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The Year That Was: 2009
Jan. 16th, 2010 04:44 pmThis year has been a year of changes. The one constant of the universe is that everything changes. People die, people are born. Relationships begin and end, careers finish and begin, and the Wheel of the Year continues its turn. Whether you think the Wheel is perpetual-motion or powered only by our striving, it certainly hasn't come anywhere close to stopping. It may have even sped up some on me. Despite that, there were only a few strong events in my personal life, or at least strong enough to have made an impression by this time of year.
January opened fresh with the news that eight years of the previous administrator were coming to an end. The result of the historic election (and it was going to be that way, regardless of who won) had tapped a man of dark skin color to be the President of the United States. What we didn't know was what was yet to come. Middle East violence, both of our own making and of others making against each other, was still in the news this month and would stay that way for a very long time. Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan would stay the focus in various strengths at various times through the year. The economy was still in the tank, housing was still crashing, unemployment was still going up, but hey, new person at the helm, maybe they can right the sinking ship.
Those attempts shook themselves out into a few specific areas for the fight - health care, which we were hoping would resolve quickly, but hasn't, an economic stimulus, which there is still debate about the effectiveness of, matters on climate, the environment, and the economy, and a set of foriegn policy proclamations intended to bring america away from the isolationist camp back into participating in the world's affairs. And then, off in the fringe somewhere, were the accusations that the President has a socialist plan for America, that he is somehow the Antichrist, a tyrant, and, *gasp* a liberal. We'll get to the really big whoppers in time, but the point to recall is that the Republicans entrenched themselves even this early on as the opposition that would approve of nothing, supported by conservative personalities and elements that would, at times, make the Republicans look like concessionary moderates and well-spoken intellectuals. Who took Fox News as their standard of objective journalism, and cheered the Republican tactic of delaying everything for as long as possible.
January also made a hero out of Captain Sullenberger, for making a successful water landing after both of his engines failed soon after takeoff, and his crew, for getting everyone off the plane safely without injury or fatality.
After such a thrilling first month, February had high standards to live up to. There were ongoing detail revelations in pastor sex scandals, the stimulus bill passed and was signed into law, where it would fade into the background, excepting when someone wanted to make a point about hwo ineffective it was. The matter of TARP funds and their uses would rise up, because people are understandably chuffed when their tax dollars pay an incompetent executive's annual bonus.
February also had the beginnings of the sneaking suspicion that the current President was not all he was elected to be, especally on issues of executive power and secrecy, Blackwater changed its name to avoid scrutiny, and the first of many race-charged events happened when the Attorney General declared the country basically cowards on the issues of race. Furthermore, the GOP in exile still seemed to be abdicating its leadership to the right wing talk radio pundits, letting them dictate policy instead of the RNC or other official organizations.
We also got treated to Governor F-Word and his scandalous scandals of selling a Senate seat, coarse language, wild hair and all.
March came to us riding a wave of... something. The beginning signs of the health care debate to come, climate change and carbon taxes beginning to enter the fray (so we're now juggling three different chainsaws, with the occasional resurgence of the fourth one already supposedly put down), and the naissance of the Tea Party movement, originally conceived to be a protest on April 15, and which became far more powerful than anyone imagined. GM and other automakers were wobbling, but not falling down yet. And of course, there was the general undercurrent of "Iran's getting nuclear weapons and extremist Muslims are infiltrating everywhere to turn us into a Muslim country." The economy was a mixture of stimulus spending and TARP money and there were calls for bigger oversight of Wall Street and banks and calls for even less oversight of Wall Street and the banks. (Continue to remember, too, that a non-insignificant portion of the opposition beleived the President was a socialist bent on turning America into the United Kingdom.)
The big thing was that it looked like the Obama Administration was going to get serious about investigating the allegations of torture happening under the previous administrator's watch. As we now know, that idea popped like a soap bubble, but not without a lot of heat generated about the partisan witch-hunt that was happening. Despite the laws requiring the investigation of those allegations as far as they would go. Instead, it would all get swept under the rug, even as successively more damning evidence arrived, like torture memos in April, which ignited a storm of "the ends justifies the means" justifications and conveniently ignored that the U.S., as a signatory to the Convention on Torture, is obligated to investigate and prosecute allegations, the revelation of briefings of Congress in May (with some discussion about whether the CIA was entirely truthful in their briefings), one of the big witnesses/persons in the torture case saying he lied to stop the torture (in June), the discovery of a program the CIA was ordered to keep secret, even as it would turn out to have never gotten off the ground,
April had big things, too. A flap over the pro-choice president going to the Catholic universtiy as the commencement speaker, the beginnings of what would become an ACORN investigation and condemnation that would ultimately turn out to be done out of spite instead of for any real reason. The war dead could be seen again, if the families wished it, even as the pressure continued to not accurately diagnose those coming back with dsorders. The Tea Party adopted the nickname "teabaggers" as their grouping moniker, much to the snickering of the rest of us, followed by NOM's 2M4M, the birthers were still around, although they were not yet the prominent voice that later time would give them (even as they were darlings of the fringe ever since they appeared), Al Franken was declared the winner in the November 2008 Senate race, starting the appeals process, and a memorandum went out and was recalled from DHS that said we were growing our own terror cells, and that they would take an interest in veterans because vets had combat skills.
