Recently, the following letter appeared in the Buffalo News’ “Everybody’s Column”:

“As a graduate of Lafayette High School, I must comment on The News story discussing Board of Education plans for closing it, and the editorial urging action “without worrying about . . . history.”

Buffalo didn’t worry about history when the Larkin Building was torn down. Albright-Knox didn’t worry when it sold priceless art treasures. The Erie Canal Harbor Development Corp. isn’t worrying, subsuming one of two great nexuses of American immigration (the other is Ellis Island), and burying the Canal District under a Bass Pro-inspired project.

Lafayette is Buffalo’s oldest public high school still in its original (nationally historic) building, the educational font for hundreds of local and nationally known professionals: Judge Joseph Mattina, architect Gordon Bunshaft, The News’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Bruce Shanks and many others.

It has been renovated and refurbished, with energy-efficient windows and a new library and cupola. Its Steinway piano was rebuilt, and its carillon reactivated; both with funds from the city’s most active public school alumni association. We raised more than $30,000 at the 100th Anniversary celebration, attended by graduates from the years 1931 through 2001.

The board should keep Lafayette open, and encourage West Side families to view it as the great community asset that it is, and to send their children there.

Angela Bongiovanni Coniglio

Amherst”

My first inclination was to write my own damn letter to the Buffalo News, but I realized that I would not be able to use the language nessecary to convey my true feelings about Angela’s comments.

Read the signature– ANGELA LIVES IN FUCKING AMHERST.  Angela, like so many other scared folk, left the City of Buffalo screaming for the suburbs, and now has the audacity to suggest that “West Side Families” should send their kids to Lafayette.  Now, in Angela’s defense, maybe she doesn’t have kids.  Maybe she can’t have kids for all I know.  Maybe she moved to Amherst because she inherited a house.  I don’t know.  What I do know is Angela has no right getting up on her soapbox criticizing the city for considering closing Lafayette High School.

Personally, I agree with Angela– closing Lafayette would be a huge mistake.  As a resident of the West Side, I see Lafayette as tradition, an institution, and as an architecture buff, I agree, it’s a beautiful building.  Kids are bussed in from all over the city to attend Lafayette, and from what I can tell, the staff there are trying to fight the good fight.  But this woman sits in her home in the suburbs and suggests that West Side families should send their kids there in hopes of… what?  Changing the demographic of the student body? Making it more like it was when she attended classes?  If she does have children (and again, I don’t know the answer to that), where do they go to school?

I’m sure Angela has Buffalo’s and Lafayette High School’s best interest at heart.  But she ran.  She’s part of the problem.

I bought something on Craigslist recently.  The woman I spoke to was very nice.  She lived in Amherst.   She even offered to deliver the item.

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“In the city, on the West Side,” I replied.

Silence. Then, “Maybe you should come pick it up.”

The City of Buffalo is in the state that it is because people left.  People got scared and ran away.  And people are too scared to even set foot within it’s boundaries.

Angela, thank you for being an active alumnus and donating to the building’s renovation, but if you are so concerned about Lafayette High School, move back to the West Side.  Buy one of those nice homes in the Elmwood Village. Become part of the community, instead of sending letters to the Buffalo News.

Today marks the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq. 5 years, 10 months, 19 days since Bush declared mission accomplished and and end to major combat operations in Iraq. 4258 confirmed U.S. deaths. 4577 total coalition deaths. An unknown, and probably never fully known, number of Iraqi deaths.
And the fact remains:
We went in there based on a lie.
It was a motherfucking lie and yet still I see people on television defending Bush and his crew for this shit. Every goddamned day.
Every fucking time I hear someone say that this war was a good idea I have the strongest urge to punch them directly in their motherfucking neck.
As the war continues to roll on and the bodies continue to pile up I can’t help but wonder what we can even do now. Can we safely pull out now? Would the government of Iraq be stable enough? The honest answer is: No one knows. But the fact remains that we shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Afghanistan? Fine. We should have gone there. It was grossly mishandled and then ignored in favor of Iraq but I still maintain that sending troops into Afghanistan was the proper course of action. Iraq? No. There was no link between the attack on the World Trade Center and Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction. What there was is a U.S. president with the need to show up his daddy and make a name for himself and a vice president with a hunger for oil and the ability to lie until the populace is scared.
Think about how many people died because we were so easily scared.

Remember:
Even Cheney said back in 1994 that invading Iraq would be a bad idea.

When I was a kid, Christmas seemed like such a magical time of year.  Everyone seemed happy, people were buying me expensive toys (I think I got the entire Kenner Star Wars collection spread out over a few years between Christmas and birthdays) and I got a lot of time off from school.  Not bad, huh?  All because this guy named Jesus was apparently born that time of year.

As I got older, Christmas seemed to be becoming less and less about goodwill toward men, happiness, Jesus and all that I had been raised to believe it was about.  It started to be more about retail, money, buying things at discounts and showing people you cared about them by showering them with money and material things!  Family members that all but ignore each other year round were coming together, putting on a fake smile and pretending to actually care about each other for one day.

During the Holiday season you also see people being - drum roll - kind to strangers.  The homeless make out pretty well, as do the people we encounter on a professional basis.  Your doorman, your mailman, the guy who sells you your newspaper every morning all get tips above and beyond what they’d normally get year round.  We spend all year taking these people for granted but on the Holidays we pretend we care about them and their families just because it makes us feel better to do so.  Where’s all of that good will toward our fellow man the rest of the year?

Which brings me to the events of this year’s Black Friday.  Yes, the day after Thanksgiving when the greedy masses of Americans invade retail chains all across the country.   Heavily discounted merchandise inspires people to line up in front of stores as early as 2am, waiting for the gates to open and the race for cheap electronics and toys to commence.

This year, at a Long Island Wal-Mart a mass of people filled with the Holiday spirit broke down the doors and a stampede into the store killed a young employee by the name of Jdimytai Damour, who was just there to do his job.  He was instructed to let the crazed holiday shoppers in once the store opened, but they couldn’t wait for that.  They had to get IN.  They had to get their discounted Xbox and Playstation accessiories.  They had to break the doors down and trample this poor man to death.  In their efforts to give their family a Merry (and heavily discounted) Christmas, they deprived this man and his family of theirs.

The customers rushed into the store, trampling him not even giving any thought to the people around them, or the condition of this poor man who took his last breaths on the floor next to the pop machines.  They needed to get their discount TVs!  They needed the discount Malibu Barbie Dream House!  It didn’t matter that they had to kill a man in the process.

Is this what the Holidays are?  Christmas is now a holiday dedicated to greed and materialism.  It’s the season where we prove over and over again just what a shallow, materialistic culture we truly are.

I don’t know how you plan on spending this Holiday season, but I know where I’ll be.  On my couch, away from the insanity, watching bad horror films and knowing that what’s happening outside my front door is much worse than what I’m seeing on my TV screen.

So turncoat Lieberman says he’ll stop caucassing with the democrats if they take his chairmanships away.

Um… and this matters WHY?

Since he supported the party’s candidate for president?  Since he votes along with them so often?  Why is it important that he say in the caucus when he does nothing to further the goals of the democratic party, and actively works to keep them from being acheived?

Come on, Reid, boot the deadweight.  It’s not like you can count on his votes in the future, or his support for the president-elect’s agenda.  Let him bluster.  So what if he goes to the GOP.  Does anyone really think they’ll pass over a longtime Republican to give mumbly Joe a chairmanship on their side?  Shit, they picked Caribou Barbie over him on the McCain ticket!  Cut him loose, and he can see how popular he really is on either side.

So after the screaming and the jumping up and down and the tears and the people dancing in the streets (literally), I’ve had a couple days to reflect.
I really do have to give McCain credit… after the sleeze and near race-riots he presided over, after the way he inflicted Bible Spice on all of us, I think he may have saved his reputation with one of the classiest and most heartfelt concession speeches I’ve ever seen.

Good for him. I’ve never hated McCain. I hated that he was so willing to sell his soul to the Rove wing of the party after what they said about him and his kids in 2000, though, and that he let the same extremist religious fanatics run his campaign now.

And then, well, there was Obama’s speech. I don’t think we’ve seen a man like Obama on the national political stage in at least a generation. I wonder if this is how my grandparents felt listening to JFK (since, after all, my mom is 51, she was a kid when JFK and MLK were killed, so it has been that long). I figure kids will study the speeches of Barack Obama along with those of FDR, Lincoln, and JFK for generations to come.

Yes, this is a triumph for African-Americans. No question about it. But that, in and of itself, makes it a triumph for us all. It shows we have moved past the nation we were, and although I don’t expect him to take the oath of office and have racism disappear overnight, this does send a message. So many people have bigotry in their hearts, and console themselves with the belief that everyone thinks as they do, and is too afraid to say. We’ve turned the light on them now, though. Today they have to look around and see that no, most people don’t believe as they do, most people don’t have deep seeded hates, and they are in fact a member of a rapidly shrinking group. Maybe some of their beliefs will be challenged, both by seeing our president-elect and his amazing family, and by seeing how few Americans believe as they do. After all, people can change.

And there is another triumph here, one of ideology. For my entire adult life I have been told that what I believe is outside the norm, that I’m on the left fringe, that this is a conservative nation, and liberal is a dirty word. I never believed it, though. Look at what happens when social security is in danger, look at how every single politician talks about their support for free public schools… two fine socialist institutions. Look at abortion- the GOP makes it a platform issue despite the vast majority, some say over seventy percent of adults, thinking that it should be legal at least to some degree beyond just rape, incest, and a mother’s life.
More than that, for my entire adult life I have been told I am in some way not a true American. That because I live in a city, work with a computer, don’t attend church, have gay friends, whatever, I’m somehow not authentic. Real Americans live in the country, or at least the suburbs. They’re blue collar. They’re christian. They drive pickup trucks, not coupes and subcompacts. God knows Palin said enough about it over the last few weeks.
And now we know, the “unamerican” parts of America are the majority. Most of us do work in offices, we’re cube dwellers on the whole, not plumbers, and even though most people say they’re christian, on the whole we as a nation don’t go to church, we aren’t bigots, and most people who might not be actively in favor of gay rights are generally pretty much live and let live about the whole thing.

And if anyone else makes a latte crack I seriously will beat them with a seventh grade US history textbook. Since that is the year us pre No Child Left Behind students learned that the US revolution was born in coffeehouses.

It is just starting to fully sink in now.
Over the course of this election I watched, read and absorbed everything I could. Watched polls come in. Read the bloggers and journalists from both sides. Listened to people when they talked. Heard the hate and the praise. The hope and the fear. I was afraid. I was excited.
From my seat at my desk my eyes were assaulted with everything from hope so pure it made my heart ache to hatred so vile it made be clench my teeth until it hurt.
At first it seemed unlikely but over time things started looking better, more hopeful, but even then I didn’t feel content. As the polls came in for the primary run I got excited but still I felt that this wasn’t a sure thing.
Then the primary was won. I couldn’t believe it.
And I still couldn’t relax.
People screamed that he couldn’t win Hillary supporters. He couldn’t win whites. He couldn’t win Hispanics. I bit my nails.
More polls and more panic. It looked too good. Pundits talked about the Bradley effect. I didn’t buy it.
It looked close. Could we squeak by? Obama picked Biden. I loved the pick. It was perfect. But there was no southerner on the ticket. Shit. Can he grab any southern voters at all?
McCain picked Palin. Everyone with a working brain saw that pick for what it was. McCain got a small bump from the pick at first then she started to talk. Every time she opened he mouth pure bullshit fell out. I couldn’t help but laugh at her. She personally lost McCain any chance at stealing a majority of independent votes and any of the so-called Reagan Democrats. She spit hate and anger, played to the fear. She hyped up the idiots with her moronic words. But she failed. She successfully solidified the extremist fools into the main McCain support base instead of leaving them out on the fringe.
It looked bad for McCain.

Election day was stressful for me. My polling place is very close to my house and I could have voted at anytime but I waited. My wife was at work and I wanted to go as a family. So I waited. I bit my nails. I watched the news. I saw the lines. I read the stories of people crying tears of joy on the way out of their polling place. I read stories of voter caging. I was still worried.
Finally we went and voted. No wait at all. Went in, pulled levers, went out. We stopped by the Obama office after voting and it was packed. It was loud. It was full of energy. I was still worried.
Back to my couch to have a few beers and try to relax as I prepared for what I thought would be a long long night.

