for medical care, or "Chickens for Checkups", as it would be known. Rand Paul's assertion that the Civil Rights Act, banning discrimination in all places that served the public, should have only been a ban on government services discriminating, wouldn't happen until next month.
The rolls of the dead added Dr. Henry Edward Roberts, designer of the Altair 8800, the first affordable home computer, Jaime Escalante, subject of the movie "Stand And Deliver" about his trials with getting inner-city kids to pass the AP exams in calculus, and Dorothy Height, civil rights activist.
Oh, and there were dioramas. Using Peeps. And an attempt to cause an earthquake through the application of exposed cleavage. And Seattle got a new superhero - Electron Boy.
--
"...Do you like how I walk?
Do you like how I talk?
Do you like how my face
Disintegrates into chalk?..."
May. An attempted terror attacks that turned out to be a dud revived the voices that claimed anyone merely suspected of being an "enemy combatant" should be held outside the protections of the law and the Constitution for an indefinite period until they confess, and that any methods deemed necessary to obtain that confession and other Communists, err, terrorists, should be used without any regard to legality or morality.
A strident anti-gay activist, George Rekers, was caught with a "rentboy", whom Mr. Rekers claims was there simply to move luggage. The profile of the hired boy, as well as the site, suggested something...different was in mind. Mr. Rekers eventually resigned. The Episcopalian Church in the United States, however, consecrated an openly-lesbian bishop, setting them in conflict with the Anglican communion they are a part of. And the repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy was passed as part of the Defense Authorzation Bill at the end of the month - which would then sit.
The beginnings of "austerity" rumblings in Europe, as well, with Greece taking the lead due to their already poor economic position. Predictably, the people actually being affected by "austerity" took to the streets and the airwaves to protest the fact that they were being screwed and the people actually responsible for the crises were getting off light, if they were being punished at all.
The Koreas growled at each other, puffed out their chests, gave each other various middle fingers, and made everyone around them nervous that they were going to resume hostilities, a theme that would return later on in the year.
Rashes of teen suicides over issues that eventually always collapsed down to bullying and despair meant that the issue routinely came back into the public eye every now and then. A particuarly bad spot happened in this month.
The presence of a secret air base in Afghanistan, a Guantanamo Bay-like place outside constitutional and legal protections, brought the First Land War in Asia back into the public eye for a bit.
Elena Kagan was nominated for the Supreme Court to replace the retiring Justice Stevens. She had no "wise Latina" remarks for the racists to pounce on, but she did run into a lot of "she hates the military, and that makes her unfit" based on a tenure as Dean of Harvard Law School. (Arizona continued to indicate how much it hated brown-skinned people, incidentally, by passing a law banning classes that were focused on any one ethnicity or promoted ethnic solidarity.)
Miss USA was crowned - an Arab-American from Dearborn, Michigan. The whole time this was going on, her detractors were claiming she was secretly a Muslim funded by terrorist groups, intended to be a sleeper agent to make people think Muslims are pretty. This despite her rather prominent public Christianity. And then they claimed she won because PC demanded a white girl lose the beauty pageant when compared to the brown-skinned girl. For all we know, they were trying to avoid a repeat of a Prejean-style incident...because the other girl talked about how much she supported the Papers Please law.
The Wall Street stock market exposed a vulnerability when the mis-typing of a single transaction caused a cascade of automatic reactions that resulted in several organizations receiving a wildly disporportionate stock price.
The Texas Board of Education was still on a collision course with reality, in terms of how they wanted to change their textbooks to emphasize Christianity and de-list people who advocated for equal rights and minorities. And then they passed those textbook reforms, ensuring that a lot of other students across the country would be subjected to the same values that they espoused.
And finally, a lot of hay was made out of a raid by Israel on a nominally Turkish ship that the Israelis claim was smuggling weapons under an armed crew and the people there claim was aid for Palestine and that they were without weapons.
Enrie Harwell, long-time voice of Detroit Tigers baseball, Edgar Wright/Antony Grey, advocate for decriminalization of LGBT sexuality in the UK, Lena Horne, whose music transcended the heavily racist society she lived in, and Doris E. Travis, last of the Ziegfeld Girls all died in May, and the world was less without them here.
--
"...I have a wonderful wife!
I have a powerful job!
She criticizes me for being egocentric [ha!]..."
Month six, June. We may have made it to the first chorus of "We Didn't Start The Fire", finally...
The beginnings of hosuing skullduggery came to light when deployed veterans had their homes foreclosed on by a homeowner's association for failure to pay dues...because the person who was there was suffering from the stresses of having a soldier deployed and became agoraphobic. The "rocket docket" would show up later.
Senator-candidate Paul indicated that he was against the part of the Civil Rights Act that requires businesses open to the public to be nondiscriminatory. This did nto make him a racist, he said, but a libertarian who was consistent about the supremacy of private property.
A Detroit Tigers pitcher had a perfect game taken away on a blown call by the first-base umpire. The Commissioner of Baseball did not choose to rectify the error. The rules did not provide for a way to correct the error, either. The international football tournament, the FIFA World Cup, also got underway.
More evidence of torture from the previous administration surfaced. The current administration continued to do jack shit about it. Furthermore, the Land War in Afghanistan officially ticked over to being longer than the one in Vietnam. Although there was a change in leadership as a Rolling Stone article candidly showed a general i ncharge who was openly contemptuous of the civilian leadership.
Back home, idiots protested the construction of a community center near the 11 September attack site because the community center would contain a prayer space for Muslims.
Sharron Angle won her primary to challenge the majority leader, Mr. Reid. Suffice to say, that contest became a whole lot more interesting at that point. Orly Taitz, Birther Queen, ran for Secretary of State in California. And Alan Greene, a person who had no interest at all past filing his candidacy, ended up winning the Democratic primary in South Carolina.
The Wikileaks scandal of many diplomatic cables was already in full swing by June, even though it wouldn't explode until later. Instead, we heard how PFC Bradley Manning was sold out to the FBI by someone claiming to be a journalist who took his information and made it into a mostly-redacted story.
The BP oil spill continued, with bonus obstruction from the company and others in denying access to the press, and with accounts that workers were being forced to clean up the toxic chemicals without uadequate protections. The company set up an escrow account to pay claims made against them, although there would be several delays in actually paying claims, even as the design was found to be unsafe and the haggling over just how much oil was let out would begin, because fines and royalties both depended on the amount leaked. A moratorium o ndomestic drilling was enacted, overturned, reenacted, and then eventually dropped later on.
Mr. Neil Gaiman became the first author to receive both the United Kingdom and the United States' highest honors for books published for children on the same book, The Graveyard Book.
We lost Rue McClanahan, actress, at 76, Gary Coleman, child star and building supervisor of the Avenue Q apartment complex, at 42, Robert Byrd, senator, at 92, and Edith Shain, a nurse who would be iconic based on a photo taken of servicemen returning from war, at 91,
Ah, and proms where the participants were wearing clothes made of duct tape, a marathon tennis match at Wimbledon that had to be called on account of darkness and resumed the next day, with the winner having won seventy games in the final set to secure the victory, and the decentenntial Census of the peoples.
----
"...You practice your mannerisms
Into the wall.
If this mirror were clearer,
I'd be standing so tall!
I saw you slobber over clovers
On the side of the hill.
I was observing the birds!
...circle in for the kill..."
July! Candidate Angle and candidate Paul continued to open their mouths and say interesting things, like how the unemployed are spoiled and should just go out and get any job they can rather than searching for a job with a salary that was comparable to their old job. This was despite the knowledge that the ratio of people looking for a job to available jobs was about 5:1. Mr. Corbett, running Pennsylvania, also made this claim. Both candidate Angle and candidate Paul were also in favor of replacing Social Security with a private system that would subject retirment income to the whims of stock market speculators and the crashes and booms of Wall Street. There were also remarks from Ms. Angle about "Second Amendment remedies" if she or other conservatives should lose their issues and electinos, and her belief that rape victims should be forced to carry children to term.
Activision rescinded a policy debuted in June that would have required the use of real names on the World of Warcraft forums and accounts.
An alleged ring of Russian Federation spies was exchanged with the Russian Federation for alleged United States spies after the ring was broken in June.
President Obama made a recess appointment, much to the consternation of the conservatives, to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.
Governor Brewer of Arizona claimed beheadings were going on in the borderlands, an utterly unsubstantiated claim. The Papers Please law was injuncted against, preventing its enforcement. Senator Kyl advocated for repealing the amendment to the Constitution that gives citizenship to all persons born in United States territory.
A disgraced propagandist, responsible for the Congressional defunding of the group ACORN (in something that looked suspiciously like a bill of attainder), cobbled together another selectively edited video and managed to get an employee of the Agriculture Department fired for appearing to have long-held racist views. When the truth came to light, an apology was issued and the employee reinstated. Said discraged propagandist became a thoroughly disgraced propagandist, and nobody should ever believe anything he or Andrew Brietbart says or does.
A Wikileaks release placed more than 90,000 documents, some marked secret, about the Land War in Afghanistan into the public eye.