Oh, and there was Carrie Prejean. She of opposite marriage sparked another massive debate, after we'd just gotten through the Proposition 8 fiasco, and so homosexuals continued to be part of the national conversation for a while.
Professionally speaking, the big thing was the new Consumer Product Safety Regulations, which could have required all books in the library to be tested for lead levels before they could be safely returned to them. At great cost and expense. And the scratching of heads that said "Books are not major sources of lead, y'know."
But we survived to May.
I went to Anime Central and had a very fine time with the JAMS crew as we did our best to soak up nostalgia from the American attempt at tokusatsu, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
After a defection in April, and the final certification of Al Franken this month, the Democratic caucus had sixty of one hundred votes in the Senate, assuming everyone voted the party line. The President made noise that he might actually do something about the way the banks were handling their TARP money, H1N1 arrived on the scene as the flu of choice this season, a new Supreme Court justice nominee was attacked for a single remark, "empathy", and for being a woman and a minority, instead of trying to take issue with her judicial record and career (she beat the rap and was confirmed), the boss of the Republican Party (no, not Mr. Steele) challenged his detractors to go thirty days without him, figuring they were feeding off his fame, and got middle fingers all around in response, the death of Doctor George Tiller, killed by a domestic terrorist, and the Republican Party almost passed a resolution declaring the Democratic Party should change its name to the Democrat Socialist Party.
Thus, June. Professionally speaking, June was the start of summer and Summer Reading, which meant school visits, stickers, prizes, and the best insanity there ever is, continuing for three months or so. Elsewhere, in West Bend, WI, four nuts demanded the removal and public burning of Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be Bop as well as $120,000 to cover their pain and suffering at having been exposed to such a book.
We also tossed in our lot with the Dreamwidth Studios beta release of their Livejournal code fork, and we've been pleasantly satisfied with what has been available so far. The only major difficulty we have is that we cannot yet aggregate our LJ friends and our DW circle onto the same reading page, which would simply be awesome.
There were still big rumors that Israel would strike against Iran's nuclear facilities and precipitate an international realtions disaster in June. And then, elections happened, elections were disputed, and protests broke out in the country. That certainly put the rumors of nuking Iran on hold, at least until the protest resolves itself one way or another. Twitter suddenly became a news outlet with dispatches and updates and information, and YouTube delivered video content.
There was the first mention of prayers to kill President Obama (which would continue on), "public option" was currently the talk of the health care debate, and would continue to be so through the end of the year, Al Franken was finally declared the winner after the appeals process, and a reversal on a firefighters promotion test that was thrown out because minorities did not score well on it and they were worried civil rights lawsuits would follow. The news cycle was never dull, although it could be repetitive at times.
We're past the halfway point in July, and the major holiday and my birthday happened. Another year older, another year more experienced. Have no idea whether any wisdom came with that year. Some entertainment value from the indiscretions of a Governor, gone to Argentina without telling anyone where he was, and then getting busted as he arrived back, who followed on the heels of indiscretions of a Senator, who employed the mistress and her husband, then fired them, and then attempted to get his family to pay them off. Failed Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin became failed Governor of Alaska, resigning her post to join the 101st Fighting Keyboarders and tour the lecture circuit (also, to have a book at least partially ghostwritten published). A riot went off in China, where an ethnic minority rose up in protest and the Chinese government moved swiftly to stomp them back down so they could pretend nothing happened. The actual hearings of Sonia Sotomayor happened, a day camp of black children went to a poor at a club and were refused entry, because the club members were apparently concerned that black children were getting into the apparently whites-only pool, the White Sox sent twenty-seven men down in order, issuing no bases on balls nor allowing any hits in the process, Jon Stewart, of the Daily Show, a satirist, was named the most trusted newsman in America, and the conservative side of the aisle made mountains out of molehills from a remark the President made about the stupid actions of a policeman. There would eventually have to be beer at the White House before those conservatives would shut up and stop distorting the facts to their advantage.
