Home of the brave

Year in review from Our Man in Washington, Roger Fitch ... National Rifle Association's dreams come true ... Business lobby group wants more exploitation of the masses ... Guantánamo 11 years on ... Gay rights take hold ... As does the NSA 

NRA supports guns for the blind

THE National Rifle Association achieved a long-held dream: carrying concealed weapons, though not yet obligatory, is allowed in every one of the 50 states.   

The NRA also supported legislation giving valuable Second Amendment rights to the blind.  

At year's end, the organisation's tireless supporters were busy making sure minors can get guns, too.

Meanwhile the corporate front, American Legislative Exchange Council, has worked hard to repeal over-generous state laws that protect safety at the expense of productivity or keep employable fast-food fodder (i.e. children) in school.

ALEC wants to bring back the freedoms associated with union-less, pension-less, health-care-free life for the masses.  

Next year, ALEC hopes to build on the solid accomplishments of 2013: the organisation wants to see, for instance, a special tax on homeowners who preen themselves with solar panels.  

It's a curious refinement of the sumptuary laws of our dour Puritan ancestors, but surely, solar heat is the equal of a beavered hat.

Moreover, it harms some of ALEC's most substantial backers - e.g. Exxon-Mobil and the Koch family.  

Guantanamo: a terrible mistake

2013 was also the year that people responsible for setting up Guantánamo's detention centre in 2002 began admitting it was all a terrible mistake, including the Pentagon's Detainee Affairs man, William Lietzau, and the prison's founding commander, Marine Maj Gen Michael Lehnert.

The Bush envoy in Cuba went further and proposed the detainees be given to Cuba – along with the base.

It was the year in which President Obama tentatively began to make peace with Iran, a country the US has been warring with since the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran, an event that got Hollywood treatment in 2012. 

Regrettably, the film, Argo, papered over Republican skulduggery in the hostage crisis.  

It was a year of paradox and irony: the 150^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation - the freeing of slaves in the racist Democrat South by a white Republican - was celebrated by a black Democrat president with the awkward participation of a Republican Party now the preferred home for white racists.

Tracking the location of the world's mobile phones

As the end of the year approached, the NSA was found to be tracking the location of all of the world's mobile phones, every day, in a program whimsically named CO-TRAVELER (sic), and a group called Privacy International had taken on the privacy violations of the "Five Eyes" consortium of Anglophone countries.

And finally, in the federal Windsor case and its California companion, the exquisitely complicated Hollingsworth v Perry, gay rights got a firm foothold in the US.

Americans may not have much to be happy about, but at least they're entitled to be gay.