Five Good Things That Happened In 2024
There were more than five, we think, but we're not spending all day writing this.
It’s been a hell of a year, and just counting it down can be kind of a drag, so just in case some girl who sings the blues won’t give you any happy news, we certainly won’t just smile and turn away. A bunch of good things in 2024! Here are five of the many stories with Wonkette’s coveted “Nice Time” tags, in no particular order, although there were certainly many more. (We’re excluding Nice Time stories related to climate and clean energy, of which there were several, because the big ones can be found in our climate roundup story once Dok writes it.)
First, the top runner-up, which gladdened our hearts even though its final outcome remains to be seen. Hell, it was still amazingly good news!
The Onion Buys InfoWars — Almost
It was just such a terrific story when it broke in November: Satirical news site The Onion, seemingly out of nowhere, submitted the winning bid in a bankruptcy auction to buy InfoWars, the lies-and-conspiracies factory Alex Jones used to make America a measurably shittier place for years. The Onion publisher Ben Collins acknowledged that he’d gotten the idea from a tweeted suggestion, and then worked with lawyers for the Sandy Hook families to whom Jones owed $1.5 billion in damages for defaming them by claiming their kids didn’t die in the 2012 mass shooting. Collins announced that InfoWars would come back online as a parody of itself, to mock the pernicious nonsense Jones used it to spread.
It was not to be, however: In December, the bankruptcy judge voided the sale, Jones took back control of InfoWars, and nobody yet knows what the final outcome will be. Collins is keeping hope alive that The Onion will triumph in a second attempt to buy out Jones, and that should certainly happen, because obviously that would be funniest.
Cool Blue States Doing Cool Blue State Stuff!
In the 2022 midterms, Massachusetts voters passed a new “millionaire tax” that required residents making over One Million Dollars to pay an extra four percent in state taxes. That “Fair Share Amendment” paid off big in its first year, raising around $2.2 billion for the state in fiscal 2024 — well above the $1.5 billion initially estimated! The rich didn’t flee Massachusetts for Florida or Texas, the state had a big budget surplus, and the new funding went to infrastructure projects and education, including providing universal school meals to all kids regardless of parental income. It went so well in its first year that the state decided to cover community college tuition for all in-state students, with low-income students also qualifying for up to $1,200 in assistance with books and other school expenses.
Minnesota, not about to be left behind in the orgy of Blue State Good Governing, went and made state college and university tuition free to kids from families making less than $80,000 a year, too, as well as making other investments in higher education, without any worries that it would turn the youngs into adherents of Karl Marx or even Paul Wellstone, egad.
Student Debt Forgiveness
This one’s a bit of a mixed bag, because of course the Trump Courts this year largely killed off Joe Biden’s major reform of student loan repayment. Biden’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) income-driven debt repayment plan was only in place for about a year before being blocked; it not only allowed qualifying borrowers to pay less of their income toward student loans, but eliminated the interest rollover trap that left millions of borrowers deep in debt, even after years of payments.
But despite that rotten development, it’s worth remembering that before Joe Biden took office, only around 50 borrowers in income-driven repayment (IDR) plans actually had their remaining loan balances cancelled after paying for 20 years or more, out of nearly two million who qualified. Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona fixed a backlog that had been building for decades, making the programs work like they were supposed to. All told, including the SAVE plan, the administration wiped out $56.5 billion in debt for more than 1.4 million borrowers who qualified. That wasn’t a giveaway, it was making the IDR programs work, for the first time ever.
On top of that progress, which is now in legal limbo, Biden and Cardona fixed related problems in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program that had led more than 99 percent of applications to be rejected under Trump’s idiot Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. PSLF now works how it was designed, and on the way out the door, the Biden Administration announced it had processed another $4.28 billion in debt forgiveness for nearly 55,000 teachers and other public service workers, bringing the total of those whose loans were forgiven under PSLF to $78 billion, for 1,062,870 borrowers. And now that PSLF works, it would take some heinous fuckery to break it again. Not that they won’t try.
‘Weird’ Made Republicans Lose Their Shit
Remember how much fun we all had over the summer, when Republicans were driven to sputtering rage by an observation from Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz? We’d sort of forgotten that he actually said it in December 2023.
“When we’re running against the generic Republican, our races are always really close, but there’s no such thing [as a generic Republican]. These guys are weird. Once they start running, their weirdness shows up, and especially with the nominee on the other side.”
The comment resurfaced in late July, shortly after Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate, and a little bit prior to her choice of Walz as veep. And boy, oh boy, were the Rs falling all over themselves to insist they and their imaginary culture wars obsessions weren’t weird, no YOU are.
Remember, this was when many Americans were first learning of JD Vance’s weird obsession with women’s fertility as a measure of their worth. And when Donald Trump was talking about the “late, great Hannibal Lecter” and wondering whether it would be worse to be in a sinking electric boat or swimming with a shark.
Imagine explaining that campaign issue to sixth graders in 20 years.
In “weird,” Democrats briefly had a way to dismiss Republicans’ strange attacks on Kamala Harris for not having any “biological offspring,” their nattering insistence that she somehow only “became Black” for political advantage, after being solely “Asian” forever, because explaining why that’s insane takes so many more words than “weird.”
I’m not sure I buy the idea that not continuing to call Republicans weird lost the election, but it certainly made things less fun than in the early heady weeks of the Harris campaign. Besides, it’s still an accurate criticism.
New Zealand Maori Lawmakers Protest Racist Bill Best Way Possible
We called it the best political moment of 2024 when it happened in November, and nothing has since topped it. To protest a bill that would have fundamentally undermined indigenous rights, Maori members of New Zealand’s Parliament interrupted a routine roll-call vote by singing a haka, a traditional Maori challenge chant, as MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke tore a copy of the bill in half.
As we said then, somewhere on the cosmic plane, the spirit of John Lewis must have smiled and said “That’s good trouble.”
It was glorious and defiant, and it went viral because it was a righteous HELL NO to bullies who wanted to pretend that “equality” means pretending law must be “color blind” as a way of never actually addressing longstanding discrimination.
We’re going to need to say HELL NO a lot in the coming year. Let’s say it with unity, and with joy.
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Just now I saw this CNN headline on my Google news feed:
"Carter's presidency holds foreign-policy lessons for Trump"
AHHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
"Lessons"? Oh, lizard shit! WHEN has Donald Trump learned anything useful, about anything, from anyone?
1. Lost 30 pounds (and still counting).
2. Planned (and executed) a move from NoCal to AZ, which went off without a hitch.
3. Dug myself out of a deep depression I had been in for years.
4. Planned and executed a "home haunt" for Halloween which over 150 folks attended and enjoyed. Gave out tons of candy.
5. Decorated the fuck out of the house for Christmas. It's festive as fuck and lifted all of our spirits.
6. Developed two new healthy (and hopefully $$$-generating as a side thing) hobbies: making sourdough goods (bread, crackers, etc.) and growing sunflower greens and making them into tasty foods.
It's still pretty shitty, still dealing with a super depressed early 20s kid who can't seem to dig herself out (and won't take any advice from me or listen to anything I have to say), and still dealing with this fucking political situation, but on balance it was pretty good if I try not to apply the "negative filter" to which we are all subject.
Happy New Year everyone.