We're not even at the fun point yet. Congress took their traditional break for August, and boy was it a doozy! The Lie of the year appeared in full force - Death Panels! There were tea party type protests, claiming everything from Socialism! to Naziism! and more. Birthers, Deathers, teabaggers, and big, big lies. This was the background of the Congressional recess, an attempt to prevent the dissemination of real information, any sort of productive conversation, and to give the appearance that the whole country was against the idea of passing health care reform.
Additionally, the program intended to get people to buy more fuel efficient vehicles received a second infusion of cash after wild success, the Iran protest movement retreated for a little bit when Ahmadinejad was certified as the winner after a recount, and he took the oath of office, Sonia Sotomayor took office as a Supreme Court Associate Justice, Megan McCain was a brief flash of optimism for the Republican Party before they were once against totally swallowed by the teabagger menace, someone accused the UK's NHS of wanting to kill Stephen Hawking and thus snuff out a brilliant mind, only to be reminded that Stephen Hawking has been under the care of the NHS as a UK citizen for his entire life, disney bought Marvel, and there were a couple rumblings that there might be actual prosecution of torture, but those were just rumblings.
That, and I sat through the entire Ring opera, all four parts. There was a lot of good singing - the staging wasn't quite as good, and the story took four nights to tell what it could have done in two. Not to mention how many times the story could have come to a successful conclusion and it didn't, apparently because of the corrupting power of the ring.
September brought with it a cry of "socialist plot to indoctrinate the youth of America!" based on the supplemental materials the Department of Ed was going to distribute to help students get context and questions out of an Obama speech on the merits of education, The Republican Party having to defend government-run healthcare as they campaigned against the possibility of government-run healthcare, contractors in Afghanistan taking pictures of doing alcohol shots off each other's rectums, a teabagger-heavy (and wildly inflated, in terms of attendance numbers repeated by conservatives) movement attempting to capitalize on 9/11 while hiding behind Glenn Beck's cover of values and norms creating a 9/12 rally, "You lie!" shouted at a sitting President while he addressed Congress, and a former President saying opposition to the current was was founded mostly in racism, an ur-conservative awarding an entrepreneur award to a gentleman's club in exchange for a donation, which was promptly refunded and the award rescinded once the conservative found out what type of establishment he had just supported, the stripping of ACORN on trumped up charges and heavily-doctored video that needed multiple tries before the footage they wanted was obtained, announcement that there is actually water on Luna...
...and Operation Iraqi Baseball, where American sport companies and regular people donated and outfitted the entire Iraqi national baseball team with appropriate gear. That, and Banned Books Week, celebrating the freedom we have to seek forbidden lore in spite of all the people who think that lore should be forbidden. Yes, that means me, too.
October began with some acceleration. My personal life took a big and major step forward, of which I'm not sure I've felt all the consequences of yet, but so far, I seem to be on reasonably stable ground. My work life braced for impact as the system found it had to shed more than $1 million of budget, which it did through efficiencies, early retirement buyouts, and layoffs. Mostly buyouts and layoffs, because people are always expensive. This put a lot of people on edge, because contract negotiations and other actions meant accurate information was scarce, and what little there was wasn't forthcoming at all.
Elsewhere, Sarah Palin published a book, Rio de Janerio became the site for the 2016 Summer games, and the right wing here had orgasms over the knowledge that Chicago was eliminted in the first round of balloting, and then they had inflamed ranting when the President was named the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, the beginnings of the Conservative Bible, which is fairly oxymoronic, yes, 30 Republicans voting against an amendment that defunded feeral contractors that prevented their employees from taking sexual harrassment cases to court, the ramming of Luna with a missile to analyze what sort of elements and water content was available there, a Raplh Lauren model first suffering a Photoshop Disaster, then being fired by the company when she complained about how unrealistic she looked, a judge's unwillingness to marry interracial couples, which reulted in his eventual resignation, the Matthew Shepard Act signed into law, the committees finally all managed to pass out variations on their health care bills, and a mainstream Republican candidate quit a race over being accused of not being conservative enough and was "replaced" in the race by the Teabagger party candidate, an act that would eventually elect a Democrat in November to a seat that hadn't been Democratic for more than a century.
