It's Federal Primary Day! Let's Go Vote! (FOR CHARLES BARRON)
It's all happening today! The race of the century! Today in the 5th, 6th, 7th, the 8th, the 9th, the 13th, the 16th, it is primary day for Congressional seats and stuff. SO I KNOW you're busily hitting the polls today.
BUT MOSTLY THE 8TH! Where Jerrold Nadler has been shunted over to the 10th, the new district created to gerrymander poor people or whatever, I have no idea. (We lost two seats in redistricting is what happened. And like, the 10th is approximately one million percent Democratic.) Anyway, leaving it open for fun people to run, like today's face-off between the stunningly handsome Hakeem Jeffries and the stunningly fun Charles Barron.
Fun facts about Charles Barron:
• He does not actually hate Jews.
• He is a good time.
• He should absolutely be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. LET'S VOTE THIS THING ON.
If you don't know what your new district looks like (and probably you don't?) go here!
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/03/20/nyregion/new-york-redistricting.html
It is interesting to me that the court-imposed districts actually make total sense for once upsate, or at least they look like they make sense to this former upstate resident, i.e., Buffalo and Niagara falls and their inner suburbs are in one district, Rochester and its suburubs are in a nother, and the rural/exurban areas around them are in another, instead of like it was before, where there was their weird tentacle linking the black areas of Buffalo with the black areas of Rochester. NYC districts still look kind of weird, though? Though a lot less weird than the old versions!
@jfruh Also, here's a handy page on the NYC Board of Elections site where you can locate your district, along with whatever's on the ballot there (if anything). Useful for me, 'cause I now find myself in the 12th district, which used to be repped by Nydia Velazquez. She's getting primaried by some dude named Erik Martin Dilan, about whom all I know is that his campaign is bankrolled almost entirely by a group of NYC's biggest real estate developers…so most likely he's bad news. BUT…due to redistricting, Velazquez now represents the 7th district, so I'm out of luck as far as supporting her. However, if you now find yourself in the 7th, have at it!
Charles Barron: Endorsed by The Awl and David Duke.
Apparently, he must be doing something right.
@Lockheed Ventura: I read on the internet that they don't put a picture of an awl on the site because it looks too much like a KKK hood.
@SidAndFinancy No, the picture of the awl looks too much like THE SWORD OF ISLAM.
@Lockheed Ventura Sharia Awl.
• He would pair with Bobby Rush to create sorely needed Congressional Former Black Panther Members Whose Politics Have Moderated, Relatively Speaking, Caucus.
@mmmark CORRECT.
So I assume this means TheAwl is pro-Gaddafi and anti-marriage equality as well!
@deepomega Also pro-Mugabe! Fun!
@kilgub Choire's loyalty to men's shirts with mandarin collars — the only kind of shirt Charles Barron even owns, from what I've seen — has clearly overwhelmed everything else, here. Also seriously Hakeem Jeffries is great and everyone should vote for him.
@David Roth Jeffries is an unimpressive grandstander who goes around releasing meaningless press releases about stupid issues like neighborhood names, while staying silent on important issues like the stadium and never, in my experience, showing up to neighborhood events, community board meetings, and the like. Even Clarke, who is a creature of the Brooklyn Dem machine, is better. I am glad I missed being redistricted into the area he's running in, because given the choice between voting for him and voting for a crazy person, I might well have just stayed home.
@deepomega I know, I know. But I'm not a single issue voter! It's complicated. Sometimes you have strange bedfellows.
Wait, I can't even tell what is going on with this anymore. Is Choire being funny?
I was literally walking out the door to run errands and vote Jeffries, but am I somehow overlooking some legitimate political reason to vote for Barron? That he says amusingly horrible things all of the time is not a legitimate reason. I've got far left tendencies, but it seems to me that a bland liberal (whom Ed Towns hates) is preferable to Barron, who if he wins would be a tailor-made gift to the Fox News right for whenever they wanted to frighten white people on slow news days.