Ken Ficara

Is it, perhaps, time to give up on a national consensus? Allow the red states to become as red as they like? Let them pass more and more restrictive and oppressive laws until they drive every intelligent and tolerant person to move away to one of the coasts? Let them make their own beds, and see who lies in them?

Xeni Jardin quotes her father:

Get over it. The way you feel now is exactly how I felt when Nixon won a second term — crushed. I just couldn’t believe America was that stupid. But remember what happened to Nixon that term. Change comes from discontent. And right now, there’s a lot of discontent.

Also, I want this graphic on a t-shirt.

As much as I’ve joked about it, even leaving the country seems like a poor option; there’s nowhere in the world that’s not affected by what the United States does, and this is the only place in the world that has any say in its direction.

So, it seems to me there are two main priorities:

• Supreme Court nominations: The Repugnants do not have a filibuster-proof majority, so we have some hope of blocking extreme appointees, especially given the prevailing public sentiment on abortion.
• Dump Bloomberg: Next year, we have to get rid of this fool, whose biggest worry yesterday was apparently which cookies to buy. His support of a party and an administration that is so implacably inimical to New York is unforgivable; idiocy like the various stadium proposals is just icing on the Krispy Kreme.

The quote above, from Fannie Lou Hamer, was this morning’s randomly generated email .signature. The other quote that comes to mind is from Woody Allen: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

My polling place was mobbed this morning; I was the 162nd voter in my election district. In the primaries, I was the 11th. Let’s hope this is happening in states where it matters!

My big disappointment was not being able to vote in the bizarre race in the 57th Assembly District. Roger Green, who resigned the seat in disgrace four months ago for illegitimate expense reimbursements, is running for it again. And the party organization redrew the lines so that Hakeem Jeffries, who lives a block away from me and nearly knocked Green out of his seat in the 2002 primary, is no longer in the district. So rather than voting against Green, I got to vote for Park Slope’s assembly person, Joan Millman.

Voting against Green would have meant either pulling a Republican lever or writing in a Green Party candidate, Susan Metz. As disgusted as I am with the Green Party’s work on Bush’s behalf, I probably would have voted for her, because I like her on the issues, and voting on misguided principal rather than common sense is what caused the 2000 mess in the first place.