Sick of Britney and Anna
I don't guess news channels will ever be punished in the ratings for being frivolous and irrelevant. Celebrity gossip is just too popular, like it or not. I do hate the way those same uninformed people that gobble up that crap are usually the ones - a week away from an election - who complain that candidates never explain "what they're going to do" and wish there could just be more "discussion of the issues". Here's a newsflash: the issues are going on every day. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi's pissed.

Britney Spears was an idiot last Thursday, an idiot on Friday, and an idiot on both Saturday and Sunday. She was, shockingly, also an idiot on Monday. It will be news when she stops being an idiot...
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On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget...
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Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely [as Bush's budget proposes], the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

I don't mind if it's reported in the news that a model and former reality TV star passed away with some bizarre timing, or for that matter that a pop music star is perhaps losing her grip and, strangely, shaved her head. But how long does it take to mention those things? Look, I just did in one long sentence. Sure, hell, even give them top billing if it's the only way to sell papers. But do they have to take over? Does MSNBC have to provide live coverage of the legal hearing over Smith's body?