I watched Chris Matthews, ABC Sunday morning with Stephanopolous, and a little bit of Meet the Press, and Face the Nation. Chris Matthews played the exact same show as last week, which by the way, was one of his worst, except that he put in a little blurb at the very end about attending Tim Russert's funeral and what a great guy he was. Check my last week's column about how Matthews did a show last week (the same show actually) and didn't even mention Russert's death. All very weird if you ask me.

Meet the Press started out with Senators Biden and Graham, and it was just a bunch of partisan drivel, and I ended up choosing ABC because they had an interesting roundtable on energy. Actually, all the shows mentioned energy because of the high gas prices, but ABC focused a nice segment on the issue. While many of the people said a lot of right things - wind, solar, etc., they said some not so right things, such as "nuclear is part of the mix." Unfortunately, those that advocate such a system based on nuclear energy's benefits visa vis carbon emissions, don't understand how much carbon the entire nuclear industry emits. It's a lot. And we need to see some of new nuclear design - a design that eliminates long lived radioactive wastes and emissions, before we even consider looking at it. That even Bill Richardson would spew that kind of misleading rhethoric about "nuclear is part of the mix" without giving us anything new is really discouraging. Of course McCain is gungho on nuclear- wanting to build 45 new nuclear plants, apparently just like the ones we currently build. That's just dumb.

The main focus of the talk was about Obama's "flip flop" on taking the public spending limits and public money for the election. I wrote about that a couple days ago. I don't like it, but I understand it, and it's a little bit of the "shoes on the other foot" for the Republicans. They are bitching about it because it puts them a financial disadvantage, a place they aren't used to being.

Of course, the networks then did feel obligated to mention that McCain had flip flopped on offshore drilling. First he was against it and now he's for it. The Republicans said across the board that this was ok, because after travelling across the country, McCain decided that th $4/gallon gas was a serious enough problem to make him flip flop. The only problem with this is that all the energy expects said that this won't help for many years, if at all, because growing demand totally out-trumps any potential production increases from drilling the Arctic. There will be no instant relief from this from increased drilling, but there will be instant environmental effects - and I'm not not talking about improvements! And the so-called gas tax is a gimmick. If we dont' pay it during gas purchases, we'll pay it somewhere. The government needs it. McCain should know better.

Some of the pundits think that Obama's shift to self finance his campaign will hurt him because it so cuts against his main message of reform. But, McCain's advantage has been blunted because McCain himself went from private to public to private funding of his campaign, and probably will go back to public. He's not one to talk about consistency with your fundraising. I don't think it will hurt Obama because it's still early, Democrats are tired of being outspent, and Obama has a decent argument in how the system is broken. But, all in all pretty boring Sunday. I successfully installed a new keyboard on my laptop (which I can't believe I actually did successfully) while I watched.