Ah, Washington. The good news is that our national leaders saved our butts (for the moment) from bottoming out off the “fiscal cliff.” The bad news is: Watch your head—it’ll soon come crunching up against another unnecessary “debt ceiling” crisis. The most important Good vs. Bad News about the New Year’s Day cliff dive is that the Ugly—the prospect that Congress’ failure to raise the debt ceiling could actually cause the United States to default on its international debts with genuine economic consequences—is now put off, but only until March.

“Media elites have convinced themselves that there is a crisis in Social Security,” said Eric Kingson, a professor of social work at Syracuse University and co-chair of the advocacy group Social Security Works. Kingson, who served as a policy advisor on presidential commissions on the issue in the 1980s and ’90s, said there is indeed an increasing crisis around adequate funding for retirement in America. “But they [journalists] focus on the most conservative framing of the crisis,” he said. In reality, Kingson added, “Social Security is the one bright spot” in the federal government.

This was the year climate change vanished from the political agenda—and then suddenly reappeared, after Hurricane Sandy shook the country. It was just a few years ago that President Obama flew to Copenhagen to rescue faltering climate-treaty talks amid bipartisan calls for global warming action. But in 2012, there wasn't a single congressional proposal or hearing on climate legislation. Neither was there mention of climate change on the presidential campaign trail, or in the debates for the first time in decades. 

The National Rifle Association (NRA) was inspired by the Black Panthers? Yes, according to Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, and author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America (W. W. Norton, 2011). "One of the surprising things I discovered in writing Gunfight was that when the Black Panthers started carrying their guns around in Oakland, Calif., in the late 1960s, it inspired a new wave of gun control laws. It was these laws that ironically sparked a backlash among rural white conservatives..."

The American Psychiatric Association gave its final approval to the latest guide to psychiatric disorders, despite strong criticism that it created new mental disorders when none exist and could lead to misdiagnosis and unnecessary medication. The first rewrite in 20 years of the diagnostic Bible of psychiatry was approved in the midst of heated controversy. The guide, known as DSM-5, defines a host of symptoms that are categorized to help doctors identify specific mental disorders. 

Will the U.S. economy go over the “fiscal cliff” after New Years Day? If so, what will that mean to the country’s most financially vulnerable people? Former White House economic advisor Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) told reporters on a national telephone briefing Thursday, organized by New America Media and CBPP, that he believes Democrats and Republicans will take the budget negotiations to and possibly over the cliff’s edge. 

The Tea Party’s brand of patented loose cannon obstructionism is too threatening to a GOP still reeling from the election flop. The ouster of the Tea Party hardliners and desertions by GOP bigwigs from the movement was hardly the first rumbling that the lights are dimming for the Tea Party. A year earlier, polls showed that far more Americans had an unfavorable view of the Tea Party than when it roared on the scene a couple of years earlier. The disaffection cut across all lines and that included many conservatives. 

Five years ago the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) described the Iraqi refugee crisis as “the largest long-term population movement in the Middle East since the displacement of Palestinians following the creation of Israel in 1948." Not much has changed at the end of 2012, a year after US forces pulled out of Iraq. “Some one million people remain displaced throughout the country, of whom hundreds of thousands live in dire conditions,” the UNHCR recently noted. 

Obama has called tougher gun control laws “common sense.” This signals that if there is enough public outcry and push that one or more of the gun control measures could finally make it out of a house or senate committee. Obama is not running for re-election and does not have to look nervously over his shoulder and worry about enraged gun owners raking him over the coals for putting his White House muscle behind one of the bills. That and the eventual passage of fresh gun restrictions would at least send the right signal that the gun lobby is not invincible and that millions of Americans want and demand anything that will at least potentially head off the next rampage.

This past week might very well mark the beginning of the end of the war on drugs as we know it, with recreational use of marijuana becoming legal in the state of Washington as a result of its citizens' vote. Coloradoans approved a similar measure and established an exchange in which citizens can grow and purchase the drug for medicinal use. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that 54 percent of Americans support legalizing the drug, while 44 percent oppose it. As states slowly begin to decriminalize marijuana, it remains to be seen whether President Obama and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will continue to enforce federal oversight to arrest and prosecute offenders, no matter a state's laws.