My week-long political-news boycott’s done. I’m feeling a little better now. I’m not gonna let some stupid election get in the way of my future, and the future of the land I love.

Yeah, there were voting irregularities again. A few political bloggers have suggested a wholesale, multi-state sabotage of the election process. Greg Palast claims another stolen election. These allegations have little tangible backing evidence; but, of course, that just causes the allegers to say it proves what slick operators the alleged fixers are.

I once wrote that if “our side” lost the 2004 election, there might not be a 2008 election. I now realize that was foolish. We’ll still have elections, all right. They might be as fair and open as those in PRI-era Mexico, but we’ll have ’em.

Mexico’s progressive/reform movement broke through its country’s corrupt one-party system, working from without. So can we.

For as long as I can remember, US liberals dreamed of a strong and paternalistic federal government that would be the font of all social progress. (There’s a possibly apocryphal story of an early-’70s NOW manifesto, two thirds of whose items began with the phrase “The federal government should….”) These days, we’ll have to “route around” the feds and their corporate sponsors, just as the Internet was designed to “route around” regional outages.