If you haven’t read A View from A Broad yet, you should. From the beginning. It’s that good, and that compelling, and all that a blog can be. Everyone, from either side of the political aisle, should read it.

I’ve been thinking about the huge waste of time it is for our country to be politically polarized. I think the Religious Right has hijacked the Republican Party. Or maybe we’re actually in a three-party system now (a political threeway: very complicated relations between bedfellows). Which would mean we have the Democratic Party (note: it’s not the Democrat Party, you mokes) and the Republican Party… and the Theocratic Party, slightly farther to the right of Genghis Khan, but “saved.”

“If everyone from Blue states and Red states started talking and working together again, we’d be able to form a more Purple union.”

That quote isn’t original – it’s a mashup of a couple of off-the-cuff jokes from Michael Feldman’s “Whad’ya Know?” public radio show. Michael, more or less on the fly, decided to scrap the usual quiz format and take calls from people in either Red or Blue states, put them together on a conference call that could be heard on the broadcast, and make them converse and ask each other about their lives. It was quite funny, since he kept cutting people off instead of putting them on conference-hold, but he never did succed in finding an actual Republican in a Red state – they were all Blues for whom ::NPR is a cultural and informational lifeline. He could only chuckle ruefully and say “Well… public radio listeners.” As in, of course they’ll tend to be Democrats. Still, it was pretty funny, and may well have resulted in some lonely Democrats from far-flung Red states connecting with each other.