News Embargo: Fail

I almost made it through the self-imposed forty-eight-hour news embargo. Almost. About forty hours into it, I went online to find a transcript of Hillary Clinton's concession speech and then I thought, oh, what the hell, I'll just check the news.

And then it was over. I was back to being a crank on the Times and I even opened an account at The Huffington Post so that I might have another place to more fully express my inner crank. And at The Huffington Post, people are far more liberal than they are over at the Times; I actually don't have to work as hard to suppress my vitriol and my comments still make it past the moderator. For example, in response to a column in which the author gave voice to his fear that Obama was going to lose the election, I wrote:

You're right. We are in trouble. A party of multimillionaires and millionaire wannabes have convinced a whole lot of us that they have small town values. They want to sit down and have a beer with us, even if it means leaving their gated communities where they live to avoid having to rub elbows with us. Even the millionaire from New York has us convinced that Obama is too cosmopolitan to be president. (Of course we all know that "cosmopolitan" is Republican Code for Black. Translation: Obama is too black to be president.) These people have been raping the nation for years and they've come up for air long enough to ask with a smirk for more permission to continue to rape the country. And we're going to give it to them. I am ashamed for my country right now.

Trust me: That would never have been posted at the Times. Nor would this comment I wrote in response to a Huffington Post columnist who wondered why we are so distrustful of Obama's education:

Perhaps one of the reasons that we don't trust education is because our current president is a graduate of an Ivy League institution and he can barely speak English and lacks the critical thinking skills that we attribute to lesser primates. Also, in this race, Obama's fighting many demons: Educated blacks are "uppity" and the traditional racist values of our society want to take down uppity blacks to the extent that even a mental lightweight like Palin with her BA from Podunk U. can stand against him, so long as she is white and middle-class. White, dumb, and middle/upper class (read: rich) will always trump black, intelligent, middle/lower class (read: poor). Always. Welcome to America. Let's change it.

I'm just so incredibly frustrated by the presidential race this year that I've begun writing two lists. One is a list of exactly why Palin's nomination makes me absolutely livid. The other is a list of what we sane people can do when Palin/McCain are elected.

The New York Times recently featured a front page article about the etiquette behind McCain's hugging Palin and kissing his wife. The Times invited comments from readers and received about four hundred responses. Readers were uniformly enraged that this kind of article is what is passing for news when there are bigger fish to fry (the economy, for example, or the war in Iraq). My favorite comment:

I believe the protocol is:

Kiss the wife.

Hug the running mate.

Screw the American people.

— j'adoube, Alameda, CA

Until Then, Life As Usual

I'm house-sitting now for Kelly Workout. I'm taking care of the little herd of cats she has after the recent adoption of two stray kittens. Normally, I really like house-sitting because it's nice to have access to someone else's snack stash and cable television. (The Brain loves nothing so much as it loves an afternoon of junk food and junk TV.) But this time the cable TV, with its twenty-four hour news channels, is making me a bit crazy. Anyway, other than the cable news addiction I've developed, it's life as usual I guess. Today's bright spot was the massage I had this morning. (I traded a house-sitting gig for a couple of massages.) And, oh, let's see, I went to the gym with my niece. We went for pizza after, but we did work out before.