Friday Funday: Wishes

Unless you're living in the farthest Southern reaches of the United States, if you're like most Americans, you've probably been wishing for warmer temperatures this past week. It has been bitterly cold in some regions, especially after the relatively mild winter most of the United States has experienced.

The fact is, wishing the weather was warmer today won't make it so - though traveling to our South Florida offices might help our staff members living in Virginia and Nebraska. Of course, if we received all of our wishes, the world might be a very different place indeed.

Still, we shouldn't belittle the wishes we did see come true this week, starting with the second Inaugural address of President Obama. We also got to see Secretary of State Clinton put a few arrogant members of Congress in their place, and we got Thursday's announcement of full gender equity in the U.S. Armed Forces.

Our staff members didn't get all their hopes and wishes fulfilled this week. For example, we didn't win the lottery. We also didn't get filibuster reform.

True filibuster reform in the U.S. Senate, including the talking filibuster and the elimination of secret holds, was completely thrown overboard by Senator Harry Reid in what appears to have been a deal for a debt ceiling agreement with Minority Leader McConnell. Liberals and progressives are justifiably outraged with Reid, who effectively got nothing from Senate Republicans, except the same kind of handshake agreement that Republicans violated early in the last Congress.

We wish more of the American public had listened to those pundits who said Reid was likely to cave on this issue.

There was one more wish that began to take root this week, and promises to flower later this year.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a host of other Senators presented a new assault weapons ban proposal on Thursday, that addresses many of the problems both supporters and detractors had with the previous ban. The fact that Americans overwhelmingly support many of the pieces of this new gun safety legislation bodes well for key parts of it, especially the overwhelming support for universal background checks.

Overall, while we didn't get every one of our most treasured wishes granted, we did have a positive and healthy week.

Sometimes, that's all anyone can wish for.