Here’s to the American people, the electorate, for finally coming to their senses and voting for something different, for someone different and for a chance to fix the multitude of man-made disasters that confront us.
By their votes, the Republican revolution and all it's wrought — an economic meltdown, two endless wars, class warfare that’s enriched the very rich and beggared everyone else and a treasury bulging only with IOU's — will be crushed.
So it has all come down to this.
After two years and a quarter-billion dollars worth of ads, the pulverizing election has become a steel-cage match pitting rivals against each other — and not Immigrants versus Natives, Americans versus Foreigners or Whites versus Blacks.
No, John McCain and Barack Obama have made the race's final weeks an ideological proxy war between two presidential icons who still loom larger than them: Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt.
I got my one and only puppy in 1976, the year my father died and Jimmy Carter was elected president. The three events are oddly connected, considering that I was a boy living in Lebanon at the time and didn't know Plains from Chevy Chase.
My mother and I used to attend church in a rest home run by unusually kind nuns. Their solution to my losing my father was, bless their heart, not to infomercial me with faith, which was proving pretty futile about then, but to accept their gift of a bastard puppy. Here's where it got weird.
It was Jesus Christ, if Matthew is to be believed, who said, "Love thine enemy." It is in that spirit that I write this belated valentine to Sarah Palin.
Sarah, I love you for having revealed unto the media the snarling heart of the beast that is the base (and the soul) of the Republican Party. Yes, you have the lipstick and the heels, not to mention the calves and bosoms, that send Republican men into swoons, but you have more; the pit-bull snarl that rouses your supporters to cry out, "Traitor!" against Obama, and "Kill him!"
The day we brought my new-born son home to our Brooklyn apartment,
an article in the New York Times pointed out that "a black male who
drops out of high school [in the US] is 60 times more likely to find
himself in prison than one with a bachelor's degree". These are the
kind of statistics I often quote in my work. But this time it was
personal. Looking down at him as he snoozed in the brand new car seat,
I thought: "Those are not great odds. I'd better buy some more
children's books."
There are lots of good explanations for why John McCain is rapidly swirling down the toilet bowl into the sewer of political ignominy, but my all-time favorite was just published in the New York Times Magazine this week.
In the end, the decision couldn't be clearer. This is more than just
a choice between parties, or ideologies, or policy positions. It's a
choice between philosophies and worldviews. It's a choice grounded in
moral psychology. We will choose between different portions of our own
brains, between our baser instincts and what used to be called "the
angels of our better nature."
In the end, this election is a referendum on trusting the electorate. It's a referendum on democracy itself.
What do a promising rookie for the Miami Heat, a systems analyst from
Bulgaria, the wife of a Republican congressional candidate and Fidel
Castro have in common?
They can't just show up Nov. 4 and fill out a
regular ballot. Theirs are among 12,000 names statewide flagged under
Florida's Voter Verification Law, a ''no match'' screening process
embroiled in legal and political controversy.
Yesterday we posted
a quick round-up of the various voter-suppression schemes being pushed
by Republicans in swing states around the country. And after looking at
the list, one thing quickly becomes clear: most of the efforts have
failed.
There's no one grand unifying theory for why that's true.
In some cases, the courts have rejected GOP efforts to make voting harder:
