2014: That Was The Year That Was

Eric Cantor (who???).  ISIS.  Ebola.  Rep. Michael Grimm (R—Greasebag) threatening a reporter with “I'll break you in half, like a boy!”  Midterm elections — Republican takeover of the Senate.  Legalized marijuana in Colorado and Washington.  Gay marriage now legal in 35 states.  Militarization of local police departments.  Ferguson.  Michael Brown.  Eric Garner.  “I Can't Breathe!”  “Mayor Bill de Blasio, Don't Insult My Sacrifice!”  North Korea/Sony/“The Interview.”  Obama's executive action on immigration reform.  Ditto the Cuban embargo.

Interesting year.

As Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat says, 2014 gets a bad rap, much of it undeserved:

“Sorry, 2014. It was all a big misunderstanding.  Never has a year been portrayed as so unremittingly bleak (including, at times, by yours truly). Yet all the while it turns out it was humming along just fine.  Remember how an entire national election was conducted around the ideas that the economy is cratering, Ebola is coming and Obamacare is a job-smothering disaster?  Oops. The economy was in fact skipping along — the U.S. added the most jobs this year since 1999. Ebola never came. And Obamacare not only didn’t go into the much-predicted “death spiral” or kill millions of jobs, it prompted the largest, fastest drop in the number of uninsured in generations.”

And:

“Just about everything that we want to go down did drop in 2014: the deficit, oil imports, gas prices, unemployment, teen pregnancy. What we want to go up mostly did go up: wages, the stock market, green energy, school test scores.”

So there.  And on that note, Happy New Year!