It's taken 52 years, but my patience might finally be rewarded; Chuck Schumer thinks so, anway

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In 1972 I voted in a presidential election for the first time; I hated Nixon, and I’d figured out by then, even at 18-years-old, that McGovern was nuts, so what to do? I discovered that a man named John Hospers was running on the Libertarian ticket, and he promised to “take a meat ax to the federal budget”. That seemed like a good idea to me at the time — it still does — but it wasn’t easy to cast my ballot for him. Hosper’s Libertarian party only managed to make it on to two states’ ballots that year, and Connecticut wasn’t one of them. At the time, our politicians had rigged the voting process to make it as difficult as possible to vote for a write-in candidate: you couldn’t vote directly for your choice but had to somehow identify and write in the name of three (six?) designated “electors” instead. I managed to do that, albeit with great difficulty, so in addition to the 3,674 votes Hospers officially received, he gained at least more: mine, chiming in from Connecticut.

Jospers lost — the election must have been fixed — and Washington’s ruling class accelerated its spending to levels that would have been unimaginable in 1972. But now, finally, there’s a glimmer of hope, and all the proper people are terrified. Good.