The Dead Pool Diamond 9 needed a baseball manager, so they grabbed George Steinbrenner at 80 years, and thought he needed a friendly voice, so they took Bob Sheppard, the PA announcer for Yankee Stadium, at 99 years.
----
"...I've been you,
I know you,
Your facade is a scam!
You know, you're making me cry,
This is the way that I am!..."
August: It's only going to get more intense from here. After all, we've only got a few months before an election.
The court challenge to Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that officially defined "marriage" as a one man, one woman monogamous relationship, succeeded and the initiative was overturned
The mayor of New York defended the Park51 community center project against the people who claimed it would be a mosque built in victory to extremist Islam for the 11 September attacks.
A library director circumvented normal procedure to remove a book on queer teen voices after a follower of Glenn Beck gave her an excuse to.
The porno scanners were proven to have images stored, instead of deleted like they were supposed to be.
Elena Kagan was confirmed as the third female Supreme Court justice in history.
The press secretary indicated that liberals should be more appreciative of what the administration has done for them during their time in office. The problem was that, at this point in the year, many of the major liberal issues had no progress, had been bargained away for something else, were done only to a small degree instead of a proper one, or were being actively stalled.
A radio personality repeatedly used a derogatory term toward black people, and said that inter-racial couples should just get used to racism in their lives. She would apologize for using the word, but not for its context nor her insistence that racism is just a part of interracial relationships. She would eventually flounce from the radio scene entirely. And Sarah Palin would endorse all of her reasoning.
A conservative think tank would put out their blueprint for how to fix America, which looked particularly like they intended to do anything other than give tax cuts to the rich, cut social programs, and give the military all the money they wanted and more.
Right at the end of the month, Mr. Glenn Beck held a Rally to Restore the Honor of the United States by bringing together conservative and fringe people, many interested in preserving the superior position of white people, in the same place around the anniversary of when a black minister brought lots of people, liberal and conservative, together to restore the honor of the United States by stopping legalized discrimination against nonwhite people.
And at the very end, the official end of the Second Land War in Asia, even though several tens of thousands of troops will be in Iraq for a significant amount of time to come.
The Dead Pool claimed Ted Stevens, senator, in an airplane crash.
----
"...I've been living a lie.
A metamorphical scheme,
Detective undercover brotherhood
Objective: Obscene..."
And it's September! We were introduced to the "rocket docket", a court designed specifically to clear all the foreclosure cases in Florida, where despite serious flaws in their documentation and proof, retired judges brought back into service were rubberstamping foreclosures.
A court declared the military's policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell to be unconstitutional, although they did then stay that ruling, leaving gay and lesbian servicemen still able to be fired for having their orientation exposed. Elsewhere, Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta was awarded a Medal of Honor, the first to be awarded to a survivor of their scenario since the Vietnam conflict.
France passed a full-face-covering ban, one that disproprtionately affects Muslims, even though the law itself doesn't actually pick them out specifically.
Christine O'Donnell, she of the Junior Anti-Sex League and the Satanic Panic Party, won her primary election. So did Carl Paladino, he of racist, bestial, pornographic e-mails. O'Donnell would go on to be accused of campaign violations in using her donated funds to pay the rent on her primary residence, claim scientists were making mice with functioning human brains, and that the nickname "czar" was actually a violation of the Constitution, as it is a title of nobility.
The second sequence of neat benefits of the health care bill went into play here, letting kids stay on longer, dropping lifetime limits, pre-existing conditions, and dropping people from insurance when they got sick.
The beginnings of "austerity riots" began with protests in France over a decision to raise the retirement age in France. In various permutations, the protests agains austerity measures would roll all across Europe.
Pakistan closed a key supplyl route to Afghanistan in revenge for unmanned aerial strikes fro mthe United States violating their borders and killing their citizens.
The WisCon convention had to figure out what to do with a Guest of Honor, Elizabeth Moon, after said GoH made several anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim comments in her personal journal, and several of the potential attendees registered their displeasure with the statements.
The opposition party released their pledge of what they would do if they got back into power after the November elections. It looked a lot like giving tax cuts to the rich, rolling back the safety net, giving the military everything they wanted, and also trying to delay, stop, or roll back as much of what the first two years of this administration have tried to do, for the benefit of their rich and corporate overlords.
A spate of teen suicides based on bullying or the likelhood thereof brought the issue back into the national consciousness for a while, including the creation of the "It Gets Better" project, where a lot of famous individuals talked to LGBT teens and assured them that life gets better outside of their required schooling.
We lost someone very dear to a lot of hearts - George N. Parks, director of the University of Massachusettes Minutemen Marching Band and director of a very successful Drum Major Academy. He was traveling with his band in anticipation of a Saturday football performance. He was only 57 years old.
The Dead Pool also claimed Edwin Newman, NBC correspondent, at 91 years, and Tony Curtis, actor.
----
"...Do you hear the flibbity jibbity jibber jabber
With an oh my God I've got to get out of here or I'll have another
Word to sell
Another story to tell
Another timepiece ringing the bell
Do you hear the clock stop when you reach the end?
No!
You know it must be neverending
Comprehend if you can
But when you try to pretend to understand
You resemble a fool
Although you're only a man
So give it up and
Smile..."
One month to go! We saw the introduction of the Tea Party coloring book for children, hot on the heels of complaining that the President talking to schoolchildren was indoctrination.
Candidate Christine O'Donnell claimed she had secret knowledge about Chinese plans for America. Someone else tried that before, we remembered - claiming they had a clearance that not even the President had. The candidate would then go on to outdo herself by claiming that she was a witch during the Satanic Panic before turning to Christianity.Finally, one of her allies would make a stunt claim of paying money to anyone who could find the exact phrase "separation of church and state" in the written Constitution.
Candidate Paladino said he was open-minded but railed against QUILTBAG people "brainwash[ing]" children into thinking it's okay to be QUILTBAG. Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council, got to express his prejudices in the Washington Post and claim that teenagers committing suicide because QUILTBAG activists keep telling them that being QUILTBAG is notjust a choice that can be turned on or off at will, and so kids kill themselves because they despair about their perpetual sinful state and all the associated problems. To counter that idea, the It Gets Better project contains recordings from many individuals, famous and not famous, about how if you can get past required schooling, life gets better. Which it does. In Uganda, for example, they publish suspected QUILTBAG people and tell others to go kill them.
Candidate Angle claimed that government had been overturned and Sharia law reigned in two cities in the United States, as well as releasing an anti-Latino advertisement, portraying them all as illegal immigrants.
Candidate Miller railed against the social safety net that has kept several of the members of his family alive.
Progressives counter-rallied against the Glenn Beck rally, trying to show that there were just as many people committed to increasing honor through liberalism. Their politicians seemed less inclined to do so, deciding against the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security benefits.
A company that was at death's door just a year or two ago returned to giving political donations.
We met a man whose house burned down because he did not pay a surcharge for fire service, was unable to convince the fire fighters to put the house out for any sum of money, and was only there to basically make sure that the fire did not spread to other houses.
Fundamentalists of the Christian stripe got a sequence of poems about stem cells pulled and destroyed art because they considered it to portray a gay Jesus.
A Philadelphia pitcher continued his remarkable season by throwing a no-hitter in playoff baseball. I say continued because he had thrown a perfect game earlier on in the season. Mr. Halladay should be headed to the Hall just for that season.
We returned to the self-driving cars protoype for a bit, showing that they've progressed significantly since we saw them last.
Miners who were trapped in a mine collapse in Chile were finally lifted out after two months of being trapped, to everyone's relief.
The school that spied on its students using school-issued laptop cameras settled out of court.
Wikileaks made another major release of war-related documents.
Conservatives, who have benefitted far more from the Citizens United decision that allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on politics, repeatedly accused liberals of wanting disclosure so they could intimidate their enemies into silence and keeping their pocketbooks shut. While liberals continued to ask questions as to whether the U.S. Chamber of Commerce funneled foreign money into its political coffers, a claim that could not be proven or disproven because of shoddy bookkeeping practices and incomplete disclosure from the organization.
Their social counterparts unleashed a storm of ad-hominem and body-image attacks on Megan McCain because she decided to call candidate O'Donnell what she is - a nutter.
Elizabeth Moon was disinvited as a GoH for WisCon based on published anti-immigrant remarks.
Stewart/Colbert held the Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive at the end of the month to capture the segment that would neither be at the Beck rally or the Progressive one.
And the dance of the unemployment benefits expiing began anew.
And we lost Benoit Mandelbrot, mathematician, at 85, Tom Bosley, actor, at 83, and Robert Guccione, founder of Penthouse, at 79,
---
"...You understand
Mechanical hands
Are the ruler of everything
Ruler of everything
I'm the ruler of everything
In the end..."
Voting time right at the beginning of the month! After a week or two of a whisper campaign that liberals were deliberately registering people to vote fraudulently to increase their turnout numbers...
