Of course, it’s impossible to say with certainty which actions "Anonymous" actually pulled off, since its membership is ill-defined and anyone can claim association, not to mention that sometimes Anonymous hacktivists act alone or as part of a subgroup.  Even when Anonymous has put out one of its quintessential videos claiming responsibility for a hack or DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service—shutting down a website by flooding it with requests) attack, it hasn’t always turned out to be true.

Given that, below are Anonymous’ “Top 20” for 2012. With its widening arsenal and focus, one can only imagine what these Internet denizens have in store for 2013.

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January: Newt Gingrich

To anyone who’d just been teleported from the year 1999, the scene in Charleston, South Carolina on the night of January 21 had to be impossible to fathom: There was Newt Gingrich, the man who’d been marched off the political stage by his own party after a disastrous four-year run as House Speaker, declaring victory in a Republican presidential primary. And not just any primary: South Carolina, a historically pivotal early contest. And not just a victory – an absolute landslide.

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We don't really know, and it's likely we never will. Many of the groups that spent the most on the election aren't required to report their donors. But thanks to recent campaign finance filings, we can get a better idea.

We dug through Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service records and found that Adelson and his wife, Miriam, spent at least $98 million this election cycle. The money went to at least 34 different candidates and groups, with contributions ranging from $2,000 for a Florida congressional candidate to $30 million for Restore Our Future, the super PAC that supported Mitt Romney.

Adelson also gave $20 million to Winning Our Future, a super PAC backing Newt Gingrich; $23 million to American Crossroads, a conservative super PAC; and $5 million each to the Congressional Leadership Fund and the YG Action Fund, both of which supported Republican candidates for Congress.

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Here’s is the ad that delivered the win to Romney:

Despite outrage from the media and the public, and a denial from Jeep’s parent company, the Romney campaign stood by the claim.

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Although it is still early, Mitt Romney, who has 16 grandchildren, is leading among the patriarchs of America's dynastic political families, in part due to the present childlessness of George P. Bush and Chelsea Clinton, whose presence in articles on this subject is an apparent journalistic convention. Starting families now could give the hypothetical grandchildren of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton a head start on the theoretical grandchildren of Barack Obama, whose daughters are years away from having children if they decide to procreate at all.

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In the Wall Street Journal, William McGurn approached the idea that villifying half the country as lazy “takers” dependent on the largesse of the makers may not be a way to win over the masses. He wrote, “Maybe Americans who have reason to feel insecure about their futures don't find a government that promises to be there for them when they need it all that menacing.” But he then rejects the notion and calls for better propaganda. “Conservatives' top priority,” he writes, “should be promoting an alternative—that in a highly competitive, global economy, the only real economic security for ordinary Americans is the security of opportunity.”

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This week, Ohio's Republican Senate president, Tom Niehaus, explicitly took President Obama's win as a referendum on abortion rights, saying he'd told supporters that he would only allow a vote on the bill in the event of a Romney victory. He also said the bill's proponents were incredibly annoying, including to people ostensibly on their side.

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Minnesota was voting on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and the Catholic Church had been the most vocal proponent of the ballot measure.

Voters snapped photos of the banner, which quickly gained attention on Twitter and Facebook.

Ivan Kowalenko took one of those photos. He told Minnesota Public Radio, “I was shocked, I didn’t think that would be allowed. I was hearing that you’re not allowed to wear any political slogan of your own, so it doesn’t seem entirely appropriate that a voting venue would be allowed to express an opinion.”

At a separate polling place at St. Joseph’s Church in West St. Paul, Stephanie Weiss was waiting in line to vote, and she noticed a sign posted to the wall. It was a prayer, written by Twin Cities Archbishop John Nienstedt, that urged Catholics to defend God’s plan for marriage — between one man and one woman.

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The most likely explanation for that yawning disconnect is that the campaign figured it was better to appear to be entirely clueless about the race than acknowledge that it had been bullshitting its fat-cat donors about Romney's chances of winning in order to keep the cash spigot open.

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The president, Romney told a group of campaign donors on a November 14 conference call, won re-election by promising free stuff to his homeboys and women’s libbers and brown people who inconveniently declined to self-deport -- or words to that effect.

“What the president -- president's campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government,” Romney told his fat cats, apparently unaware that reporters were listening in. Soon that particular cat leapt out of the proverbial bag, and it was the 47 percent all over again -- offering a vision of the majority of the electorate that voted for Obama as a bunch of moochers. The one difference, of course, was that no longer the party’s presidential contender, Romney learned that Republicans were free to kick him to the curb, which they did with steel-toed boots.

