Samantha Page

As a non-California native, Cali has always held for me that illustrious allure of the Beach Boys, The Doors (group and movie), of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. Of Haight-Ashbury. The redwoods. The Gold Rush (the event and the movie).

Surfer dudes and car culture and the great big beautiful more-breadbaskety-than-the-breadbasket grandiosity of California. Horatio Alger recommended it, The Mammas and the Papas couldn't get enough of it. Ninty percent of America's greatest movies are about it.

Hell, even the great Texan country singer Jerry Jeff Walker has a song about California ("L.A. Freeway").

And, then, there is the other side. The Big One. The mudslides. The fires.

Change.

The word is on the tip of every American's tongue. We are due for it or dealing with it or preparing to face it: changes in energy, communications, globalization, environmentalism. It is the mantra of the campaign for the next American presidency.

And there is no doubt that we, both as Americans and as citizens of the world, have undergone great changes in the past 10 years, and should expect to rapidly build on those changes in the coming ones.

Technological changes have given rise to the "information age," which might be better named the communication age. The ability to instantly disseminate information and communicate across the old wall of space has untold ramifications, and is in the process of affecting the way we do almost everything, but it may also be affecting who we are.

On Tuesday night, when most of America, and a lot of the world, was celebrating, the conservatives in Orange County were... not. Here is Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) speaking over shots of the "Victory 08 Election Night Party."

Two down. One to go. Whoever said that McCain would rock the town hall format (um... I think that was McCain), was clearly delusional. At the end of Tuesday's "town hall" debate (whatever that means), I turned to my viewing buddy and said, "He looks like Hank Hill's dad."

Yep. McCain reminds me of Cotton Hill, the ill-tempered, Japanese-hating, military-loving, doddering, shin-less cartoon character from Fox's King of the Hill.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one who felt this way, because I found this nifty little mash-up on YouTube:

The presidential debate Friday night between Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain was a sedate affair.  The two candidates, who both managed to land some shots, seemed tired.  Obama seemed tired of having to deflect baseless accusations.  McCain seemed tired dealing with an ignorant upstart.

I find presidential debates depressing.  I couldn't count the number of times Obama said that something McCain was saying "wasn't true."  Someone did count the number of times McCain said that Obama "didn't understand," or some variant therein: seven. (Apparently, FoxNews considered those atttacks "hits;" whereas the DailyKos reported that the refrain was a bust.) I don't like listening to people call either other idiots and liars.  It's boring.

Time was, or so I like to imagine, people stood around the local watering hole, reading the paper and talking to each other about what was printed - both content, and quality, and bias.  ("Didja read the thing about the whatzit by the whozit?")

Now, two new sites are attempting to bring that experience to the web: Spinspotter and News Trust.

The digital age has brought with it many new methods of discourse - MySpace, Twitter, blogs, amihotornot.com, YouTube, and so on and so forth.  With these two new sites, we are seeing the rise (or, rather, attempted rise) of the digitalized news review board.

Well, folks.  We're doing it again.  Just like we do every fourth year.  If we are the "liberal media," we're too dumb to know it. 

The headline on the Drudge Report Wednesday morning read: "As the Press Turns: Obama Says Enough Is Enough."  But, what Matt Drudge fails to understand is that the press can't "turn."  We don't have enough direction, or balls, or F*@^ING BRAINS, to actually report.

Why not?  We seem like smart people.