There's this great painting in the Brooklyn MfA office that Joe Felice made sort of by accident. We were spray-paint stenceling a lot of binders to send out volunteer manuals, and a stencel covered in wet red and gold paint fell onto a piece of paper, leaving an outline of our logo in fiery blurred color with other bits of paint spattered about at random. Joe picked it up, recognizing the value of a nice found piece. In small red letters, he finger painted the words, "Today I Learned To Fight" in the bottom right quadrant of the paper.

I've been thinking about that piece of paper a lot lately.

I believe we can fight and I believe we can win. I'll be continuing in this for the near future as my professional occupation, and no matter where my life takes me, I don't think there's any going back to apathy or ignorance.

We will need to play hardball for a few years to keep things from getting fucked up. This means, for instance, we might need to go to the remaining 45 Democratic senators (41 of whom can block judicial nominations) and tell them if they compromise our future for the sake of their political career, we will burn them down; which we can now credibly claim to do.

We will need to stage some very media-savvy protest actions. Here's a hint: ANSWER isn't the answer, but there are smart ways to use political theater to shape the national discourse.

We will need some people to run for office; lay in some ground floor talent. We will need some people to help raise money through benefit parties and the like. We will need research, rhetoric, and most of all the paitence and committment to develop a clear set of principles which we can use to grow our numbers.

But we can do all these things. And we will. And it will be enjoyable work for the most part. The reality is we are coming from way behind in this fight. But we are learning and building and we have room to grow; they do not. And so if we want to, we can win.

I've been seeing more and more allegations of voter fraud going around. I think it's good and right to count all the votes (provisional and absentee), and I also think it's grand and necessary to audit the fuck out of electonic machines.

However, I have yet to see any actual evidence that there was organized fraud on a scale that could have tipped the balance 150,000 votes, which is what people are talking about with Ohio. That's not easy. An audit and full count is in order, but the actual mechanics of shifting the balance to that degree make it highly unlikely.

Also, I'd like to say it's highly depressing when people forward me emails containg quotes like, "It's a statistical impossibility that Bush got 8 million more votes than he got last time."

That's bullshit. It's not in any way a statistical impossibility. It's reflective of the worst stereotypes of liberal elitism. Here in the reality based community, we know there were 128 million registered voters in the 2002 election, with 80 million more of voting age but unregistered (source: census). Turnout in this election was about 115 million. There's plenty of room in there for anyone to pick up 8 or 10 million more supporters just by shifting alliances among the already registered, to say nothing of bringing in new people.

The fact is, there are a lot of people out there who really like Bush, or at least voted for him. Believe it. Contemplate it. Figure out what to do.

My friend Laura Mannino who makes funny things happen back in NYC got interviewed on the Gothamist Blog. Sweet!

I did my job, but somehow seniors went for Bush and a few million never-before-voted hardcore cultural conservatives showed up, and that was enough to tip the balance.

But old people die, and pretty soon they'll run out of gay things to bash, and then we'll have our chance to run the country. All we have to do is keep them from fucking it up too badly; no small task, but hardly impossible.

Message for the next 2 to 4 years: hold the line.

For the record, I'm not seriously considering moving to another country. That's a really difficult thing to do. What I am considering is a red state road trip this summer, and being part of an orgnized movement to reform the Democratic party.

We've all earned some down time; so I'll be moving a little slower and leaning into the melancholy for a while. If you're so inclined, go ahead and do it too.

It's all bad.

It looks like the youth broke for Kerry, but may not have turned out in greatly increased numbers. It would also appear that Rove's 4-million+ legion of evangelical voters was real, and well distributed. "Moral Values" was a top issue among voters, and that shit is nowhere on the pre-election polls. The answer is that fucktons of people who weren't being polled who really cared about moral values showed. 9 anti-gay constitutional amendments passed through the states; these bills were part of the GOP strategy, and it all interlocks.

The mass media isn't liberal biased, but it is biased against fundimentalist christian subculture, if only because most of those folk think TV is Satan's medium (700 club excepted). So those of us -- I'm looking at you, liberal blogosphere -- who take their cues from Big Media never saw it coming. Never detected it. Neither did Zogby. There's a lot of us, fifty million or more, who didn't. But there it is.

This is America, and it belongs to the conservative movement for a while longer yet. I'm sad, ashamed and afraid, but life is also a lot bigger than politics. I'll be fine, and more likely than not so will you. The people who will get the squeeze soon are poorer, less educated and more marginalized than you or I. The question is whether or not I'll be happy living in a country like this.

It's an open question.

It ends today:

Vote: Find Your Spot And Hit It

Feels good to do, and your local hipster bar will probably give you a free beer later if you get the "I Voted" sticker.

I think everything's going to work out, just as long as we really do work it. I'll be on the phone and on the blog starting in about 9 or 10 hours.

Here's what's making it possible to sleep tonight: Early Voting, the Gallup polling company (and their lovable bias), and most of all cellphones.

Yeah, it's like that. We got Ohio all up in check I think. And with Ohio, I'm pretty sure we win. So sleep tight and kick ass tomorrow.

Leave It To Bush! Episode 2

Seems a little more hasty and over-the-top compared to the great subtlty and amazing well-cut voices of the Gary Busey debut. Still gets a weird laugh though.

Guardian 'The liberal elite hasn't got a clue'

The novel - researched, as usual, down to the last expletive - concerns a young world speaking "fuck patois", loaded with creatine and cocaine, numbed by PlayStation 3, and charged by alcohol, the "vile spleen" of rap and, above all, ubiquitous sex between the heirs and heiresses to privilege in America.

See, Tom, here's the thing. Playstation 3 doesn't exist. And a lot of that other stuff sounds like the kinds of overdrawn (a.k.a. "made up") characterizations that a generation gap breeds. So either you don't have your facts straight, or you're writing science fiction. But Golly, that's not really the result of "painstaking research" in the same way your early work was, now is it? Back when you had resepect; when people dubbed your and Terry and Hunter's work, "The New Journalism?" No. I'm afraid it's not.

What happened, Tom? You used to be cool. Back in the day you revealed stuff that really happened. Now you're an old man writing about college students.