Ten pipe dreams for 2010

1. Publicly-funded elections finally take the money out of politics.

2. The Pope receives an actual vision from God, leading him to issue a Papal Bull allowing married clergy, birth control, abortion, and gay marriage. (Oh, all right. Even pipe dreams need an anchor in reality, so call it medically-necessary abortion.)

3. The US Congress returns from its Christmas break with a new determination to fix health care, and creates a universal, single-payer health care system -

4. -which it funds by taxing the bejesus out of the top 3% of incomes, estates valued at over $10 million, and bonuses valued at over $50,000.

5. Media ownership rules are reinstated and the media conglomerates are broken up into their composite parts and sold off to new owners. Rupert Murdoch, in a fit of temper, retreats to the outback of Australia and is never heard from again. Oddly, most of the on-air personalities from Fox News accompany him, though a few of them reappear later in the year - Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity return with the smirks wiped off their faces, and Wolf Blitzer shows up with male-pattern baldness.

6. Samuel Alito and John Roberts, in demonstrations of extraordinary conscience, resign their Supreme Court seats after acknowledging that they were dishonest about their partisan intentions during their confirmation hearings before Congress. Their seats are filled by Obama appointees, one an openly gay man who married his long-time partner in Des Moines in 2009, and the other an American Muslim woman. Lou Dobbs and James Dobson are hospitalized for apoplexy.

7. The newly-constituted Supreme Court decides that, in fact, the Fourteenth Amendment does not apply to corporations, ushering in a new era of corporate responsibility and restraint. Among the regulations corporations willingly adopt are salary caps, which limit CEO compensation to no more than four times the salary of the next-highest-paid tier of employees. Most of the current crop of CEOs quits in outrage over this loss of income, but nobody cares.

8. Global warming is proved to be a hoax. The glaciers refreeze, dead trees all over the globe sprout new growth, hundreds of formerly extinct animals reappear, and New Orleans and Cedar Rapids are both restored to their pre-flood gloriousness. James Inhofe is hailed as a genius, and graciously retires from public life to write his memoirs. He ultimately fails to find a publisher, but that's for next year's pipe-dream-list.

9. Dick Cheney shuts the fuck up. So does Liz.

10. Karl Rove is frog-marched out of whatever office he spews from these days, is charged with revealing the identity of a CIA operative, and is sent to prison where he shares a cell with George W. Bush and a very large and angry skinhead named Bubba.