...the makeup of the Congress changed. Republicans received large gains, including taking the majority of the House of Rerpresentatives. Candidates O'Donnell, Angle, Miller, Whitman, Tancredo, and Paladino all failed in their bids, reducing the Tea Party power, but candidates Rubio, Rand Paul, and Brewer won their respective races, ensuring that at least some part of Tea Party vengeance will be felt for years. The conservative Democratic wing got whipped, becing replaced with persons farther to the right than them.
The Democrats could have done better had they run on how much they did get done, but the big things hanging over their head, like the economy's slugglish progress, were condemning them to minority status. The Republicans now have to deal with the hydra that is their base and the Tea Party politicians they elected. Considering their stated agenda, thoguh, is simply to deny the Democrats anything that might be helpful to their political aims, it may not be as much a Hydra for them to deal with as much as figuring out where to turn their Medusa and hope that there are no mirrors.
Oklahoma passed two initiatives, one to declare English the official state language, another to claim that no Oklahoma court could consider foriegn laws when deciding their judicial cases. (Which might have nixed the Torah and First Nations laws.) Michigan's attorney general was fired for conduct unbecoming after he singled out a gay teenager and attacked him with slurs and vitriol on work time. It seemed like the slurs and vitriol weren't really the problem, but that work time was used for it. How far we have come, right? And then there was the banning of Brave New World without having actually read it because the First Nations people were treated poorly in it...which was the intended Aesop.
The San Franscisco Giants captured the American baseball championship.The mayor of San Fanscisco vetoed a bill that would have prevented Happy Meals from continuing to exist, because they would not meet nutrition and health standards for a meal that came with a toy.
The National Novel Writing month kicked off, and all of its cousins, like National Blog Posting Month.
Iraq's parliament finally formed a government, with each of the three major parties getting an important ministerial seat.
Taibbi took us inside the "rocket docket", or how mortgage servicers and banks are using retired judges to legitimize their paperwork-missing, robo-signed, not-really-theirs foreclosures on houses. It may be a practice started all the way back in college, as a professional paper-writer tipped his hat anonymously and pointed out the flaw in education that cares more about grades than learning.
Lots of people got Kinect, a peripheral that can be used to play games or to develop gestural interfaces for computers and other devices.
The Transportation Security Administration continued to be the subject of ridicule for the terahertz backscatter machines and pat-down procedures for those who refuse to pass through them, to the point where the head of the airline pilots union suggested all of them opt-out for private pat-downs rather than be subjected to the scanners. Commentators of all stripes suggested that security theater be replaced by actual effective techniques, like those used in Israel.
The President continued to say he was for the rule of law, despite Congress cutting off his avenues to actually demonstrate a commitment to it, and despite his own repeated usage of expanded executive powers, and despite the bipartisan consensus in the government to ensure no investigations were ever made into the lawless activities of the previous administration.
Mr. Emanuel resigned his position as chief of staff for the White House and announced his candidacy for mayor of Chicago. In something that is not ironic but is under the jurisdiction of what people normally use "ironic" for, a Daley would be picked to replace him.
A first-grade girl was picked on by her classmates for showing an interest in Star Wars. The women who work on the Star Wars franchise, as well as women and men everywhere who were fans, left messages of encouragement and hope - and donated a few physical objects - to take their stand against the beginning of gender-role bullying and crush it before it blossomed any further. Elsewhere, a Downs student was forcibly removed from a class because the instructor had gotten tired of having her in the class. He then claimed the student was a disruption to the other students. The students got together and protested that the Downs student was not any sort of disruption to them at all. The administration ignored them and removed the student anyway.
The first civilian trial of a Guantanamo Bay resident ended in a conviction that carried a 20-to-life sentence. Conservatives were completely up in arms about it because the other 280 counts were acquittals, and moved as s wiftly as they could to prevent anyone else from being tried in a civilian court in the United States because they felt the possibility of a full acquittal was just too risky to be allowed.
The awarding of the first Medal of Honor to someone who survived the thing they were given the award for resulted in criticism claiming the medal had been "feminized" for being awarded based on valor that saved lives, instead of on someone who racked up a kill streak. Elsewhere, the publishers of a NIV-based Bible were convinced by a small and vocal minority of fundamentalists to change their gender-neutral terms back to explicitly male ones.
At the end of the month, Wikileaks released as ignificant portion of the 250,000 diplomatic cable archive allegedly given to them by PFC Bradley Manning. The storm that follows would consume much of the next month. More on that then.
In the continual fight over unemployment benefits, the Congressional Budget Office crunched numbers and reported that tax cuts for the rich are some of the worst stimulative actions a government could take, and that unemployment benefit extensions were one of the best.
Last, the Defense Department released its report that indicated the branches of service would be unaffected, in terms of being able to do their jobs, by the repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.
Finally, in this month George "Sparky" Anderson, manager of the Cincinatti Reds and Detroit Tigers baseball organizations, died at 76, Theodore Kheel, major negotiator, ran out of steam at 96, Margaret T. Burroughs, museum founder, became a part of history at 95, and Leslie Nielsen, actor and comedian, auditioned for his role in the Dead Pool production company at 84 years.
---
"...Without looking down,
Gliding around,
Like a bumbling dragon I fly,
Scraping my face on the sky..."
One last month. And a lot still to be done. The Wikileaks release prompted an imediate firestorm and concerted efforts from governments to brand the organization and its founder as traitors, terrorists, and The Enemy and to prevent their information from being hosted on various servers. The United States military forbade access to the site on any computer that was unsecured as a violation of procedure regarding secret information. Commentators called for the founder, his sources, and anyone else associated with the site to be executed as a deterrent to anyone else choosing the same path, and to protect the National Security State that routinely decides far too many things should be Secret. Anyonmous got involved. Mirrors sprang up, were taken down, and sprang up again. And the data in the cables revealed a lot of really bad things going on in the name of the United States.
The founder, Mr. Assange, was detained on an arrest warrant regard charges of rape filed against him in Sweden, which prompted reactions ranging from "it's a political ploy" to "he needs to face those charges, instead of getting away from them because he's rich and famous and nobody believes women."
The vaunted Government Death Panels appeared. In Arizona, under a Republican governor, who decided that $5 million USD should be pulled from a program meant to help low-income people get organ transplants, despite the actual budget of the state, and the hole in its finances, being many times that amount.
The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell was first stalled when the entire Defense Authorization Bill was subjected to the filibuster and Tarantino'd, then resurrected as a standalone bill, which passed both houses an went to the President to be signed. The cheering group for that signing ceremony was so large they had to change the venue to accomodate all of them. Conservatives railed against the decision, liberals praised it.
A package deal of tax cuts for the middle class, which made sense, and tax cuts for the richest, which did not, passed in the lame-duck session, making everyone mad that they didn't get their way the way they wanted it, and making sure there was still plenty of deficit spending in the future.
The actual budget, however, was Tarantino'd.
The DREAM Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for those in the United States illegally, was Tarantino'd because the opposition believes anything intended to bring those people into the light is "amnesty" and the best those people deserve is deportation.
A bill to help the first responders of the 11 September attacks died, zombified, and then came back to life again in the lame duck session, getting signed into law.
A food safety bill passed.
So did the new START arms reduction treaty.
All in all, the lame duck session was far more productive than the rest of the two years before it, and all it took was a threat to work through the holidays to get stuff done. Perhaps in retaliation, a Congressperson said they would introduce a bill forbidding Congress from holding another lame-duck session from there on out.
The city of Tokyo passed an ordinance that would restrict the sales of any material, but mostly manga, that was considered unhealthy for children. The United Kingdom went one further and pre-emptively blocked any website they considered pornographic, requiring adults to call their ISPs and request unfiltered Internet access to receive it.
The UK also cut all the funding for their programme to put books in the hands of children at key points in their life.
The health care bill saw its first "unconstitutional" ruling to stack up against the ones that had ruled portions of it, including the individual insurance mandate, constitutional.
The War on Christmas returned, although at lower intensity than usual and with fewer salvos fired. Thankfully. Although there were still some stupid things said, and there was at least one column that was supposed to be crowing about how much more generous conservatives are to private charities...that relied entirely on their percentages being bigger, and not necessarily their actual dollar amounts.
In the middle of the month, a study was released that said the more you were exposed to Fox News programming, the more misinformed you were. Later on, many publications took offense to reporting that pointed out their deliberate attempts to manipulate narrative and framing and called some of their talkig points outright lies.
Iraq swore in a government, several months after the actual elections. Venezuela's puppet parliament passed a law allowing Hugo Chavez to rule by decree for 18 months.
A lunar eclipse happened close to the Vague Early Winter Possibly Religious Festival, for which all the Prinnies sang. Ah, and we discovered another ring of Saturn, ways to make cell phone service undeniably cheap, and that placebo effect might be just what someone needs to get outof depression. We also found out that e-mail is actually a private communication, according to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and thus requires a warrant. Kodachrome will no longer be developed after the end of the year.
And the last Dead Pool of the year claimed Elizabeth Edwards, cancer survivor, staunch advocate, and lawyer, at 61 years of age, Richard Holbrooke, uber-diplomat, at 69, Blake Edwards, film-maker and director, at 88, Fred Hargesheimer, pilot who made good on a promise, at 94 years, and Geraldine Hoff, inspiration for Rosie the Riveter, at 86 years of age.