So yeah, we did to that voting thing in November. Washington went all-but-marriage while Maine stumbled at the end and fell down, and there were lots of school and library issues (we got an annexation) as well as local offices and initiatives. Carrie Prejean rather swiftly dropped from the limelight after tapes of her engaged in premarital self-sex emerged, the House of Representatives passed their version of health care, a shooting on a military base, the economy still continuing its sluggish movement while Wall Street executives continued to rake in giant bonuses, more disillusionment of the people who thought the President was a liberal, as he argued in favor of warrantless wiretaps, libary workers fired for flagrant violations of patron privacy and intellectual freedom, suspects in the 11 September attacks were scheduled to be tried in civilian courts (yes, that's eight years after they were involved in the attacks), the Iranian protesters revived with a vengeance, a Bible verse was put to potenially dark purposes, a hacker released e-mails that, out of context, made it look like climate change scientists were deliberately trying to cover up opposing viewpoints, and we all tapped our feet impatiently waiting for the Senate to Do Something on their health care bill.
Last month, but no signs of slowing! The e-mails previous preceded a climate change conference in Copenhagen happening later on in December, the President sent an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan while providing a target draw-down date, escalating a war many had hoped he would end swiftly, the marriage of a three-dimensional and a two-dimensional character, the first appearance of the "kill the gays" bill in Uganda, the apparance of what was originally SpaceShipTwo, now christened Enterprise, the President's Nobel acceptance speech, a terrorist almost when an underpants bomb fizzled instead of exploding, and the abandonment of the public option in favor of extending Medicare benefits so that 55 was the minimum age, which in turn was abandoned for an individual mandate to buy insurance without any sort of serious cost control or competition for a bill that stayed in debate all the way to the 24th of December before finally passing out of the Senate chamber, limping, ragged of breath, and with sucking wounds to several of its major organs. There was also much complaint over a stage performance by Adam Lambert, mostly over the idea that children might be watching a late night music show and thus have their parents offended by displays of mock sexual acts and possible S&M-themed displays.
...Really, at the end of the year, we're all waiting for the Democrats and the President to make good on their major campaign promises. They may even have to accelerate the process, with midterm elections appearing, which might shake some of their members from the rolls. One can always hope that actual liberals get elected in significant numbers, but we'd settle for the Democrats behaving like the liberal party. Otherwise, their sinking numbers will only continue. Not that the other party is experiencing a resurgence - the only people who might be gaining popularity are the teabaggers. And most sane people I know feel that giving those kinds of teabaggers any sort of real power or influence would be a serious mistake.
And then there was the Dead Pool - Khan/Mr. Roarke, Number Six, the suit actor for the robot from Lost in Space, John Updike, Paul Harvey, prominent and helpful librarians, The Host (from Angel), Marilyn Chambers (Behind the Green Door), Sir Clement Freud (Just A Minute), Judith Krug (ALA OIF director), Bea Arthur, Jack Kemp, Dom DeLuise, Hugh Van Es (iconic photographer), George Tiller, David Carradine, Ed McMahon, Michael Jackson, Farah Fawcett, Billy Mays (still selling products even though he's dead), Robert S. McNamara, Oscar Meyer, Walter Cronkite, Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes), John Hughes (Breakfast Club), Les Paul, Eunice Kennedy Shriver (founder of the Special Olympics), Robert Novak, Don Hewitt (creator of 60 Minutes), Senator Edward Kennedy, Reading Rainbow, Norman Barloug (high-yield crops), Patrick Swayze, Irving Kristol, Mary Travers, Henry Gibson, Peg Mullen (antiwar activist), Captain Lou Albano (wrestler and Mario), Soupy Sales, Mac Tonnies, Geocities, and Oral Roberts all went to their final rest. It always seems like the list gets bigger every year.
Against that stream of the dead, though, the Century of the Fruitbat took control - Sweden, Iowa, Vermont, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, the District of Columbia, Argentina, all legalized homosexual marriage or domestic partnership. Maine's already-legal marriages were then put to a ballot question and then repealed. California's killer Proposition 8 was upheld, although all the people who rushed to get married are still married, and all their domestic partnerships are still completely valid. Washington state survived a challenge to their domestic partnerships, and it became all-but-the-word, basically. New York tried for homosexual marriage...and failed. Don't Ask, Don't Tell continued to fire qualified military personnel for being gay, India finally decriminalized homosexual acts, the Episcopalian Church said homosexuals could be ordained as ministers, while at the end of the year, Uganda introduced a bill that would kill known practicing homosexuals with HIV and levy stiff fines on those who knew where homosexuals were and didn't report them, and there were possible ties between that bill and American evangelists, who since came out against that bill.
