One caveat:

If anything you read in this post seems bigger or brighter than normal, it's because I'm using my parents' computer, and they just got a ginormous monitor screen so my dad can still look at his Precious Moments collectibles sites even with his macular degeneration. Seriously -- this screen is like a windshield on a Hummer. You'd think it would make typos jump out at me even more, but the words are as big as Sarah Palin's squirrel-on-her-head updo so they're hard to focus on. My advance apologies for any mispelings.

Anyway, I'm in Iowa for the weekend. Specifically Cedar Rapids, the city that made flooding the cool-kids trend of 2008. Our flooding happened in June, the weekend I was here for my parents' anniversary. And it was still pretty devastated in July, so the annual July 4 8K race was postponed to this weekend. Cedar Rapids is still pretty devastated, but the race was still on this morning ... and I ran it at an 8:26 pace. A personal best, baby! Woot!

Speaking of Sarah Palin ... wow. I mean wow. A quick google search of her name shows us that she's passionately opposed to marriage equality for gay people, passionately for abstinence-only "education" and passionately against sex education. So of course -- of course -- her unwed 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. Couple that with the fact that John McCain dated and became engaged to his second wife while still married to his first wife and you can see how the Republican party is at the vanguard of moral authority. Their "pro-family" programs work because they believe in them.

The 8K just happens to run past my sister's house, so they had a good 100 people over this morning to eat, drink and cheer for me the runners. I stopped by afterward to catch up with people I hadn't seen in ages, including a bunch of my parents' friends ... many of whom quote Rush "Drug-Addled Whore" Limbaugh as though he's lucid and wax rhapsodic about Palin and McCain as though they aren't scary in an "intelligent design"-believing, calling-the-second-wife-a-cunt monkeys-in-the-White-House kind of way. ACK!

But I choose to focus on my 8:26 pace for now. It's way more calming, it's not unweddedly pregnant and it doesn't blame the gays for heterosexual divorce. Plus it looks pretty impressive on this Hummer windshield.

UPDATE: Obama responds to the Broken Watergate scandal:
"People's families are off limits."

Um ... no they're not. As long as Palin and McCain vilify my family in an attempt to sell hate votes, their famlies are up for grabs. As long as Palin and McCain endanger families by legislating mythology over biology and science in the teaching of sexual health, their families are up for grabs. Palin and McCain set standards for our families that they clearly don't hold their own families to. And you, Mr. Obama, have yet to prove yourself to be a friend of marriage equality. So if you have an affair or a divorce or your daughters get pregnant, your family will be up for grabs too. You'd be a moron not to realize that.