VBVW for 2006:
The Year End Wrap-up
• The Very Best
Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were convicted for orchestrating the Enron fraud. Lay was cheeky enough to die before sentencing, while Skilling will soon be meeting his new boss in a prison shower stall.
Pluto was demoted after its 70-year run as a planet. Really, this was too long in coming—astronomers have never even seen the thing.
The Democrats took control of Congress, rebalancing governmental power so that Democrats and Republicans can screw up in a more even-handed manner.
The stock market hit record highs. There’s something to be said for seeing stock prices rise faster than gas prices, because the only way to get your money back from the oil companies is to invest in them.
Saddam Hussein, guilty of crimes against humanity, was hanged. America wins the war!
A new wave of user-generated news coverage, led by video sharing, increased accountability for stupidity. Witness Faith Hill, Michael Richards, and the guy who knocked down a silo by ramming it with his sitdown mower.
Donald Rumsfeld resigned as Secretary of Defense. It may have been a six years too late, but maybe now we’ll start getting the truth about this little skirmish in the desert.
Mariah Carey didn’t release a record.
Judith Regan was removed from her perch as the leading purveyor of bad taste and bad books for mass consumption.
A federal court judge in Detroit ruled that surveillance by wiretap without a warrant is unconstitutional. Thank you, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, for reading all the way down to the 4th Amendment.
• The Very Worst
“Brokeback Mountain” author Annie Proulx took being a sore loser to new heights by writing an editorial to whine about her little story not winning the Best Picture Oscar. Her pathetic attack was as distasteful as watching two cowboys riding bareback in a tent.
Pope Benedict slammed Islam, booting interfaith cooperation and understanding all the way back to the Crusades.
Hewlett Packard’s board of directors authorized spying on reporters and on its own people. That’s one more major US company throwing privacy issues down the toilet for ever more market share and a better bottom line.
The horror that is Darfur, where it seemed nothing could get worse, got worse.
The Katrina cleanup effort stalled amid FEMA’s poor bookkeeping, rampant fraud, and unaccountability. We’ll give $5 and a pint of beer to any FEMA employee who can find Louisiana on a map.
A Danish cartoon depicting Allah sparked riots throughout the world. Have humorless fundamentalists never heard of the “funny pages?”
The shooting of ten little girls in an Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania was unequivocal proof that monsters are real.
The price of a gallon of gas briefly topped the price of a gallon of milk. And we all waited in line and paid for it like a herd of cattle.
John Mark Carr was extradited to the US for the murder of Jon Benet Ramsey. The worst part wasn’t that the prosecutor flew him first class and served him champagne—it’s that the media led with it for four days.
More than 6000 Africans died in boats headed for the Canary Islands to flee poverty.