At the end, though, whether we believe in the Decade of the Big Zero or a whole lot of fibs, from the beginning onward, this year has been most interesting to watch. The next year promises to be at least as good, if not better in some ways. (And likely worse in others.)
January opened fresh with the news that eight years of the previous administrator were coming to an end. The result of the historic election (and it was going to be that way, regardless of who won) had tapped a man of dark skin color to be the President of the United States. What we didn't know was what was yet to come. Middle East violence, both of our own making and of others making against each other, was still in the news this month and would stay that way for a very long time. Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan would stay the focus in various strengths at various times through the year. The economy was still in the tank, housing was still crashing, unemployment was still going up, but hey, new person at the helm, maybe they can right the sinking ship.
Those attempts shook themselves out into a few specific areas for the fight - health care, which we were hoping would resolve quickly, but hasn't, an economic stimulus, which there is still debate about the effectiveness of, matters on climate, the environment, and the economy, and a set of foriegn policy proclamations intended to bring america away from the isolationist camp back into participating in the world's affairs. And then, off in the fringe somewhere, were the accusations that the President has a socialist plan for America, that he is somehow the Antichrist, a tyrant, and, *gasp* a liberal. We'll get to the really big whoppers in time, but the point to recall is that the Republicans entrenched themselves even this early on as the opposition that would approve of nothing, supported by conservative personalities and elements that would, at times, make the Republicans look like concessionary moderates and well-spoken intellectuals. Who took Fox News as their standard of objective journalism, and cheered the Republican tactic of delaying everything for as long as possible.
January also made a hero out of Captain Sullenberger, for making a successful water landing after both of his engines failed soon after takeoff, and his crew, for getting everyone off the plane safely without injury or fatality.
After such a thrilling first month, February had high standards to live up to. There were ongoing detail revelations in pastor sex scandals, the stimulus bill passed and was signed into law, where it would fade into the background, excepting when someone wanted to make a point about hwo ineffective it was. The matter of TARP funds and their uses would rise up, because people are understandably chuffed when their tax dollars pay an incompetent executive's annual bonus.
February also had the beginnings of the sneaking suspicion that the current President was not all he was elected to be, especally on issues of executive power and secrecy, Blackwater changed its name to avoid scrutiny, and the first of many race-charged events happened when the Attorney General declared the country basically cowards on the issues of race. Furthermore, the GOP in exile still seemed to be abdicating its leadership to the right wing talk radio pundits, letting them dictate policy instead of the RNC or other official organizations.
We also got treated to Governor F-Word and his scandalous scandals of selling a Senate seat, coarse language, wild hair and all.
March came to us riding a wave of... something. The beginning signs of the health care debate to come, climate change and carbon taxes beginning to enter the fray (so we're now juggling three different chainsaws, with the occasional resurgence of the fourth one already supposedly put down), and the naissance of the Tea Party movement, originally conceived to be a protest on April 15, and which became far more powerful than anyone imagined. GM and other automakers were wobbling, but not falling down yet. And of course, there was the general undercurrent of "Iran's getting nuclear weapons and extremist Muslims are infiltrating everywhere to turn us into a Muslim country." The economy was a mixture of stimulus spending and TARP money and there were calls for bigger oversight of Wall Street and banks and calls for even less oversight of Wall Street and the banks. (Continue to remember, too, that a non-insignificant portion of the opposition beleived the President was a socialist bent on turning America into the United Kingdom.)
The big thing was that it looked like the Obama Administration was going to get serious about investigating the allegations of torture happening under the previous administrator's watch. As we now know, that idea popped like a soap bubble, but not without a lot of heat generated about the partisan witch-hunt that was happening. Despite the laws requiring the investigation of those allegations as far as they would go. Instead, it would all get swept under the rug, even as successively more damning evidence arrived, like torture memos in April, which ignited a storm of "the ends justifies the means" justifications and conveniently ignored that the U.S., as a signatory to the Convention on Torture, is obligated to investigate and prosecute allegations, the revelation of briefings of Congress in May (with some discussion about whether the CIA was entirely truthful in their briefings), one of the big witnesses/persons in the torture case saying he lied to stop the torture (in June), the discovery of a program the CIA was ordered to keep secret, even as it would turn out to have never gotten off the ground,
April had big things, too. A flap over the pro-choice president going to the Catholic universtiy as the commencement speaker, the beginnings of what would become an ACORN investigation and condemnation that would ultimately turn out to be done out of spite instead of for any real reason. The war dead could be seen again, if the families wished it, even as the pressure continued to not accurately diagnose those coming back with dsorders. The Tea Party adopted the nickname "teabaggers" as their grouping moniker, much to the snickering of the rest of us, followed by NOM's 2M4M, the birthers were still around, although they were not yet the prominent voice that later time would give them (even as they were darlings of the fringe ever since they appeared), Al Franken was declared the winner in the November 2008 Senate race, starting the appeals process, and a memorandum went out and was recalled from DHS that said we were growing our own terror cells, and that they would take an interest in veterans because vets had combat skills.