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One day, when he was in his teens, he said to himself, “Look here, Skinch Painter, this old world owes you a living, and all you’ve got to do is collect it.” Wandering the Ozarks of Missouri, he inhabited a cave and relied on nature for his food and clothing. He hunted, fished and gathered nuts and berries, wearing only animal skins and going barefoot.

“Labor is a useless sin,” said Skinch. “The time a man spends working is just so much time lost from living.”

We can just about see Fox News sending a camera crew out to interview Skinch, and one of its handsomely paid straight men wrapping up the piece with an offhand, “See, you don’t need government handouts. If you don’t want to work, you can do what this guy does. At least he’s not a taker. The rest of us in this country, we’ll continue to work for a living.”

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Clearly, the only explanation for all this delusion is that conservative media and campaign consultants, steeped in years of confidently lying about everything from global warming to the causes of the deficit, got a little too bold about their ability to create their own realities. The only question is whether conservatives will learn their lesson and exhibit more skepticism about their self-selected news media in the future.

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When the 2012 campaign began, the lousy economy made President Obama vulnerable. Republicans were favored to take back the Senate, given retirements in conservative states. Republican billionaires — the Koch brothers, Adelson and others — put up big money in the effort to have it all. Instead the president swept to victory, and Democrats gained seats in the Senate and the House.

Many factors contributed. Republicans learned once more the shortcomings of a stale, male, pale, Southern-based party in a nation of diversity. The GOP “legitimate rape” caucus helped give away two Senate seats. But too little attention has been paid to the new emerging reality. This was the first class warfare election of the new Gilded Age — and the middle class won big.

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We had seen signs of stress within the party and its adherents leading to to the election, and since then we’ve seen everyone from members of the GOP elite to right-wing foot soldiers go through the first four Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. (Whether they’ll get to acceptance remains to be seen.)

Below are several examples of how conservatives at all levels have gone off the deep end in the days leading up to and following the election.

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The voting rights part of this fact-averse bubble had many dimensions: from who is and isn’t registered to vote, to when and where people wanted to vote, to what a voter must do at the polls to get a ballot, to how voter lists are updated—and who can be trusted to oversee the process.

What follows are 10 lies the Right pedaled during the 2012 campaign. Some GOP partisans, like this Nevada group, are already trying to resurrect some of these fake issues. You can be sure you’ll see more as states and Congress look at 2012’s biggest problems, such as people having to wait hours and hours to vote.

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But I also know that the president is neither a sovereign nor a king, and most of us spend way too much time and energy staring dumbly at the sites of power we have no access to -- the White House, for example -- wringing our hands and hoping for the best, and far too little time focusing on the prospective power right in front of us: the community and the street, the school and the classroom, the shop and the workplace. Our job is to organize dissent and mobilize an independent movement. Remember: Lyndon Johnson was never part of the Black Freedom Movement, FDR was not a labor leader, and Lincoln never joined an abolitionist party -- each is remembered for important actions taken in response to fire from below. Even in the last years it was women, gay, immigrant-rights and environmental activists who moved a progressive agenda forward inch by inch.

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If Fox News is any indication, many of you are dismayed, upset, and befuddled by Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama. Some of these feelings are normal. Politics is tribal. When your team loses, a bit of sadness is expected.

However, some white folks are acting out in some very unhealthy ways. Young white conservatives participated in a near riot at the University of Mississippi, where they hurled rocks at bystanders, used racial slurs, and burned Obama and Biden campaign signs. Other angry white folks used the Internet to send out racist messages and pictures on Twitter as an act of protest and anger at the country’s re-election of its first Black president. I believe that these events are malicious outliers.

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We now know the results of such a campaign and, after all the tumult and the nation’s first $6 billion election, they couldn’t be more familiar.  Only days later, you can watch a remarkably recognizable cast of characters from the reelected president and Speaker of the House John Boehner to the massed pundits of the mainstream media picking up the pages of a well-thumbed script.

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I attended a Catholic grade school for eight years in the 1950s. When my class graduated, all of us (even the "slower" students) whizzed through public high school rhetoric so easily our new teachers remarked on it. Our school was poverty-stricken and had only basic facilities. But every one of us could read, write and do math. I believe we could read and write better than many of today's high school graduates, and some of today's colleges graduates.

Reading is the key to self-education. Let me give an example that has been obsessing me. Nearly 50 percent of all Americans reject the Theory of Evolution and believe Man was "created" pretty much in his present form some thousands of years ago. Anyone who believes that hasn't been paying attention.

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