The numbers started creeping in as I sat there drinking my beer and chewing my lip. I stepped outside to make a few phone calls and noticed something strange. Silence. I live in a college neighborhood within throwing distance from a main road. No voices. No traffic sounds. Nothing. I have never heard it this quiet here.
OH, PA, VA, IA went blue. I screamed. More results came in. Some red, some blue. Around 10:30PM eastern my brain clicked in. Math. If CA, WA, HI went blue it was over, that was 270. We had it. My wife warned me that it was still to early to celebrate. My phone lit up with texts. Kelly was analyzing, Phil was worried.

11:00PM
The left cost goes blue! Holy shit! It is over! I’m still a bit worried though. Is this really it? It is only 11PM. No shenanigans?
A very classy concession from McCain. No speech from Palin thankfully. That is when it his me. Relief. It is over.
Another trip outside. It is now a different place. I can hear the shouts from the Obama office all the way over here. I’m smiling. I’m laughing. I’m happy. I am actually happy.
I watch people show up for the victory speech in Chicago. A massive sea of people. I don’t ever think I have ever seen that many people in one place. All the faces happy. Many of them crying. All of them united no matter their race or creed. It was amazing. The camera panned over and I saw Jesse Jackson. He was crying. It nearly killed me.

After it was over, after everyone was gone or asleep, I cried.

Ah Florida… will anyone unseat you as the WTF capital of the United States?

I try to be understanding.  I try to say “hey, they can’t help it, they’re educational system blows since most people in the state are seniors who couldn’t give a fuck about it.”

But really now, you’ve raised the bar for idiocy and ignorance.

Naming a high school after the founder of the Klan?  Classy!  Deciding to KEEP THE NAME IN 2008?  Moronic doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Now, there’s a lot of people in the article talking about history, and why the name isn’t actually offensive.  Here’s a little hint from this latte-sipping liberal.  When your school earns an F GRADE on FLORIDA assessments you are not allowed to discuss history.  or math.  or science.  or literature.  You are allowed to ask me if I want fries with that. 

Oh, and if you get bored…

5530 Firestone Rd., Jacksonville, Fl. 32244

Oh, and they’ve been kind enough to list a whole ton of phone numbers here… and I’m not saying you should call them or anything, but I am saying the area code for Jacksonville, FL is 904.

We are finally here. It was a long and amusing process. There have been a lot of exciting moments and probably an equal amount of screaming-at-the-TV moments. All of those moments are inconsequential compared to the small moment you will have when you step inside that voting booth.
Now go. Vote. This post will still be here when you come back from doing your duty as a citizen of this great nation.

Back? Voted? Got your sticker and your free coffee from Starbucks?
Good.

Before I start spitting my anger and sarcasm I would like to take a moment out to thank Madelyn Payne Dunham, the grandmother of Barack Obama. Thank you for helping to shape Senator Obama into the man that will hopefully be our next president. She got the chance to vote for her grandson in the presidential election but she sadly will not have the chance to see him lead. My heart and wll wishes go out to her entire family. Madelyn Payne Dunham was 86.

I’m going to be kind of sad once this is all over. I’ve never yelled at my television this much when I wasn’t watching hockey. This has been an exciting time for me. Nerve wracking, but exciting. I really enjoyed watching the McCain campaign venture into the inane with their bullshit attacks and fear mongering. For all the shit they threw at Obama, after all the times they tried to link him to terrorists, extremists, socialism, after all that the make an ad that ended with saying Obama wasn’t ready to be president… yet.
Yet.
The yet implies he will be ready eventually. But at the same time they want you to believe he is evil. How the hell are we supposed to take these fucksticks seriously if they refute themselves?
All the slander, all the lies, the fear mongering, the bullshit, the general douchebaggery coming out of the Republican mouthpieces to me feels frantic. And judging by the current numbers over at Pollster the American populace is ignoring it. Pollster has Obama at 291 electoral votes (273 strong, 18 lean), McCain at 142 (129 strong, 13 lean). 105 in the tossup. With that math McCain could take all of his strong states, all of his lean states, all of the toss up and, get this, all of the Obama lean states and would still lose. It would be close but he would still lose.
All that and I am still nervous. I think after the last two elections no democratic voter should feel comfortable.

