UFR: Window washer

Chilly, gray, and raining. At the corner, there is a stop sign which, according to a lawyer friend of mine, is probably illegal; whether out of principle or not, cars tend to barely stop there, even when someone is in the crosswalk. Today, as an impatient driver passed right in front of me, I noticed something odd: A rainy day, and he had the window open. Then I saw that he had one arm out the window and was wiping the edge of his windshield with a kleenex or cloth while he steered one-handed, leaning forward and straining to see through the glass.

Grasping

monshu wants everyone to know that following careful consideration (and the strategic application of high-quality Swiss chocolate) he has decided not to "defriend" me. I had him over for lomo adobado last night and we got into a three-hour discussion of party politics, democracy and democratisation, nationalism, decolonialisation, social evolution, and the future of mankind. As usual with such conversations, no firm conclusions were reached, but we both felt very satisfied with our own erudition afterwards.

Afterwards, I called back my sister to plan our upcoming family wedding weekend and we ended up dissecting the elections. She lives in a swing state, so her experience of them was about as different from mine as it's possible to find. For starters: Two(!) calls from Laura Bush urging her to vote for highly-qualified and morally-upstanding local candidates. Federer, the Republican candidate for an open House seat (Gephardt's old district), mailed her a copy of a brochure distributed by Carnahan to GLB supporters along with a letter decrying his opponent's lax moral values. He lost, as did the other conservative running for the other open seat, but Blunt took the governor's mansion in a hotly contested race. No anti-gay marriage amendment passed--only because this had already been taken care of in the primaries.

deFriending total stands at: 2. I'm sorry to see rootbeer1 go, but I understand that he's following kitchenbeard's call for a full-on boycott of anyone associated in any way with the Republican Party. (They're in SF. They can afford that luxury.)

I was going to compose a post today expounding on the painful truth that, if you really are flabbergasted by the election results, then it only goes to show how out of touch you are with vast stretches of the American electorate. Fortunately, impeccably progressive topaz_munro tackled this already, giving it a much more positive spin then I think I would've been able to. (Edit: Be sure to scroll down to forceful response by jacflash, which says a lot of what I've been saying only better.) For the past year, I've been grumbling about the number of people I run into who seem to spend most of their time in self-contained progressive enclaves and left-wing echo chambers, failing to make any real effort to comprehend people who view things dramatically differently than they do. Well, here's the call to action: It's time to stop disparaging "religious nuts," "NASCAR dads," and "security moms" and redouble our efforts to determine how it is we've failed to win them over to our causes. They're not making the same effort to understand you and your ideas? Tough; the simple fact is that you need them more than they need you.