Oh, and there was Carrie Prejean. She of opposite marriage sparked another massive debate, after we'd just gotten through the Proposition 8 fiasco, and so homosexuals continued to be part of the national conversation for a while.
Professionally speaking, the big thing was the new Consumer Product Safety Regulations, which could have required all books in the library to be tested for lead levels before they could be safely returned to them. At great cost and expense. And the scratching of heads that said "Books are not major sources of lead, y'know."
But we survived to May.
I went to Anime Central and had a very fine time with the JAMS crew as we did our best to soak up nostalgia from the American attempt at tokusatsu, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
After a defection in April, and the final certification of Al Franken this month, the Democratic caucus had sixty of one hundred votes in the Senate, assuming everyone voted the party line. The President made noise that he might actually do something about the way the banks were handling their TARP money, H1N1 arrived on the scene as the flu of choice this season, a new Supreme Court justice nominee was attacked for a single remark, "empathy", and for being a woman and a minority, instead of trying to take issue with her judicial record and career (she beat the rap and was confirmed), the boss of the Republican Party (no, not Mr. Steele) challenged his detractors to go thirty days without him, figuring they were feeding off his fame, and got middle fingers all around in response, the death of Doctor George Tiller, killed by a domestic terrorist, and the Republican Party almost passed a resolution declaring the Democratic Party should change its name to the Democrat Socialist Party.
Thus, June. Professionally speaking, June was the start of summer and Summer Reading, which meant school visits, stickers, prizes, and the best insanity there ever is, continuing for three months or so. Elsewhere, in West Bend, WI, four nuts demanded the removal and public burning of Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be Bop as well as $120,000 to cover their pain and suffering at having been exposed to such a book.
We also tossed in our lot with the Dreamwidth Studios beta release of their Livejournal code fork, and we've been pleasantly satisfied with what has been available so far. The only major difficulty we have is that we cannot yet aggregate our LJ friends and our DW circle onto the same reading page, which would simply be awesome.
There were still big rumors that Israel would strike against Iran's nuclear facilities and precipitate an international realtions disaster in June. And then, elections happened, elections were disputed, and protests broke out in the country. That certainly put the rumors of nuking Iran on hold, at least until the protest resolves itself one way or another. Twitter suddenly became a news outlet with dispatches and updates and information, and YouTube delivered video content.
There was the first mention of prayers to kill President Obama (which would continue on), "public option" was currently the talk of the health care debate, and would continue to be so through the end of the year, Al Franken was finally declared the winner after the appeals process, and a reversal on a firefighters promotion test that was thrown out because minorities did not score well on it and they were worried civil rights lawsuits would follow. The news cycle was never dull, although it could be repetitive at times.
We're past the halfway point in July, and the major holiday and my birthday happened. Another year older, another year more experienced. Have no idea whether any wisdom came with that year. Some entertainment value from the indiscretions of a Governor, gone to Argentina without telling anyone where he was, and then getting busted as he arrived back, who followed on the heels of indiscretions of a Senator, who employed the mistress and her husband, then fired them, and then attempted to get his family to pay them off. Failed Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin became failed Governor of Alaska, resigning her post to join the 101st Fighting Keyboarders and tour the lecture circuit (also, to have a book at least partially ghostwritten published). A riot went off in China, where an ethnic minority rose up in protest and the Chinese government moved swiftly to stomp them back down so they could pretend nothing happened. The actual hearings of Sonia Sotomayor happened, a day camp of black children went to a poor at a club and were refused entry, because the club members were apparently concerned that black children were getting into the apparently whites-only pool, the White Sox sent twenty-seven men down in order, issuing no bases on balls nor allowing any hits in the process, Jon Stewart, of the Daily Show, a satirist, was named the most trusted newsman in America, and the conservative side of the aisle made mountains out of molehills from a remark the President made about the stupid actions of a policeman. There would eventually have to be beer at the White House before those conservatives would shut up and stop distorting the facts to their advantage.
