I'm still pissed off that a year and a half before the next presidential election, half of all the news I hear is about jockeying in this race. It's manufactured by those who make money off news, which not coincidentally is where the vast majority of those grotesquely large fund raising war chests will go. Media companies and the candidates are locked in this weird embrace, not quite symbiotic but more mutually parasitic. This is what Gerry Spence is on about lately, how the relaxed media ownership rules and relaxed political requirements of media companies make true democracy impossible. What we end up is something like an oligarchy, where a handful of media owners and a handful of rich Americans work together to make sure only the richest citizens are truly represented.

Living in a state with an early primary, we're getting an eyeful of this sad process. John McCain and Sam Brownback have both spoken at places so close to my house I could walk there. Barack Obama was about 40 miles away yesterday. I took a phone poll yesterday that was all about democratic issues, but I got the vibe that maybe the poll was commissioned by Obama's people. I can't cite specifics but something about it felt like that. It was boring and I was tempted to hang up but I wanted to get my datum in there where I feel about the issues. On a scale from 0 to 10, I gave a 0 to all the questions about "how important is faith to you in this election?" If there is one thing I don't like about Obama, it is the incessant chiding about our faith and values.

A lot of the questions were framed about "restoring moral values in our country" which seemed tilted to me, because it came from the perspective that moral values have been eroded generally. I think most people in this country do not have moral values that are in question. That is reserved for the handful of people that think torturing people to get useless information is a worthwhile pursuit, that the only way to preserve our liberty is to reduce our liberty, that risking the lives of our fighting men and women while systematically siphoning the treasury into the hands of military contractors is the way of the future, and that rebuilding Baghdad is more important than rebuilding New Orleans. Those sons of bitches have morals that are questionable as to whether they exist and they need a long time out of government to contemplate that.