Most of the content of this site is geared toward red-in-the-face arguments about politics or red-in-the-face bouts of testing new types of liquor that the writers here have found (I had a great new boubon a few weeks ago that a fellow writer and I found in a Dupont Circle wine shop, and can’t remember the name - more later), but we are going to switch it up a bit today and make sure that anyone who reads our site remembers some of the things that really matter - life, love, hope, faith and second chances just to name a few.

Tricky those Sulzbergers at The New York Times… First their editorial page slams Rudy Giuliani and endorses John McCain, only to have their political reporters drop the scarlett letter on him. I stumbled on the article Wednesday night by chance, apprarently right after they posted it, and I couldn’t figure out why the media’s collective head hadn’t exploded with excitement over it.

Then the 10 o’clock news came on and it all began.

There is so much that can be said, and I don’t think anyone would appreciate me rambling on and on about it, but I would like to point out a few important points.

With John McCain’s win in Florida, for the first time in around seven years, I am reminded of the amazing benefit of the electoral college and all that it has spawned in American politics - in particular the primary process that mirrors it. If it were not for the small rural states that began the primaries, we could have ended up with Rudy Giuliani in the White House.

When Giuliani decided on his “big state” strategy to win the Republican nomination, I was skeptical, yet nervous. I am not a fan of the overwhelming power that Iowa and New Hampshire hold in the presidential election process and think we need a change, but at the same time, I realize the benefit it provides in letting states that are not New York, California and Florida actually have a say in the election process.

If it were not for the state-by-state primary process, everything that is not a major coastal population center (including the Great Lake coasts), would get ignored almost entirely. For a while, I was worried that Giuliani had figured a way to outsmart the conventional wisdom of campaigning in the cornfields and living rooms and that the man who doesn’t include more to a sentence than a noun, a verb and 9/11 might actually end up winning the nomination. However, tonight, after the 2000 election when the electoral college elevated the Moron to the Oval Office, its little sister, the state-by-state primary starting with Iowa and New Hampshire has redeemed the process.

For full disclosure, I am a red state liberal who happens to prefer city life personally. I have spent around 4/5 of my life living in the Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi even though I now live in New York. So while I hated to see Bush lose the popular vote and win the White House in 2000, I understood why the process is the way it is - unlike Hillary Clinton and her shrill screeches against it in her first year in the Senate. Without the electoral college and the states’ primary process, the voices of Iowans and Nebraskans and Alabamians and others would be lost amid the glamor and glitz of New York and Los Angeles-based campaigns.

Now, with McCain’s win in Florida due to the momentum he built up winning in the great states of New Hampshire and South Carolina, maybe Giuliani can realize that all those people he ignored and didn’t care about in Iowa and New Hampshire actually do matter. If you want to be president of these United States, you can’t just understand life in the city; you also have to understand life in the country. This country is about more than New York and L.A. It’s about Omaha and Birmingham and Tulsa and Portsmouth and Cedar Rapids and thousands of other small cities and towns across the country.

Go back to New York, Rudy. The rest of the country doesn’t want you there either.

For the second time this winter, I have woken up like a kid on Christmas morning only to end up with disappointment stealing my joy. (In case you are wondering, neither morning was Christmas morning). As I went to bed last night, I again checked my computer and weather.com, and saw that they were predicting 1-2 inches of snow by morning commute time for New York City, followed by another 4-6 inches before noon.

But what did I find when I woke up this morning and scurried to the windows in my pajamas?

RAIN!!! MORE DAMN RAIN!!!

Honestly, how long can weathermen and weatherwomen pull this scam? I must have checked weather.com four times yesterday to make sure the forecast hadn’t changed for Monday, and sure enough, it never changed - each time inflating my dreams of skipping to work in the fresh snow before it turned into big gray heaps on the sidewalks.

That is four more times than I normally ever check the weather on a Sunday. Sometimes at work during the week I check it once before going to buy my lunch to decide if I need to really bundle up or not, but generally I MIGHT check it 4 times during an average a week. Yet, thanks to their meteorological propaganda, I checked it FOUR TIMES in one day. I can only imagine how many times school kids checked the Greater New York weather yesterday on TV or online.

The meteorological powers that be must make a fortune this time of year - all from taking an average rainstorm and turning it into the “BLIZZARD OF [insert year here].” I once took a fishing trip to Titusville, Florida near Cape Kennedy and stayed in a hotel room that looked right across the water at the space shuttle launch pad. Since there was no launch planned, it was just any other hotel room in Florida that had a nice view. But if we had been there during a launch, the nightly rate would have at least tripled for the same room. Our fishing guide said that sometimes to boost the economy, NASA postpones launches for a day to give a nice boost to the local economy due to all those people to staying in Titusville for just one more night to see a shuttle launch.