--------
"...In the gallows, or the ghetto,
In the town, or the meadow
In the billows
Even over the sun
Every end of a time
Is another begun..."
That was 2010. A ride, to be sure, with a lot of things happening in it. The amount of data processed into bite-size chunks was probably pretty immense, and then having to compress further and determine where the major media narratives were was definitely an interesting exercise. I'm beginning to think I need to start tagging, somehow, or find someone who actually wants to tag posts with descriptive items, or finding some manner in which I can know which places to return to when I want to put the next one of these together. Either that, or I need to start constructing these as they actually happen, over the course of the year.
Elsewhere, the prospect of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives means there will be great opportunities for working together, for partisan squabbling, for hilarity, for symbolism, for getting momentum built for 2012, for opportunities, and for us to see whether they actually had a plan all this time or were faking it. The Senate can continue on its dysfunctional path or it can decide to get its act together and start passing, or at least getting to up-or-down votes on, legislation.
The President still has time on his first term to try and show that he's still the centrist that people elected, to move to the left or the right in a bid to capture certain bases and try to appeal to the center, to repudiate the lawlessness of the previous administration (or to try and extend that attitude further), and to try and make good on his campaign promises in ways that make sense and that will be helpful to us regular folks. It's an "off" year, in the sense that there are no elections to posture for, but the race for the election in 2012 has already begun, so we may not see any sort of rest from campaign-style rhetoric.
The world around will turn. The Land Wars in Asia will continue, although one is scheduled to finally come to a stop. Globalization and internationalization will continue to ship jobs away from high wages to low, values and shortfalls in government revenue will mean decisions painful to the citizens, although not to those who craft them, libraries will continue to be shut down or rolled back due to lack of funding, and the Forces of Censorship will attack anywhere their demagogues say to concentrate their energies.
We will get older, and more people that we know, famous and otherwise, will die. We will hopefully get closer to the day when we can decide when we're ready to go, instead of being forced out by the ravages of time. New life will appear, full of potential.
But for now, we made it to another year without prematurely ending the human experiment. Here's to many more.
----
Conservatives would continue to accuse the administration and the President of being socialists intent on destroying the free market, unable to run the government because they have no experience in running businesses and thus do not have the wisdom of the free market and it's obvious solutions to debt and deficit problems, and ideologues unwilling to compromise or accept suggestions from their opposition on anything. That opposition would set a record for number of filibusters in a Senate session, embrace the idea of the Party of NO, even to ideas that were their own suggestions, and continually insist that the private sector had all the solutions to the problems and deserved every dollar of the debt the federal government incurred to bail them out of the economic collapse they engineered.
The name Matt Taibi would become almost household, and Rolling Stone would suddenly be known as a magazine that did in-depth and smart political writing instead of pieces on, y'know, music. In some ways, it followed in the footsteps of Playboy, which also routinely had articled unrelated to sex inside.
And Muslims would continue to be demonized wherever conservative columnists could try - tying them to terrorists, accusing them of attempting to take over the country, accusing the President of being secretly one and exhorting their fellows to be as irreverent to Islam as they perceived the culture was to Christianity.
That was just one examples of the insane things that a lot of people would believe about the President, about his administration, their policies, or liberals and liberalism in general. A lot of discredited conspiracies continued to live in 2010 despite having been disproven early in 2009.
It wasn't all about politics, of course - part of the problem of getting older is that you have less people alive at the end of the year than when you started. I can only hope that they determine how to prolong life indefinitely before biology forces me to the end of mine.
And it wasn't all bad, despite the fact that I'm sure my news tends to the negative more than the positive. The year had a lot of talk about why we haven't decided that QUILTBAG people are people and accord them all the proper rights and privileges of such, and a lot of action on the same, for example. But there were also more than a few places that did accord QUILTBAG people the status of being people who can engage in all sorts of activities. The Century of the Fruitbat marched forward in many places, and backwards in a few.
And there were all sorts of literary terrorists around, doing their best to remove books they considered inappropriate from schools and libraries, making large loud complaints about the presence fo information in the library or the school, and continuing to make their case as to why they should be entirely ignored, based on their ignorance of the thing they were challenging, or their hubris in believing they knew best for everyone.
Anyway, January.
"Juno was mad,
he knew he'd been had,
so he shot at the sun with a gun.
He shot his wily one
only friend..."
The turn of the year saw us still in the very thick of the Green Revolution protests in Iran, where an ostensibly pro-democracy faction took to the streets repeatedly to demand the installment of the apparent winner of a popular election in Iran. While several columnists were attempting to make it into a pro-Western Democracy faction and urged the United States to use its overy and covert influence to support and try to bring down the regime in place, the demonstrators themselves always seemed more limited to the sphere of "we elected this man to be President, he must be installed", and they were willing to face both the uniformed police, but the secret police to get that done.
Furthermore, the Land Wars in Asia continued, although this year had a scheduled drawdown in one Land War, and next year was promised another from the other...and all the while, dark hints that at least one more Land War in Asia should be opened up.
Additionally, in the middle of the month, Haiti suffered a Richter 7.0 earthquake, which basically collapsed the shaky infrastructure of the country, and several aftershocks to compound the problem. Relief efforts were hindered by blockages preventing ports from operating as well as a small number of usable airfields to land supplies with.
The United States was also attempting to figure out what to do about a failed attempt to detonate an explosive pair of underpants on board a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Conservatives said the "enemy combatant" rules of disappearing someone off to an undisclosed site, to be interrogated and then tried by military commission should have been applied immediately, instead of the civilian arrest procedures and Miranda warnings accorded the attempted terrorist. This was not a new theme by any stretch, and it would continue for any and all persons who succeeded or attempted terror strikes in the United States or abroad.
The big political football of the time was the health care bill and its requirement that each person in the United States carry some form of insurance. During the rather raucous debate, where many liberals felt betrayed that the Democrats and Administration had taken their strongest argument off the table before it had a chance to be aired, the individual mandate was seen largely as a sellout to the insurance industry on one side and as an un-Constitutional intrusion into the lives of private citizens on the other - lawusits were promised, with more to join on later.
On the back burner, which would not explode until later, were the full-body, through-the-clothes backscatter radiation devices that would later become "the porno machines", but the powder keg for that, the "enhanced pat-down" involving genital touching, would not arrive until much later.
Also biding its time before it became hot stuff was the Citizens United decision, a Supreme Court ruling that gave corporations unlimited ability to influence elections through the donation of money to political groups - although they were still forbidden from giving directly to official candidate campaigns. Furthermore, they could do so without having to disclose that they had given that money. For a look at how that played out beautifully to the corporation and the Republicans' hands, trace back the origins of all your campaign ads run by third parties...if you can.
The murderer of Dr. Tiller, Scott Roeder, was convicted of his crime. He is still currently the only person indicted in the case.
A sitting Congressman audibly called out the President as a liar during his State of the Union address, and a sitting Supreme Court Justice was caught mouthing the same sentiment. (I think it was the same address.) Opinion columns and talking heads exploded as to whether the Congressman should be praised or repudiated.
Lastly, the Proposition 8 case claiming that the ballot initiative against same-sex marriage in California was against the California State Constitution was getting all sorts of information and testimony.
And in the opinion columns, much of the push and pull was about themes that would expand dramatically the closer we got to the election times - the supposed "elitism" that characterizes liberals and intellectuals and makes them think they are "better than you" on one side, and the continued aggravation-to-despair on the other that this administrator was turning out just like his predecessor in all the wrong, torture-supporting, law-avoiding ways, the various accused affectations of the current administrator, many in direct conflict with each other, and the continued vicious fights, both liberal and conservative, over whether the Tea Party was a corporate-backed astroturfing organization, or a legitimate grass-roots angry populace seeking to return the country to an imagined past.
Finally, we lost Mip Gies, the last of the family that hid Anne Frank, Glenn W. Bell, creator of Taco Bell, J.D. Salinger, noted author, and Lee Archer, sole official ace pilot of the Tuskegee Airmen, to the warm embrace of the Dead Pool.
--
"...Number your thumb,
Impossible sum
Of the monkeyfist hung on a vine,
Organism assembly line.
Everything's gonna be fine
Play pretend..."
February began in many of the same ways as January had been. The question of The Tarantino was already resolved: any sort of legislation with importance would take the supermajority to even be considered for a vote, the matter of Don't Ask, Don't Tell continued to rage, even as African countries considered bills that would criminalize being gay, and the budget, released last month, began the howls about debt and deficit reduction that would continue on significantly through the rest of the year. And finally, the plight of the long-term unemployed and all the underemployed and newly unemployed started moving toward fever pitch, as it would do several times over the course of the year as benefit extensions expired. This year, more than others, it seems like the issues were brought up in January and then sustained through the news cycle all the way to the elections and beyond. At least, here in the States, that is.
