SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: I WAS BORN A WINNER EDITION.

Two plus two is on my mind

 Well -- that’s wasn’t too bad of a week, was is?

I talked about the meaning of it in the first flush of victory at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down -- you can read that here for free. But now, four days later (and a day late for Friday ‘Round-the-Horn, sorry!), let me elaborate a little:

First, it could have been even better. Sounds like I’m getting greedy, I know, but I’m not the first to notice that Republican gerrymanders weren’t all “dummymanders” that sapped their own constituencies -- with the blue waves in Texas and Tennessee, for example, Democrats arguably should have won more but for the Republicans’ rotten boroughs. (And Democrats's own gerrymandering seemed to work out for them in California!) National legislation on gerrymandering that can beat the Supreme Court’s stupid Louisiana v Callais decision (or, failing that, packing the Court, which we should do anyway) remains a must.

(Also, it’s not just GOP gerrymandering that’s a problem -- read this Democracy Docket story on voter suppression in Mississippi, where Scott Colom should be running away with it instead of sweating the slow vote count. Many if not all Republican states pull this kind of thing, and that’s why all the new Democratic governors and secretaries of state are welcome and have to come in with guns blazing.)

And speaking of musts, Democrats absolutely cannot let the centrist dipshits fuck this up by bamboozling them into a go-slow, hands-across-the-aisle agenda in the new term.  As Dylan Gyauch-Lewis points out at the American Prospect, the Yglesioids are already using fuzzy math to claim that strong progressives like El-Sayed didn’t win by enough and that’s why we should put up with a pale blue Congressional agenda that leaves ICE to rampage and our trans constituents betrayed, and generally does kinder-gentler conservatism. Balls to that. Guns blazing. 

The Prestige Press is still trying it on, with the New York Times giving ham-faced far-right pundit Erick Erickson space to plead for comity and pretend he hasn’t been a Just the Tip Trumper for ten years. And this weekend the Good Grey Lady descended further into self-parody with this:

Guess they ran out of diners! Keep your head on a swivel and your eyes on the prize, comrades. In a way this is our best shot since Reagan ruined everything, because everyone's seen too much shit to settle for the half-loaves of the Clinton era and the naïveté of the Obama era. And ain't that news?