The best thing to do this election year, is cancel your cable, disconnect, and try to stay as far away from media as you can.  Right now I am getting no newspapers – no Detroit Free Press, no Detroit News, no Wall Street Journal, no New York Times; no magazines – no Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report -  or other useless drivel.  I only watch the Daily Show on the internet, and I am finding life and politics to be a lot easier to take.  I got a car last year.  The car came with a free year of XM satellite radio, which proved to be useless, and even maddening at times.  I have not had cable tv for years.  Cable and XM seem to share a common malady – hundreds of channels and nothing worth seeing or hearing.  Now I have no TV.  I have not missed it.  And radio  has turned into Tea Party Disneyland.  You got Rush Limbaugh, giving voice to the desires of the bigoted and unintelligent, which is good I guess, because even the bigoted and unintelligent need a champion.  Lord knows the billionaire class needs them to keep working class people complaining and venting about other working class people.  In Detroit we have Mitch Albom, who is Rush Limbaugh, but eloquent and with a college degree, and who scabs when unions strike and writes crappy, sappy books.  There are other local blowhards on AM 1270 here, but I did not stick around long enough to find out the call letters nor the blowhards names (apologies to said blowhards for not having the courtesy to note their names).

So I am unplugging.  And you know what?  Birds still sing.  Grass still grows.  The sun still shines, although not often enough in Michigan.  Life is good.