By this point in the narrative, the Tea Partiers continued to out themselves as persons with dark motivations based on race, religion, fear, and misinformation, and moving in such a way that the glint of corporate puppetmasters was inferrable from their behavior.
In the world, the Olympic Winter Games came to Vancouver for a stay of athletic prowess and some really neat coverage of curling and ice hockey.
More seriously, a Richter 8.8 quake struck Chile. Two months, two major quakes. Not a good start.
In the United States, on top of the general narratives above, an importer of comics was sentenced to six months in prison for his collection after it was inspected by the Post Office and they determined it to be child porn.
School-issued laptops captured private images of students who took them home, due to remote activation of webcams.
In the opinion columns, a solid anti-unions sentiment surfaced for a bit and then ran deeper through the year, although never silently. Liberal condescension and elitist "better-than-you" thinking was never too far away from the pens of the opinion writers, regardless of how true it actually was.
And the Dead Pool got John Murtha, Representative, and Charlie Wilson, armer of Afghanis against the Soviets.
--
"...You understand
Mechanical Hands
Are the ruler of everything
Ruler of everything
I'm the Ruler of Everything
In the end..."
And then there was March.
One of the major parts of March that I followed were the continuing exploits of the Texas Board of Education as they did their level best to impose as much Christianity into history books as they could, which would subsequently change the textbooks of many other states that follow their model.
The opinion columns and articles were particualrly rife with all sorts of materials about discrimination against QUILTBAG peoples and the reactions to them, including students expelled from a Catholic school because their mothers were lesbians, and another student prohibited from bringing her date to the school prom because her date was also female, to the point of canceling the official school prom so as to stop her from bringing her date. We would later find out that the parents went even further and held a secret prom that they did not tell her about. The Catholic Church also won an exemption from UK law requiring equality so they could continue telling QUILTBAG people that they couldn't adopt from any Catholic adoption agency.
The health care bill made it easy for at least one commenter to proclaim how taxation in any form is slavery of upstanding people to give money and benefits to undeserving slackers and lazy people. Although that particular commenter would say this about any and everything, and would proceed to do so, sometimes alone, sometimes in chorus, over the rest of the year. One Congressperson, Bart Stupak, received far more attention that he should have in his raving that the health care bill would allow for federal funding of abortions, a ludicrous position because there were so many other things still in place that prevented that from coming to pass. But because Mr. Stupak was a potentially-crucial vote, he got mollycoddled instead of backhanded.
The measure passed both houses and was signed into law this month. The lawsuits began immediately thereafter, mostly focusing on the idea of whether the legislature could demand that all persons carry an insurance policy, and the calls for repeal followed swiftly from that. And then there were the threats made once the bill was passed, threats that has started with angry shoting at town hall meetings and seethed all the way through the debate and passage.
And in the "future predictions" department, I accurately guessed that deficits would be a noise-making machine, and also, at the end of March, the new START agreement was reached...and would then sit for a significant amount of time while Republican Senators stalled, filibustered, blustered, and otherwise tried not to pass it, if they could get away with it.
Tran Van Hay, possibly the person with the longest hair in the world, Corey Haim, 80s heart-throb, and Peter Graves, known well for the Mission: Impossible TV series all joined the Dead Pool.
Oh, and one last thing - the LHC fired successfully and the universe did not unravel immediately. Another end-of-the-world scenario that turned out to be a dud. Geronimo.
--
"...Do you like how I dance?
I've got zirconium pants!
Consequential enough
To slip you into a trance..."
April. Four months in, and it seems like we've already had a year's worth of material. The cloud was akin to the volcano that was producing ash clouds that were diverting and grounding planes, because they could not be seen but would cause severe damage to jet turbine engines.
Scott Roeder, the killer of Dr. George Tiller, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 50 years time. It is justice, but Roeder's assault had it's intended effect as well - the clinic that Dr. Tiller practiced at closed, leaving one less person performing legal abortions in the country. And I'm betting a lot of women who might have been able to get abortions decided against it, because of the possible threat to them from persons like Roeder. Or from legislatures like Oklahoma's, that passed, and then would later override vetoes of, laws that put onerous requirements on medical providers to try and discourage women from having abortions, even of those who were raped, and then also shielded those providers from lying about the developmental disabilities of the fetus if they thought it would lead to an abortion.
The President of the United States opened up some previously-closed locales for offshore drilling for oil. He couldn't have known that offshore oil rigs would figure much more prominently later on, with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the subsequent months-long containment, cleanup, and blame efforts.
A mine explosion in West Virginia highlighted one company's consistent record of negligence and safety and provided a glimpse into a company that was being run as if it were a Dickensian business. Mines would return to the news later on in the month, with another safety problem in Kentucky, and then later on in the year.
And then, a river in Tennessee flooded Nashville and a lot of other cities along its path, thanks to heavier-than-usual rainfall.
Wikileaks released a major item - video of a 2007 helicopter attack that killed journalists and civilians, apparently without any confirmation that those people were supposed to be targets of an attack and were confirmed insurgents or terrorists. Even with all this information and a lot of ther bits, the current administration made no moves to prosecute the previous administration, and would, in fact, expand upon their framework and claim more powers than the previous administrator had.
The Republican Party took a trip to a lesbian bondage-themed strip club and charged it to the company dime.
A ruling indicated the FCC could not simply impose "net neutrality" on customers. That issue will resurface later on, as well. It's kind of interesting how major issues in the news have foreshadowing earlier on, with little bits and pieces here and there before they go exploding.
The Tea Party's continued flirting and outright kissing or racist beliefs was defended by other columnists claiming they were merely concerned about the size of the government and "creeping socialism". This despite pohotographic evidence of many rather racist signs at Tea Party rallies, statements by persons who are Tea Party leaders, and columns written in defense of them that claim black people were civilized through their slavery to white people. To be fair, though, Tea Partiers and their supporters also often believe that taxes are slavery, freedom-loving people should secede and form a Randian paradise, and that there's enough charity in the private and religious sectors for everyone that needs it, so the government should not be in the business of providing a social safety net, so there's a lot of things in there that are fairly incoherent.
Two men who had arranged for as much legal protection as possible for one to be the caregiver and inheritor of the other had all of their careful legal protections and documents ignored by the local government, separated the two men, putting them in separate nursing homes, and then sold their possessions and terminated their lease. One of the two men later died from his medical complications, without his partner being there to see him or to act as his medical advocate, despite having the legal paperwork in place.
Arizona passed a law that required persons to carry their proof of citizenship on them at all times or face deportation. The response to that was to point out that only people that looked like illegal immigrants would be asked to show their proof, and how did the governor and others plan on defending themselves against the onslaught of racial profiling claims. That question was never answered satisfactorily.
The beginnings of the strange characters that would dot the political landscape before November appeared - Mr. Paladino's affinity for racism, bestiality, and naked women, for example, appeared first in this month, to be referred to later on. Sue Lowden made a soundbite that would be played for a little bit as a viral thing, advocating the barter system for medical care, or "Chickens for Checkups", as it would be known. Rand Paul's assertion that the Civil Rights Act, banning discrimination in all places that served the public, should have only been a ban on government services discriminating, wouldn't happen until next month.
The rolls of the dead added Dr. Henry Edward Roberts, designer of the Altair 8800, the first affordable home computer, Jaime Escalante, subject of the movie "Stand And Deliver" about his trials with getting inner-city kids to pass the AP exams in calculus, and Dorothy Height, civil rights activist.
Oh, and there were dioramas. Using Peeps. And an attempt to cause an earthquake through the application of exposed cleavage. And Seattle got a new superhero - Electron Boy.
--
"...Do you like how I walk?
Do you like how I talk?
Do you like how my face
Disintegrates into chalk?..."
May. An attempted terror attacks that turned out to be a dud revived the voices that claimed anyone merely suspected of being an "enemy combatant" should be held outside the protections of the law and the Constitution for an indefinite period until they confess, and that any methods deemed necessary to obtain that confession and other Communists, err, terrorists, should be used without any regard to legality or morality.
A strident anti-gay activist, George Rekers, was caught with a "rentboy", whom Mr. Rekers claims was there simply to move luggage. The profile of the hired boy, as well as the site, suggested something...different was in mind. Mr. Rekers eventually resigned. The Episcopalian Church in the United States, however, consecrated an openly-lesbian bishop, setting them in conflict with the Anglican communion they are a part of. And the repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy was passed as part of the Defense Authorzation Bill at the end of the month - which would then sit.
The beginnings of "austerity" rumblings in Europe, as well, with Greece taking the lead due to their already poor economic position. Predictably, the people actually being affected by "austerity" took to the streets and the airwaves to protest the fact that they were being screwed and the people actually responsible for the crises were getting off light, if they were being punished at all.
The Koreas growled at each other, puffed out their chests, gave each other various middle fingers, and made everyone around them nervous that they were going to resume hostilities, a theme that would return later on in the year.
Rashes of teen suicides over issues that eventually always collapsed down to bullying and despair meant that the issue routinely came back into the public eye every now and then. A particuarly bad spot happened in this month.