That’s what I think meteorologists must due for their stations and websites - from the National Weather Service down to this guy. They claim snow to quadruple the hits on their site or ratings of their station. Hell, maybe we should just let The Onion take the place of USA Today so that we can say that everyone always reads the news.

*Global warming sucks too, but this is all meteorologists’ fault.

OK, I know I have said in the past that Ron Paul adds nothing of any value to the intelligent discourse of the presidential race, but I have to recant that statement. After watching the ABC/Facebook debate tonight and watching that nutty backwoods conservative scream over and over about the Iraq War and the welfare state, I have to say, he’s a hell of a lot of fun to watch. I don’t know how much longer he can last, but I almost want to give money to his campaign to watch the fireworks continue.

On domestic issues, I am about as opposed to him as I can be. I think he is a moron to want to cut the federal government as much as he wants to (that’s not to say it couldn’t use a little trim here and there). However, on foreign policy, while I disagree with his isolationist stance as a whole, there are some good and sound messages in there that we should take to heart.

The rest of the field fell all over themselves to say that Al Queda didn’t attack us because we have bases in Muslim countries, while Ron Paul was man enough to say that was the main reason it happened. Of course, none of them were able to say that it could have been a combination of that and the values that we hold dear as a nation (which it of course is).

So, I recant. I hope Ron Paul hangs in there as long as he can.

Friday morning, there wasn’t a major paper in the country that did not have full coverage of the Iowa Caucuses on the front page. Even Friday’s financially-minded Wall Street Journal splashed Huckabee and Obama all over the top of its front page. All of the dailies did the same, both on paper and on their website. In fact, as I write this on Saturday afternoon, the websites for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Fox News, MSNBC all have residual news about Thursday’s Iowa caucuses and articles looking ahead to Tuesday’s New Hampshire primaries. Only CNN, of the major news websites, does not still have Iowa caucus news up. This is pretty amazing, since none of the major networks had live Iowa caucus coverage on Thursday night, and CSPAN apparently went on some quixotic campaign to show an entire caucus meeting from beginning to tedious end and make me realize I would rather be trapped in a room with Tom Tancredo and a truck load of illegal immigrants than sit through that mind-numbing process in person.

After unfortunately working late Thursday (all the while following news rolling in via Politico.com and Hotline on Call), I got home to find my wife watching The Apprentice on NBC. “Wha… where is the caucus coverage,” I asked as I dropped my bag to the floor. “CSPAN has some weird local thing on. So, I’m watching this,” she said. “What do you mean some weird local thing?” After she explained it to me, I asked about the networks. “That’s what this is,” she replied, making me realize how dumb a question I had just asked.

As you may have guessed, my wife and I don’t have cable. We don’t want to flush a ridiculous amount of money down the drain for 120 channels when we will only watch 12 of them. Until we can get an a la carte package, it will probably stay that way and we will keep enjoying our NetFlix subscription and get whatever comes through our building wiring (which we are pretty sure is not illegal, considering the cable guy came and set up our internet service and knows what channels come into the TV. Anyway, I digress…)

On caucus night, while every major print media outlet in the country was foaming at the mouth of their website over the Iowa caucuses, and I presume all of the cable media from what I have seen on their websites, NOT ONE OF THE MAJOR NETWORKS HAD LIVE COVERAGE! Instead, I had to battle with my wife over switching back and forth from sleaze like Desperate Housewives to the networks and CSPAN to see if ANYONE had any coverage besides what I was pulling up on my computer. I couldn’t believe it. And, what stunned me even more was that when the news finally came on, it was the local news that we saw – no national coverage until Nightline came on.

Luckily, I had my laptop and was able to keep up with everything, and when the time came, we watched Obama give his victory speech via the live Associated Press feed online. Then at some point CSPAN (which until that night had had great Iowa coverage) woke up and realized they needed to stop showing farmers argue about whether their county should include in its proposal to the state party platform whether the federal or state governments to regulate gay marriage, and they showed John Edwards’ speech.

How pathetically apathetic do the network executives think this country is? Do they not realize how badly Americans want to see someone else as president – if only in their imagination? Why else would voters have accepted the incredibly early beginnings of 2008 campaigns in 2007… er, 2006? Do they really think that TV watchers are so stupid that they don’t want to watch something more intelligent than Donald Trump firing a playmate?

ABC will partially make up for this tonight with its coverage of the New Hampshire debates, but it does not have any primary coverage on its schedule for Tuesday night. Neither do NBC or CBS. And, of course, ABC planned this debate for Saturday night, so who the hell will be home to watch it?