I have purged most of political weblogs from my Bloglines account since the election, but there are a few that I do still read. One of my favorites is Winning Argument, which is brilliant in both concept and execution. If you’re not reading it, you should be.

Most developers I’ve worked with lately take advantage of open source software when they can to make their jobs easier. Using somebody else’s library to parse XML or to connect to an HTTP server or manage a database connection pool is a lot quicker than writing that stuff yourself, and is probably more likely to be less buggy than anything you’d write anyway. One aspect of open source software that I think gets less attention is that it’s a great learning tool, and not just if you contribute to the projects.

Diving into the code for some of the libraries I’ve been using lately (particularly Spring) has significantly changed the way I program. Here’s a concrete example. I’ve never been one who does a lot of superclassing when I program in Java, because I thought it was messy. But in Spring, they extend classes all over the place, and I’ve started taking that approach in my code to a much greater extent. All of a sudden, now that I have a fairly robust set of classes that I can extend, I can get things done a heck of a lot faster than I could before. I used to be allergic to those sorts of tall object hierarchies, but now I’ve come around to the opposite point of view.

Interestingly, I didn’t go into this wanting to learn how Spring does things and adapt to it, rather I was just trying to figure out how the framework did something and couldn’t help but absorb some of the design choices they made by osmosis. I’ve long thought that the worst developers I’ve worked with are those who look at the same set of code (that they probably wrote in the first place) and don’t get the chance to learn by looking at work done by their peers. Utilizing open source software, and studying the source code to solve problems, can take the place of working on a large team, which is something I haven’t done for some time.

Here’s how John Ashcroft signed off as Attorney General:

The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.

Obviously this is just wrong. If that were the case, we would have never even had a 9/11. And as far as I know, crime still exists. But more importantly, doesn’t this diverge from the accepted Republican talking points? If those goals were already achieved, why did the President campaign on the idea that we faced a dangerous ongoing fight against terrorism that still threatens our very existence?

Firefox 1.0 is out today, and the download site actually seems to be working pretty well.

Howard Zinn: The Optimism of Uncertainty. Something actually encouraging.

So in the process of dealing with last Tuesday, I came to an important realization, and it actually made me feel a lot better. It’s pretty obvious, but I think a lot of people are having trouble getting there. I know I was. Here it is: I’m not responsible for getting Democrats elected. There are paid professionals who are in charge of that. They have to figure out which candidates can win. They have to come up with a message that will appeal to the majority in any electorate. They have to raise the money to run the ads and pay the campaign workers and buy the bumper stickers. None of that is my job.

More importantly, there’s no reason for me to try to pretend to be something I’m not in order to help Democrats get elected. That means that when I’m talking to people, I don’t have to moderate my views to make it seem like I’m more “reasonable” than I really am. Those of you who read this might be confused, because I don’t really bother with moderation when I’m writing for this site. But believe me, when I talk to actual human beings face to face, I generally strike the pose that many liberals do, which is that I’m a moderate who agrees with them on most things and is still going to vote for a Democrat. I have no idea whether that persuades anyone to vote for the candidates I support, but it certainly isn’t any fun for me. Going along to get along sucks.

Ultimately, I have a set of principles that changes very slowly, if at all. My views on how to best serve those principles changes more often, as I get new information. And how I prioritize those principles changes as well (since they’re sometimes in conflict). I vote for the candidates that represent the least compromise of my principles. What I think now is that it’s a lot more important to talk about my principles than to talk about the candidates who are at best imperfect servants of my principles (and probably of their own principles as well).

One thing I’ve detected among liberals after this election is that there seems to be a general sense of outrage that conservatives came out of the booth and said they voted in favor of moral values. I hope that sticks in the craw of liberals everywhere, because as I wrote the other day, we’re values voters too, even if we don’t always think about it that way. This election, I think, has made people start thinking about it that way again. And from here on out, I plan on talking about it that way, regardless of who I’m conversing with. I wasn’t born with the principles that I have, I arrived at them through experience and contemplation, and I’m proud of them. And the best thing about them is that I get to keep them regardless of who’s in the White House or who has a Congressional majority. I hope other liberals feel the same way.

So I was thinking yesterday about Republicans and how they vote for candidates that share their values (or profess to) rather than voting in their economic self interest. There’s a whole book that was written about this phenomenon, and plenty of liberals think that middle class and lower middle class Republicans are stupid for placing their values above their pocketbook. It was then that it hit me that I’m in exactly the same category as those Republicans.

I don’t vote for Democrats because it’s in my own self interest. I’m a white male American citizen with an income above the median income in this country. I have no kids and am almost guaranteed never to have any. Economically speaking, the Republican party probably helps me out more than the Democrats. But I never vote for Republicans, because they don’t share my values. It was then that it hit me that I’m a full fledged member of the liberal elite. That’s what conservatives call people who vote for Democrats based on values rather than their own self interest. I feel special.

If I ever get rich, I’ll get promoted to limousine liberal. One can hope.

Well, I don’t feel any better than I did yesterday, although I did get a full night’s sleep. Yesterday, the adjective I used to describe my general emotional state was “shattered.” I honestly don’t feel any better today. Honestly, as an American, I don’t know where to go from here. When Bush was “elected” in 2000, I told everyone I knew that liberals always win in the end. Women’s suffrage, cleaning up the environment, giving real rights to workers, supporting civil rights for minorities. Much has been accomplished on the liberal ledger in the past hundred years. And I felt like decades from now, the causes of today would be the wins of yesterday. Honestly, I don’t feel that way any more. Over the past four years, we’ve given up some gains, and over the next four years, we may give up more.

And then who’s to say what happens next? If you’re in the group that believes that at least the Republicans will have to own their mistakes for the next four years, and will tumble in 2008, wake up. Where’s your evidence. George W. Bush put up a record of abject and consistent failure at basically everything for four years, and he was enthusiastically embraced by the majority of voters. Yes, it was a slim majority, but it was a clear majority. Does anyone really think that anything he does in the next four years will change those people’s minds? Which red state are the Democrats going to take in 2008? The biggest change in this election was the Repubilcans putting together a Get Out the Vote effort that is just as good as the ones that the Democrats have relied on for years. I’m not sure how the Democrats are going to respond to that.

One thing I know for sure is that if anyone talks to me about the “wisdom of the American people” within arm’s reach, they’re liable to get punched in the face.

Tim Bray answers a serious question that I would have liked to have asked today. The question: what’s it like to live in Canada?

Jim Kuntsler says it all:

We couldn’t form a plausible opposition to those who act as if the future doesn’t exist.

Or, if you prefer, Adlai Stevenson said it all when, at an event during the 1956 Presidential campaign, a woman shouted, “You have the vote of every thinking person!” Stevenson shouted back, “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!”