The presence of a secret air base in Afghanistan, a Guantanamo Bay-like place outside constitutional and legal protections, brought the First Land War in Asia back into the public eye for a bit.
Elena Kagan was nominated for the Supreme Court to replace the retiring Justice Stevens. She had no "wise Latina" remarks for the racists to pounce on, but she did run into a lot of "she hates the military, and that makes her unfit" based on a tenure as Dean of Harvard Law School. (Arizona continued to indicate how much it hated brown-skinned people, incidentally, by passing a law banning classes that were focused on any one ethnicity or promoted ethnic solidarity.)
Miss USA was crowned - an Arab-American from Dearborn, Michigan. The whole time this was going on, her detractors were claiming she was secretly a Muslim funded by terrorist groups, intended to be a sleeper agent to make people think Muslims are pretty. This despite her rather prominent public Christianity. And then they claimed she won because PC demanded a white girl lose the beauty pageant when compared to the brown-skinned girl. For all we know, they were trying to avoid a repeat of a Prejean-style incident...because the other girl talked about how much she supported the Papers Please law.
The Wall Street stock market exposed a vulnerability when the mis-typing of a single transaction caused a cascade of automatic reactions that resulted in several organizations receiving a wildly disporportionate stock price.
The Texas Board of Education was still on a collision course with reality, in terms of how they wanted to change their textbooks to emphasize Christianity and de-list people who advocated for equal rights and minorities. And then they passed those textbook reforms, ensuring that a lot of other students across the country would be subjected to the same values that they espoused.
And finally, a lot of hay was made out of a raid by Israel on a nominally Turkish ship that the Israelis claim was smuggling weapons under an armed crew and the people there claim was aid for Palestine and that they were without weapons.
Enrie Harwell, long-time voice of Detroit Tigers baseball, Edgar Wright/Antony Grey, advocate for decriminalization of LGBT sexuality in the UK, Lena Horne, whose music transcended the heavily racist society she lived in, and Doris E. Travis, last of the Ziegfeld Girls all died in May, and the world was less without them here.
--
"...I have a wonderful wife!
I have a powerful job!
She criticizes me for being egocentric [ha!]..."
Month six, June. We may have made it to the first chorus of "We Didn't Start The Fire", finally...
The beginnings of hosuing skullduggery came to light when deployed veterans had their homes foreclosed on by a homeowner's association for failure to pay dues...because the person who was there was suffering from the stresses of having a soldier deployed and became agoraphobic. The "rocket docket" would show up later.
Senator-candidate Paul indicated that he was against the part of the Civil Rights Act that requires businesses open to the public to be nondiscriminatory. This did nto make him a racist, he said, but a libertarian who was consistent about the supremacy of private property.
A Detroit Tigers pitcher had a perfect game taken away on a blown call by the first-base umpire. The Commissioner of Baseball did not choose to rectify the error. The rules did not provide for a way to correct the error, either. The international football tournament, the FIFA World Cup, also got underway.
More evidence of torture from the previous administration surfaced. The current administration continued to do jack shit about it. Furthermore, the Land War in Afghanistan officially ticked over to being longer than the one in Vietnam. Although there was a change in leadership as a Rolling Stone article candidly showed a general i ncharge who was openly contemptuous of the civilian leadership.
Back home, idiots protested the construction of a community center near the 11 September attack site because the community center would contain a prayer space for Muslims.
Sharron Angle won her primary to challenge the majority leader, Mr. Reid. Suffice to say, that contest became a whole lot more interesting at that point. Orly Taitz, Birther Queen, ran for Secretary of State in California. And Alan Greene, a person who had no interest at all past filing his candidacy, ended up winning the Democratic primary in South Carolina.
The Wikileaks scandal of many diplomatic cables was already in full swing by June, even though it wouldn't explode until later. Instead, we heard how PFC Bradley Manning was sold out to the FBI by someone claiming to be a journalist who took his information and made it into a mostly-redacted story.
The BP oil spill continued, with bonus obstruction from the company and others in denying access to the press, and with accounts that workers were being forced to clean up the toxic chemicals without uadequate protections. The company set up an escrow account to pay claims made against them, although there would be several delays in actually paying claims, even as the design was found to be unsafe and the haggling over just how much oil was let out would begin, because fines and royalties both depended on the amount leaked. A moratorium o ndomestic drilling was enacted, overturned, reenacted, and then eventually dropped later on.
Mr. Neil Gaiman became the first author to receive both the United Kingdom and the United States' highest honors for books published for children on the same book, The Graveyard Book.
We lost Rue McClanahan, actress, at 76, Gary Coleman, child star and building supervisor of the Avenue Q apartment complex, at 42, Robert Byrd, senator, at 92, and Edith Shain, a nurse who would be iconic based on a photo taken of servicemen returning from war, at 91,
Ah, and proms where the participants were wearing clothes made of duct tape, a marathon tennis match at Wimbledon that had to be called on account of darkness and resumed the next day, with the winner having won seventy games in the final set to secure the victory, and the decentenntial Census of the peoples.
----
"...You practice your mannerisms
Into the wall.
If this mirror were clearer,
I'd be standing so tall!
I saw you slobber over clovers
On the side of the hill.
I was observing the birds!
...circle in for the kill..."
July! Candidate Angle and candidate Paul continued to open their mouths and say interesting things, like how the unemployed are spoiled and should just go out and get any job they can rather than searching for a job with a salary that was comparable to their old job. This was despite the knowledge that the ratio of people looking for a job to available jobs was about 5:1. Mr. Corbett, running Pennsylvania, also made this claim. Both candidate Angle and candidate Paul were also in favor of replacing Social Security with a private system that would subject retirment income to the whims of stock market speculators and the crashes and booms of Wall Street. There were also remarks from Ms. Angle about "Second Amendment remedies" if she or other conservatives should lose their issues and electinos, and her belief that rape victims should be forced to carry children to term.
Activision rescinded a policy debuted in June that would have required the use of real names on the World of Warcraft forums and accounts.
An alleged ring of Russian Federation spies was exchanged with the Russian Federation for alleged United States spies after the ring was broken in June.
President Obama made a recess appointment, much to the consternation of the conservatives, to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.
Governor Brewer of Arizona claimed beheadings were going on in the borderlands, an utterly unsubstantiated claim. The Papers Please law was injuncted against, preventing its enforcement. Senator Kyl advocated for repealing the amendment to the Constitution that gives citizenship to all persons born in United States territory.
A disgraced propagandist, responsible for the Congressional defunding of the group ACORN (in something that looked suspiciously like a bill of attainder), cobbled together another selectively edited video and managed to get an employee of the Agriculture Department fired for appearing to have long-held racist views. When the truth came to light, an apology was issued and the employee reinstated. Said discraged propagandist became a thoroughly disgraced propagandist, and nobody should ever believe anything he or Andrew Brietbart says or does.
A Wikileaks release placed more than 90,000 documents, some marked secret, about the Land War in Afghanistan into the public eye.
The Dead Pool Diamond 9 needed a baseball manager, so they grabbed George Steinbrenner at 80 years, and thought he needed a friendly voice, so they took Bob Sheppard, the PA announcer for Yankee Stadium, at 99 years.
----
"...I've been you,
I know you,
Your facade is a scam!
You know, you're making me cry,
This is the way that I am!..."
August: It's only going to get more intense from here. After all, we've only got a few months before an election.
The court challenge to Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that officially defined "marriage" as a one man, one woman monogamous relationship, succeeded and the initiative was overturned
The mayor of New York defended the Park51 community center project against the people who claimed it would be a mosque built in victory to extremist Islam for the 11 September attacks.
A library director circumvented normal procedure to remove a book on queer teen voices after a follower of Glenn Beck gave her an excuse to.
The porno scanners were proven to have images stored, instead of deleted like they were supposed to be.
Elena Kagan was confirmed as the third female Supreme Court justice in history.
The press secretary indicated that liberals should be more appreciative of what the administration has done for them during their time in office. The problem was that, at this point in the year, many of the major liberal issues had no progress, had been bargained away for something else, were done only to a small degree instead of a proper one, or were being actively stalled.
A radio personality repeatedly used a derogatory term toward black people, and said that inter-racial couples should just get used to racism in their lives. She would apologize for using the word, but not for its context nor her insistence that racism is just a part of interracial relationships. She would eventually flounce from the radio scene entirely. And Sarah Palin would endorse all of her reasoning.
A conservative think tank would put out their blueprint for how to fix America, which looked particularly like they intended to do anything other than give tax cuts to the rich, cut social programs, and give the military all the money they wanted and more.
Right at the end of the month, Mr. Glenn Beck held a Rally to Restore the Honor of the United States by bringing together conservative and fringe people, many interested in preserving the superior position of white people, in the same place around the anniversary of when a black minister brought lots of people, liberal and conservative, together to restore the honor of the United States by stopping legalized discrimination against nonwhite people.
And at the very end, the official end of the Second Land War in Asia, even though several tens of thousands of troops will be in Iraq for a significant amount of time to come.
The Dead Pool claimed Ted Stevens, senator, in an airplane crash.
----
"...I've been living a lie.