We're not even at the fun point yet. Congress took their traditional break for August, and boy was it a doozy! The Lie of the year appeared in full force - Death Panels! There were tea party type protests, claiming everything from Socialism! to Naziism! and more. Birthers, Deathers, teabaggers, and big, big lies. This was the background of the Congressional recess, an attempt to prevent the dissemination of real information, any sort of productive conversation, and to give the appearance that the whole country was against the idea of passing health care reform.
Additionally, the program intended to get people to buy more fuel efficient vehicles received a second infusion of cash after wild success, the Iran protest movement retreated for a little bit when Ahmadinejad was certified as the winner after a recount, and he took the oath of office, Sonia Sotomayor took office as a Supreme Court Associate Justice, Megan McCain was a brief flash of optimism for the Republican Party before they were once against totally swallowed by the teabagger menace, someone accused the UK's NHS of wanting to kill Stephen Hawking and thus snuff out a brilliant mind, only to be reminded that Stephen Hawking has been under the care of the NHS as a UK citizen for his entire life, disney bought Marvel, and there were a couple rumblings that there might be actual prosecution of torture, but those were just rumblings.
That, and I sat through the entire Ring opera, all four parts. There was a lot of good singing - the staging wasn't quite as good, and the story took four nights to tell what it could have done in two. Not to mention how many times the story could have come to a successful conclusion and it didn't, apparently because of the corrupting power of the ring.
September brought with it a cry of "socialist plot to indoctrinate the youth of America!" based on the supplemental materials the Department of Ed was going to distribute to help students get context and questions out of an Obama speech on the merits of education, The Republican Party having to defend government-run healthcare as they campaigned against the possibility of government-run healthcare, contractors in Afghanistan taking pictures of doing alcohol shots off each other's rectums, a teabagger-heavy (and wildly inflated, in terms of attendance numbers repeated by conservatives) movement attempting to capitalize on 9/11 while hiding behind Glenn Beck's cover of values and norms creating a 9/12 rally, "You lie!" shouted at a sitting President while he addressed Congress, and a former President saying opposition to the current was was founded mostly in racism, an ur-conservative awarding an entrepreneur award to a gentleman's club in exchange for a donation, which was promptly refunded and the award rescinded once the conservative found out what type of establishment he had just supported, the stripping of ACORN on trumped up charges and heavily-doctored video that needed multiple tries before the footage they wanted was obtained, announcement that there is actually water on Luna...
...and Operation Iraqi Baseball, where American sport companies and regular people donated and outfitted the entire Iraqi national baseball team with appropriate gear. That, and Banned Books Week, celebrating the freedom we have to seek forbidden lore in spite of all the people who think that lore should be forbidden. Yes, that means me, too.
October began with some acceleration. My personal life took a big and major step forward, of which I'm not sure I've felt all the consequences of yet, but so far, I seem to be on reasonably stable ground. My work life braced for impact as the system found it had to shed more than $1 million of budget, which it did through efficiencies, early retirement buyouts, and layoffs. Mostly buyouts and layoffs, because people are always expensive. This put a lot of people on edge, because contract negotiations and other actions meant accurate information was scarce, and what little there was wasn't forthcoming at all.
Elsewhere, Sarah Palin published a book, Rio de Janerio became the site for the 2016 Summer games, and the right wing here had orgasms over the knowledge that Chicago was eliminted in the first round of balloting, and then they had inflamed ranting when the President was named the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, the beginnings of the Conservative Bible, which is fairly oxymoronic, yes, 30 Republicans voting against an amendment that defunded feeral contractors that prevented their employees from taking sexual harrassment cases to court, the ramming of Luna with a missile to analyze what sort of elements and water content was available there, a Raplh Lauren model first suffering a Photoshop Disaster, then being fired by the company when she complained about how unrealistic she looked, a judge's unwillingness to marry interracial couples, which reulted in his eventual resignation, the Matthew Shepard Act signed into law, the committees finally all managed to pass out variations on their health care bills, and a mainstream Republican candidate quit a race over being accused of not being conservative enough and was "replaced" in the race by the Teabagger party candidate, an act that would eventually elect a Democrat in November to a seat that hadn't been Democratic for more than a century.
