Harper's Magazine presents a slightly different way of reviewing the year just past, 2010. It's surprising how much one has forgotten of the bad, and some good, over the last 12 months.......
"Two thousand seven hundred twenty-two days after U.S. troops crossed the Kuwaiti border into Iraq, U.S. combat operations there officially ended. The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan turned older than the Soviet Union’s 3,339-day campaign in the country. Twenty-one percent of young veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were unemployed, Iraqi government officials said that some 58,000 stray dogs in Baghdad had been poisoned or shot, and Target, a dog rescued from Afghanistan after she alerted troops to a suicide bomber and saved dozens of soldiers, was accidentally euthanized. The Supreme Court upheld the right to record women crushing small animals with their feet and overturned two precedents to rule that the government cannot ban corporations from spending money in political elections. The U.S. House and Senate finalized a watered-down, 2,000-page financial-reform bill. “Not to be funny about it,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told the FCIC, “but my daughter asked me… ‘What’s the financial crisis,’ and I said, ‘Well, it’s something that happens every five to seven years.’” The Texas State Board of Education voted to revise its social-studies curriculum, mandating that the U.S. government should not be called “democratic,” and Republicans took control of the House. A Virginia judge voided the provision in Obama’s health-care law requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance. A Texas newborn with a heart defect was denied health insurance because of his pre-existing condition. “It would be hard to argue that we’re going backwards,” said Obama. “I think what you can argue is we’re stuck in neutral.”
Continue reading here.
"Two thousand seven hundred twenty-two days after U.S. troops crossed the Kuwaiti border into Iraq, U.S. combat operations there officially ended. The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan turned older than the Soviet Union’s 3,339-day campaign in the country. Twenty-one percent of young veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were unemployed, Iraqi government officials said that some 58,000 stray dogs in Baghdad had been poisoned or shot, and Target, a dog rescued from Afghanistan after she alerted troops to a suicide bomber and saved dozens of soldiers, was accidentally euthanized. The Supreme Court upheld the right to record women crushing small animals with their feet and overturned two precedents to rule that the government cannot ban corporations from spending money in political elections. The U.S. House and Senate finalized a watered-down, 2,000-page financial-reform bill. “Not to be funny about it,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told the FCIC, “but my daughter asked me… ‘What’s the financial crisis,’ and I said, ‘Well, it’s something that happens every five to seven years.’” The Texas State Board of Education voted to revise its social-studies curriculum, mandating that the U.S. government should not be called “democratic,” and Republicans took control of the House. A Virginia judge voided the provision in Obama’s health-care law requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance. A Texas newborn with a heart defect was denied health insurance because of his pre-existing condition. “It would be hard to argue that we’re going backwards,” said Obama. “I think what you can argue is we’re stuck in neutral.”
Continue reading here.
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