A metamorphical scheme,
Detective undercover brotherhood
Objective: Obscene..."
And it's September! We were introduced to the "rocket docket", a court designed specifically to clear all the foreclosure cases in Florida, where despite serious flaws in their documentation and proof, retired judges brought back into service were rubberstamping foreclosures.
A court declared the military's policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell to be unconstitutional, although they did then stay that ruling, leaving gay and lesbian servicemen still able to be fired for having their orientation exposed. Elsewhere, Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta was awarded a Medal of Honor, the first to be awarded to a survivor of their scenario since the Vietnam conflict.
France passed a full-face-covering ban, one that disproprtionately affects Muslims, even though the law itself doesn't actually pick them out specifically.
Christine O'Donnell, she of the Junior Anti-Sex League and the Satanic Panic Party, won her primary election. So did Carl Paladino, he of racist, bestial, pornographic e-mails. O'Donnell would go on to be accused of campaign violations in using her donated funds to pay the rent on her primary residence, claim scientists were making mice with functioning human brains, and that the nickname "czar" was actually a violation of the Constitution, as it is a title of nobility.
The second sequence of neat benefits of the health care bill went into play here, letting kids stay on longer, dropping lifetime limits, pre-existing conditions, and dropping people from insurance when they got sick.
The beginnings of "austerity riots" began with protests in France over a decision to raise the retirement age in France. In various permutations, the protests agains austerity measures would roll all across Europe.
Pakistan closed a key supplyl route to Afghanistan in revenge for unmanned aerial strikes fro mthe United States violating their borders and killing their citizens.
The WisCon convention had to figure out what to do with a Guest of Honor, Elizabeth Moon, after said GoH made several anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim comments in her personal journal, and several of the potential attendees registered their displeasure with the statements.
The opposition party released their pledge of what they would do if they got back into power after the November elections. It looked a lot like giving tax cuts to the rich, rolling back the safety net, giving the military everything they wanted, and also trying to delay, stop, or roll back as much of what the first two years of this administration have tried to do, for the benefit of their rich and corporate overlords.
A spate of teen suicides based on bullying or the likelhood thereof brought the issue back into the national consciousness for a while, including the creation of the "It Gets Better" project, where a lot of famous individuals talked to LGBT teens and assured them that life gets better outside of their required schooling.
We lost someone very dear to a lot of hearts - George N. Parks, director of the University of Massachusettes Minutemen Marching Band and director of a very successful Drum Major Academy. He was traveling with his band in anticipation of a Saturday football performance. He was only 57 years old.
The Dead Pool also claimed Edwin Newman, NBC correspondent, at 91 years, and Tony Curtis, actor.
----
"...Do you hear the flibbity jibbity jibber jabber
With an oh my God I've got to get out of here or I'll have another
Word to sell
Another story to tell
Another timepiece ringing the bell
Do you hear the clock stop when you reach the end?
No!
You know it must be neverending
Comprehend if you can
But when you try to pretend to understand
You resemble a fool
Although you're only a man
So give it up and
Smile..."
One month to go! We saw the introduction of the Tea Party coloring book for children, hot on the heels of complaining that the President talking to schoolchildren was indoctrination.
Candidate Christine O'Donnell claimed she had secret knowledge about Chinese plans for America. Someone else tried that before, we remembered - claiming they had a clearance that not even the President had. The candidate would then go on to outdo herself by claiming that she was a witch during the Satanic Panic before turning to Christianity.Finally, one of her allies would make a stunt claim of paying money to anyone who could find the exact phrase "separation of church and state" in the written Constitution.
Candidate Paladino said he was open-minded but railed against QUILTBAG people "brainwash[ing]" children into thinking it's okay to be QUILTBAG. Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council, got to express his prejudices in the Washington Post and claim that teenagers committing suicide because QUILTBAG activists keep telling them that being QUILTBAG is notjust a choice that can be turned on or off at will, and so kids kill themselves because they despair about their perpetual sinful state and all the associated problems. To counter that idea, the It Gets Better project contains recordings from many individuals, famous and not famous, about how if you can get past required schooling, life gets better. Which it does. In Uganda, for example, they publish suspected QUILTBAG people and tell others to go kill them.
Candidate Angle claimed that government had been overturned and Sharia law reigned in two cities in the United States, as well as releasing an anti-Latino advertisement, portraying them all as illegal immigrants.
Candidate Miller railed against the social safety net that has kept several of the members of his family alive.
Progressives counter-rallied against the Glenn Beck rally, trying to show that there were just as many people committed to increasing honor through liberalism. Their politicians seemed less inclined to do so, deciding against the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security benefits.
A company that was at death's door just a year or two ago returned to giving political donations.
We met a man whose house burned down because he did not pay a surcharge for fire service, was unable to convince the fire fighters to put the house out for any sum of money, and was only there to basically make sure that the fire did not spread to other houses.
Fundamentalists of the Christian stripe got a sequence of poems about stem cells pulled and destroyed art because they considered it to portray a gay Jesus.
A Philadelphia pitcher continued his remarkable season by throwing a no-hitter in playoff baseball. I say continued because he had thrown a perfect game earlier on in the season. Mr. Halladay should be headed to the Hall just for that season.
We returned to the self-driving cars protoype for a bit, showing that they've progressed significantly since we saw them last.
Miners who were trapped in a mine collapse in Chile were finally lifted out after two months of being trapped, to everyone's relief.
The school that spied on its students using school-issued laptop cameras settled out of court.
Wikileaks made another major release of war-related documents.
Conservatives, who have benefitted far more from the Citizens United decision that allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on politics, repeatedly accused liberals of wanting disclosure so they could intimidate their enemies into silence and keeping their pocketbooks shut. While liberals continued to ask questions as to whether the U.S. Chamber of Commerce funneled foreign money into its political coffers, a claim that could not be proven or disproven because of shoddy bookkeeping practices and incomplete disclosure from the organization.
Their social counterparts unleashed a storm of ad-hominem and body-image attacks on Megan McCain because she decided to call candidate O'Donnell what she is - a nutter.
Elizabeth Moon was disinvited as a GoH for WisCon based on published anti-immigrant remarks.
Stewart/Colbert held the Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive at the end of the month to capture the segment that would neither be at the Beck rally or the Progressive one.
And the dance of the unemployment benefits expiing began anew.
And we lost Benoit Mandelbrot, mathematician, at 85, Tom Bosley, actor, at 83, and Robert Guccione, founder of Penthouse, at 79,
---
"...You understand
Mechanical hands
Are the ruler of everything
Ruler of everything
I'm the ruler of everything
In the end..."
Voting time right at the beginning of the month! After a week or two of a whisper campaign that liberals were deliberately registering people to vote fraudulently to increase their turnout numbers...
...the makeup of the Congress changed. Republicans received large gains, including taking the majority of the House of Rerpresentatives. Candidates O'Donnell, Angle, Miller, Whitman, Tancredo, and Paladino all failed in their bids, reducing the Tea Party power, but candidates Rubio, Rand Paul, and Brewer won their respective races, ensuring that at least some part of Tea Party vengeance will be felt for years. The conservative Democratic wing got whipped, becing replaced with persons farther to the right than them.
The Democrats could have done better had they run on how much they did get done, but the big things hanging over their head, like the economy's slugglish progress, were condemning them to minority status. The Republicans now have to deal with the hydra that is their base and the Tea Party politicians they elected. Considering their stated agenda, thoguh, is simply to deny the Democrats anything that might be helpful to their political aims, it may not be as much a Hydra for them to deal with as much as figuring out where to turn their Medusa and hope that there are no mirrors.
Oklahoma passed two initiatives, one to declare English the official state language, another to claim that no Oklahoma court could consider foriegn laws when deciding their judicial cases. (Which might have nixed the Torah and First Nations laws.) Michigan's attorney general was fired for conduct unbecoming after he singled out a gay teenager and attacked him with slurs and vitriol on work time. It seemed like the slurs and vitriol weren't really the problem, but that work time was used for it. How far we have come, right? And then there was the banning of Brave New World without having actually read it because the First Nations people were treated poorly in it...which was the intended Aesop.
The San Franscisco Giants captured the American baseball championship.The mayor of San Fanscisco vetoed a bill that would have prevented Happy Meals from continuing to exist, because they would not meet nutrition and health standards for a meal that came with a toy.
The National Novel Writing month kicked off, and all of its cousins, like National Blog Posting Month.
Iraq's parliament finally formed a government, with each of the three major parties getting an important ministerial seat.
Taibbi took us inside the "rocket docket", or how mortgage servicers and banks are using retired judges to legitimize their paperwork-missing, robo-signed, not-really-theirs foreclosures on houses. It may be a practice started all the way back in college, as a professional paper-writer tipped his hat anonymously and pointed out the flaw in education that cares more about grades than learning.
Lots of people got Kinect, a peripheral that can be used to play games or to develop gestural interfaces for computers and other devices.