So yeah, we did to that voting thing in November. Washington went all-but-marriage while Maine stumbled at the end and fell down, and there were lots of school and library issues (we got an annexation) as well as local offices and initiatives. Carrie Prejean rather swiftly dropped from the limelight after tapes of her engaged in premarital self-sex emerged, the House of Representatives passed their version of health care, a shooting on a military base, the economy still continuing its sluggish movement while Wall Street executives continued to rake in giant bonuses, more disillusionment of the people who thought the President was a liberal, as he argued in favor of warrantless wiretaps, libary workers fired for flagrant violations of patron privacy and intellectual freedom, suspects in the 11 September attacks were scheduled to be tried in civilian courts (yes, that's eight years after they were involved in the attacks), the Iranian protesters revived with a vengeance, a Bible verse was put to potenially dark purposes, a hacker released e-mails that, out of context, made it look like climate change scientists were deliberately trying to cover up opposing viewpoints, and we all tapped our feet impatiently waiting for the Senate to Do Something on their health care bill.
Last month, but no signs of slowing! The e-mails previous preceded a climate change conference in Copenhagen happening later on in December, the President sent an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan while providing a target draw-down date, escalating a war many had hoped he would end swiftly, the marriage of a three-dimensional and a two-dimensional character, the first appearance of the "kill the gays" bill in Uganda, the apparance of what was originally SpaceShipTwo, now christened Enterprise, the President's Nobel acceptance speech, a terrorist almost when an underpants bomb fizzled instead of exploding, and the abandonment of the public option in favor of extending Medicare benefits so that 55 was the minimum age, which in turn was abandoned for an individual mandate to buy insurance without any sort of serious cost control or competition for a bill that stayed in debate all the way to the 24th of December before finally passing out of the Senate chamber, limping, ragged of breath, and with sucking wounds to several of its major organs. There was also much complaint over a stage performance by Adam Lambert, mostly over the idea that children might be watching a late night music show and thus have their parents offended by displays of mock sexual acts and possible S&M-themed displays.
...Really, at the end of the year, we're all waiting for the Democrats and the President to make good on their major campaign promises. They may even have to accelerate the process, with midterm elections appearing, which might shake some of their members from the rolls. One can always hope that actual liberals get elected in significant numbers, but we'd settle for the Democrats behaving like the liberal party. Otherwise, their sinking numbers will only continue. Not that the other party is experiencing a resurgence - the only people who might be gaining popularity are the teabaggers. And most sane people I know feel that giving those kinds of teabaggers any sort of real power or influence would be a serious mistake.
And then there was the Dead Pool - Khan/Mr. Roarke, Number Six, the suit actor for the robot from Lost in Space, John Updike, Paul Harvey, prominent and helpful librarians, The Host (from Angel), Marilyn Chambers (Behind the Green Door), Sir Clement Freud (Just A Minute), Judith Krug (ALA OIF director), Bea Arthur, Jack Kemp, Dom DeLuise, Hugh Van Es (iconic photographer), George Tiller, David Carradine, Ed McMahon, Michael Jackson, Farah Fawcett, Billy Mays (still selling products even though he's dead), Robert S. McNamara, Oscar Meyer, Walter Cronkite, Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes), John Hughes (Breakfast Club), Les Paul, Eunice Kennedy Shriver (founder of the Special Olympics), Robert Novak, Don Hewitt (creator of 60 Minutes), Senator Edward Kennedy, Reading Rainbow, Norman Barloug (high-yield crops), Patrick Swayze, Irving Kristol, Mary Travers, Henry Gibson, Peg Mullen (antiwar activist), Captain Lou Albano (wrestler and Mario), Soupy Sales, Mac Tonnies, Geocities, and Oral Roberts all went to their final rest. It always seems like the list gets bigger every year.
Against that stream of the dead, though, the Century of the Fruitbat took control - Sweden, Iowa, Vermont, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, the District of Columbia, Argentina, all legalized homosexual marriage or domestic partnership. Maine's already-legal marriages were then put to a ballot question and then repealed. California's killer Proposition 8 was upheld, although all the people who rushed to get married are still married, and all their domestic partnerships are still completely valid. Washington state survived a challenge to their domestic partnerships, and it became all-but-the-word, basically. New York tried for homosexual marriage...and failed. Don't Ask, Don't Tell continued to fire qualified military personnel for being gay, India finally decriminalized homosexual acts, the Episcopalian Church said homosexuals could be ordained as ministers, while at the end of the year, Uganda introduced a bill that would kill known practicing homosexuals with HIV and levy stiff fines on those who knew where homosexuals were and didn't report them, and there were possible ties between that bill and American evangelists, who since came out against that bill.
At the end, though, whether we believe in the Decade of the Big Zero or a whole lot of fibs, from the beginning onward, this year has been most interesting to watch. The next year promises to be at least as good, if not better in some ways. (And likely worse in others.)
