About one-fifth the news everyone else reports

It's awesome to be back with my family.

It's great to be home.

The back yard barbecue we had today was sheer joy. And it didn't take much suds to lift my spirits. My beer tolerance needs some work. Think I'll spend a good portion of my R&R time working on that...

It's always interesting to jump back into the "real world" after being gone for a significant chunk of time. The only TV news I got while deployed was FOX News (sic). My observations, therefore, should come as no surprise:

Ted Kennedy has an inoperable brain tumor? FNC didn't tell me this. I guess it's not "newsworthy" in their petty little minds. Apparently this was big news two weeks ago. That is, newsworthy to every news outlet except Rupert Murdoch's pile of shit.

Scott McClellan has published a book. Some sort of minor thing, you know, which suddenly seemed a lot bigger once I arrived home. And saw the real news networks.

Gasoline rose by 75 cents during my deployment. Of course I was aware of this, from conversations with my wife. But it didn't sink in until I saw it with my own eyes. Holy sheep feces. And it's supposed to inflate by another dollar over the summer. Joy.

I did learn a few things while watching nothing but FOX. When Dick Morris opines, his bottom lip moves in more directions than Mitt Romney's stance on abortion. Alan Colmes is more poised when he argues with Sean Insanity than I remember, though he still gets bitch-slapped occasionally. Mediocre comics with right-leaning political stances have established a late-night FNC show called the "Idiot Zone" or something.

What else, oh -- FOX News is petrified of Obama. Shemp Hannity is hilarious with his "Obama has connections with communist radicals" spin. And his "Hannity's America" show is hilariously dumb. Apparently, according to Shemp, Obama used to hang out with the Unabomber. Or something equally fabricated.

FNC wanted to get Hillary nominated, and tried for several weeks, until it became clear that's not going to happen. At this point they started asking "should Hillary run as an independent?" Ha!

I never heard a thing about Reverend Hagee. Not once in six months. You know, John McCain's Reverend Wright. Oh . . . I saw plenty about Reverend Wright, and some white Priest mocking Hillary Clinton. But Hagee – nothing. Now that I’m back in the real world, I’ve seen the Hagee clips and WOW.

None of this really comes as a surprise, but it's noteworthy.

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On "our" side of the political fence, I've noticed my friend Bartcop acting inexplicably anti-Obama. Calls Rachel Maddow "Olbermann's toady" and thinks a McCain win will "prove" Hillary should've run instead of Obama. Maybe his IQ really is 60.

Speaking of Olbermann, he's getting fat. Not extremely so, just enough for someone gone for a half a year to notice. But he's still fighting the good fight, so I say lecture on O Jolly Man.

Rachel Ray has porked up as well, and seems to have aged about ten years. The scarf ad looked like the Rachel I remembered; her "mainstream" cooking show - on the other hand - looks like it's hosted by an older sister on Prednizone or something.

Huffingtonpost.com has made some improvements to their comments feature, Stephanie Miller still rules the airwaves, eBay sucks donkeys dicks (though I use it for beer can images... heh heh), snopes.com is just as silly as ever, Daily Kos still kicks ass, and YouTube still proves a valuable resource for SHIT I JUST DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT.

One last thing - how is "morning joe" without anyone named Joe? Is Scarborough - an embarrassment to many of us Pensacolians - so powerful an NBC employee these days that he can take huge chunks of time off while his staff continues to run his namesake morning show in his absence?