The Transportation Security Administration continued to be the subject of ridicule for the terahertz backscatter machines and pat-down procedures for those who refuse to pass through them, to the point where the head of the airline pilots union suggested all of them opt-out for private pat-downs rather than be subjected to the scanners. Commentators of all stripes suggested that security theater be replaced by actual effective techniques, like those used in Israel.
The President continued to say he was for the rule of law, despite Congress cutting off his avenues to actually demonstrate a commitment to it, and despite his own repeated usage of expanded executive powers, and despite the bipartisan consensus in the government to ensure no investigations were ever made into the lawless activities of the previous administration.
Mr. Emanuel resigned his position as chief of staff for the White House and announced his candidacy for mayor of Chicago. In something that is not ironic but is under the jurisdiction of what people normally use "ironic" for, a Daley would be picked to replace him.
A first-grade girl was picked on by her classmates for showing an interest in Star Wars. The women who work on the Star Wars franchise, as well as women and men everywhere who were fans, left messages of encouragement and hope - and donated a few physical objects - to take their stand against the beginning of gender-role bullying and crush it before it blossomed any further. Elsewhere, a Downs student was forcibly removed from a class because the instructor had gotten tired of having her in the class. He then claimed the student was a disruption to the other students. The students got together and protested that the Downs student was not any sort of disruption to them at all. The administration ignored them and removed the student anyway.
The first civilian trial of a Guantanamo Bay resident ended in a conviction that carried a 20-to-life sentence. Conservatives were completely up in arms about it because the other 280 counts were acquittals, and moved as s wiftly as they could to prevent anyone else from being tried in a civilian court in the United States because they felt the possibility of a full acquittal was just too risky to be allowed.
The awarding of the first Medal of Honor to someone who survived the thing they were given the award for resulted in criticism claiming the medal had been "feminized" for being awarded based on valor that saved lives, instead of on someone who racked up a kill streak. Elsewhere, the publishers of a NIV-based Bible were convinced by a small and vocal minority of fundamentalists to change their gender-neutral terms back to explicitly male ones.
At the end of the month, Wikileaks released as ignificant portion of the 250,000 diplomatic cable archive allegedly given to them by PFC Bradley Manning. The storm that follows would consume much of the next month. More on that then.
In the continual fight over unemployment benefits, the Congressional Budget Office crunched numbers and reported that tax cuts for the rich are some of the worst stimulative actions a government could take, and that unemployment benefit extensions were one of the best.
Last, the Defense Department released its report that indicated the branches of service would be unaffected, in terms of being able to do their jobs, by the repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.
Finally, in this month George "Sparky" Anderson, manager of the Cincinatti Reds and Detroit Tigers baseball organizations, died at 76, Theodore Kheel, major negotiator, ran out of steam at 96, Margaret T. Burroughs, museum founder, became a part of history at 95, and Leslie Nielsen, actor and comedian, auditioned for his role in the Dead Pool production company at 84 years.
---
"...Without looking down,
Gliding around,
Like a bumbling dragon I fly,
Scraping my face on the sky..."
One last month. And a lot still to be done. The Wikileaks release prompted an imediate firestorm and concerted efforts from governments to brand the organization and its founder as traitors, terrorists, and The Enemy and to prevent their information from being hosted on various servers. The United States military forbade access to the site on any computer that was unsecured as a violation of procedure regarding secret information. Commentators called for the founder, his sources, and anyone else associated with the site to be executed as a deterrent to anyone else choosing the same path, and to protect the National Security State that routinely decides far too many things should be Secret. Anyonmous got involved. Mirrors sprang up, were taken down, and sprang up again. And the data in the cables revealed a lot of really bad things going on in the name of the United States.
The founder, Mr. Assange, was detained on an arrest warrant regard charges of rape filed against him in Sweden, which prompted reactions ranging from "it's a political ploy" to "he needs to face those charges, instead of getting away from them because he's rich and famous and nobody believes women."
The vaunted Government Death Panels appeared. In Arizona, under a Republican governor, who decided that $5 million USD should be pulled from a program meant to help low-income people get organ transplants, despite the actual budget of the state, and the hole in its finances, being many times that amount.
The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell was first stalled when the entire Defense Authorization Bill was subjected to the filibuster and Tarantino'd, then resurrected as a standalone bill, which passed both houses an went to the President to be signed. The cheering group for that signing ceremony was so large they had to change the venue to accomodate all of them. Conservatives railed against the decision, liberals praised it.
A package deal of tax cuts for the middle class, which made sense, and tax cuts for the richest, which did not, passed in the lame-duck session, making everyone mad that they didn't get their way the way they wanted it, and making sure there was still plenty of deficit spending in the future.
The actual budget, however, was Tarantino'd.
The DREAM Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for those in the United States illegally, was Tarantino'd because the opposition believes anything intended to bring those people into the light is "amnesty" and the best those people deserve is deportation.
A bill to help the first responders of the 11 September attacks died, zombified, and then came back to life again in the lame duck session, getting signed into law.
A food safety bill passed.
So did the new START arms reduction treaty.
All in all, the lame duck session was far more productive than the rest of the two years before it, and all it took was a threat to work through the holidays to get stuff done. Perhaps in retaliation, a Congressperson said they would introduce a bill forbidding Congress from holding another lame-duck session from there on out.
The city of Tokyo passed an ordinance that would restrict the sales of any material, but mostly manga, that was considered unhealthy for children. The United Kingdom went one further and pre-emptively blocked any website they considered pornographic, requiring adults to call their ISPs and request unfiltered Internet access to receive it.
The UK also cut all the funding for their programme to put books in the hands of children at key points in their life.
The health care bill saw its first "unconstitutional" ruling to stack up against the ones that had ruled portions of it, including the individual insurance mandate, constitutional.
The War on Christmas returned, although at lower intensity than usual and with fewer salvos fired. Thankfully. Although there were still some stupid things said, and there was at least one column that was supposed to be crowing about how much more generous conservatives are to private charities...that relied entirely on their percentages being bigger, and not necessarily their actual dollar amounts.
In the middle of the month, a study was released that said the more you were exposed to Fox News programming, the more misinformed you were. Later on, many publications took offense to reporting that pointed out their deliberate attempts to manipulate narrative and framing and called some of their talkig points outright lies.
Iraq swore in a government, several months after the actual elections. Venezuela's puppet parliament passed a law allowing Hugo Chavez to rule by decree for 18 months.
A lunar eclipse happened close to the Vague Early Winter Possibly Religious Festival, for which all the Prinnies sang. Ah, and we discovered another ring of Saturn, ways to make cell phone service undeniably cheap, and that placebo effect might be just what someone needs to get outof depression. We also found out that e-mail is actually a private communication, according to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and thus requires a warrant. Kodachrome will no longer be developed after the end of the year.
And the last Dead Pool of the year claimed Elizabeth Edwards, cancer survivor, staunch advocate, and lawyer, at 61 years of age, Richard Holbrooke, uber-diplomat, at 69, Blake Edwards, film-maker and director, at 88, Fred Hargesheimer, pilot who made good on a promise, at 94 years, and Geraldine Hoff, inspiration for Rosie the Riveter, at 86 years of age.
--------
"...In the gallows, or the ghetto,
In the town, or the meadow
In the billows
Even over the sun
Every end of a time
Is another begun..."
That was 2010. A ride, to be sure, with a lot of things happening in it. The amount of data processed into bite-size chunks was probably pretty immense, and then having to compress further and determine where the major media narratives were was definitely an interesting exercise. I'm beginning to think I need to start tagging, somehow, or find someone who actually wants to tag posts with descriptive items, or finding some manner in which I can know which places to return to when I want to put the next one of these together. Either that, or I need to start constructing these as they actually happen, over the course of the year.
Elsewhere, the prospect of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives means there will be great opportunities for working together, for partisan squabbling, for hilarity, for symbolism, for getting momentum built for 2012, for opportunities, and for us to see whether they actually had a plan all this time or were faking it. The Senate can continue on its dysfunctional path or it can decide to get its act together and start passing, or at least getting to up-or-down votes on, legislation.
The President still has time on his first term to try and show that he's still the centrist that people elected, to move to the left or the right in a bid to capture certain bases and try to appeal to the center, to repudiate the lawlessness of the previous administration (or to try and extend that attitude further), and to try and make good on his campaign promises in ways that make sense and that will be helpful to us regular folks. It's an "off" year, in the sense that there are no elections to posture for, but the race for the election in 2012 has already begun, so we may not see any sort of rest from campaign-style rhetoric.
The world around will turn. The Land Wars in Asia will continue, although one is scheduled to finally come to a stop. Globalization and internationalization will continue to ship jobs away from high wages to low, values and shortfalls in government revenue will mean decisions painful to the citizens, although not to those who craft them, libraries will continue to be shut down or rolled back due to lack of funding, and the Forces of Censorship will attack anywhere their demagogues say to concentrate their energies.
We will get older, and more people that we know, famous and otherwise, will die. We will hopefully get closer to the day when we can decide when we're ready to go, instead of being forced out by the ravages of time. New life will appear, full of potential.
But for now, we made it to another year without prematurely ending the human experiment. Here's to many more.
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