Schadenfreude: It Only Gets Better!

It's now been over three weeks since President Barack Obama's decisive victory over Mitt Romney and the army of Right Wing haters.  Never have so many failed so miserably.  And fail they did on Novemeber 6--from the filthy greedy plutocrats,  to the religious right,  to the Tea Party phonies unhinged by a liberal president of color.

The delusion about what happened continues. They think they just have to run a right wing Latino like Marco Rubio and all will be fine.  For the right wing in America, their small minded philosophy of conservatism never fails, it is mortal men that fail it.  Conservatism has always been with us--to oppose freedom for blacks, workers, women, immigrants, gays et al.  It's always there with its boot on the necks of the underclass; its always at the ready to do the bidding of the rich and powerful.  On November 6, 2012 a huge majority for these polarized times told the right wing and its minions to go fuck itself.

Of course, when you are funded by billionaires the threat is always omnipresent especially in off-year elections.  But liberalism triumphed on Novemeber 6 in a way it had not since November 1964 when LBJ destroyed Goldwater.  That is why the wingnuts are devastated.  They know what happened a few weeks ago.  They can blame all the poor people and welfare grabbing moochers all they want--except when its pointed out that the only age group Romney carried contained most of his government dependent  47%--the over 65 crowd.

The wingnuts hate Obama and hate liberal America and want it to fail. That's how they think.  They are tribal, they are insular and they are still in shock.  They are still unskewing Nate Silvers polls.  Right now, they are still counting votes nearly a month afte rthe election. Obama is at 51% of the vote and Romney is slipping at close to 47%., and the votes from California keep coming.   Watching them suffer is as great a pleasure and one can imagine.

Hard Surge

The battering that New York and New Jersey received at the hands of Hurricane Sandy has been devastating.  I live on the far west side near the Javits Center in one of the new towers that has sprung up in the growing Hudson Yards neighborhood over the past few years.  In the crucial hours when the storm pounded the Hudson I could see the water rising and flooding into Hudson River Park in the areas where the Circle Line, World Yacht and the NJ Ferries are docked.  But  just a few blocks south on 31st Street I could see that  Ohm, a tall residential tower that unfortunately has gone dark since Monday night.  I feel very fortunate I'm not one of them.  Con Ed has yet to restore power to hundreds of thousands of residents in lower Manhattan.

Yesterday, I decided after being cooped up inside since Sunday afternoon, I got onto my bike and rode downtown through Battery Park City and then followed the river line past the South Street Seaport and then up through the Lower East Side, the East Village and Murray Hill.  All the areas I rode through were dark.  You could tell people were getting frustrated.  I saw some filling up their large water cooler sized plastic jugs from an open fire hydrant.

One other remarkable site, at least for Manhattan, was what I saw at one of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel entrances--a truck submerged in water.  Lots of water.