One thing that does make me smile is the final Senate Score Card from fivethirtyeight.com:

That looks like good news doesn’t it?

I hope when this is over we can finally tell the Republican party what they deserve to hear:

Get the fuck out.

A lot has been made of this lately.
For those who hear the term and don’t understand, a brief history lesson: Back in 1982 the mayor of LA, the aforementioned Bradley, ran for governor of California. He was ahead in the polls and appeared poised to become the first African-American governor of the state.
And then he lost.
The theory: people told pollsters they planned to vote for him, but ultimately decided they were not comfortable doing so when in the privacy of the voting booth, presumably because of race.

So now, obviously, everyone is wondering if it will happen again.

Me, I don’t think so. If anything, we may see the reverse of it- something I’ll get into in a bit. 1982 was a LONG time ago. My sister was born that year… she’s a married accountant now! In the many years since we’ve seen some big changes in the country. We’ve seen an African-American on the supreme court, we’ve seen numerous African Americans in congress and as governors. We’ve seen not one but two African American secretaries of state- under a republican administration, no less! We’re not a perfect nation yet, but we’re not the nation we were under Ronald Regan’s first term by any stretch.

And really… if the Bradley effect was in play we would have seen it in the primaries. Or in any number of other recent races involving candidates of different races. However, the polls in the primaries were no more or less accurate than polls in previous years. Nor were polls in, for instance, MA when Patrick won his seat. If anything the polls underestimated Obama again and again, due to the youth vote being weighted based on turnouts in 2004 and not on current levels of registration. I live in a hipster neighborhood. I can assure you, kids these days love their fucked up asymmetrical haircuts, ironic shirts, and Barack Obama.

What I think we will see is a reverse of the Bradley effect. I’ll call this the JFK effect. Back in the dark ages when the earth was a molten ball of rock and JFK was running for president pollsters heard “well, yeah, I support him, but I don’t think America will elect a Catholic” again and again. It’s the “I’m not a bigot, but my neighbors are” theory. We LOVE to think we’re all sooo much more enlightened than our fellow citizens. I’m in NY, we fucking revel in that shit. Everyone’s an ignorant redneck but us.

So let’s look at North Carolina. Solid red state. Red for years. Obama was polling at about tied, and it was a nightmare for the GOP. But it looks like things are way worse than they even expected… since exit polling and registration records of people who have voted early show a ridiculous margin favoring the Democrat side. In some polls as much as 20+%. And, there’s really no historical backing to say it’ll switch around. If anything, history says it will only split further since early voting in most states, NC included, generally favors the GOP.
So what the fuck happened? Well, first off we have what may turn out to be the hallmark of this race: polls under-representing the African American and youth vote, by basing their weighting on 2004 turnouts.
And then we have my JFK effect. People in “red states” not openly supporting Obama, not calling the local office to get involved, not putting out a lawn sign or a sticker on their car, not saying a peep… because they assume their neighbors are die hard GOP supporters and don’t want to be the freak of the block. Secret, guilty closed door democrats, never realizing half the street may be in the same boat. They’re not a racist, they support Obama, but they won’t say a word to a pollster or anyone else since they figure their racist neighbors will never understand it. How many times, while canvassing, have has someone heard “you won’t find any Obama supporters around here!” at one house, and smiled because the previous three houses all promised he had long since won their vote? That’s the big joke on the streets this election, and it’s being repeated by people in nearly every state.

America isn’t ready for a Catholic president has become America isn’t ready for an African American president. People then assigned prejudices to their neighbors that turned out to be nonexistent, and I suspect we’re all doing it again. It’s 2008, let’s give each other some credit for a change, and not assume the worst of people.

Shit, it’s halloween in half an hour. Here’s a little something to crank up the aww factor, courtesy of Yes We Can (Hold Babies).