The Sunday News Shows today were kind of interesting. Not the best, but better than the last several. The main subjects were upcoming primaries, Kagan, and the oil spill. Those are all very relevant issues.

The discussion of the elections come on the eve of a number of primaries in which incumbents or establishment candidates are facing real challenges. I found most interesting the discussion of the "Democratic primary" for U.S. in Pennsylvania, where Arlen Specter, who switched parties to "Democrat" in order to avoid losing in the Republican primary (that seems to be happening more and more these days, doesn't it?). He is being challenged, as I predicted, http://www.ruralthoughts.net/?q=node/280 and the prognostication today by these high paid (where's my pay, I'm living under the poverty level!) was that Specter is going to lose to Representative Joe Sestak, who has created and run an ingenius political ad which was played a number of times today on the talk shows, which only makes things worse for Specter. The ad makes Specter look awful. He looks like a conniving sleazebag. Go Joe Go, I say.

I guess the most significant thing about the Kagan discussions is that more than one show brought up that there were rumors going around, which had not really surfaced to the most mainstream of press, that she was a lesbian. Even Krauthamer had to say that should never come up, and was irrelevant. What a way to air the subject! Of course, no mention of the Truthout article about Kagan sticking up for Monsanto which circulating on my email lists a few days ago, http://www.truthout.org/supreme-court-nominee-elena-kagan-goes-bat-monsa... although the commentators did acknowledge that Kagan was being attacked from the left - but on her views of executive authority and not about the GE crops issue. Interestingly enough, McLaughlin himself used my lingo from a previous column that I wrote after the nomination saying that Kagan was a "shoo-in." That's for better or worse, but was just an observation. Let's hope it's for better.

Once again, Bonnie Erbe's "To the Contrary" was perhaps the most interesting show. It definitely provided the best quote of the day. In a discussion about Kagan, in which the republican females were downplaying Kagan being a female and the democratic females were saying, oh yeah, it was great and would make a difference, Erbe blurted out, that the republican women "saw women as the same as men" and the democratic women "saw women as women." Boy, did that ruffle those republican feathers. They crowed in denial, but it's hard to deny the obvious.

Also significant on "To the Contrary" was Eleanor Norton stating that both "conservative democratic" U.S. senators as well as republican senators were "bought off" by big money. The reference came in response to an interview Erbe had with U.S. Senator Cantwell, from Washington state, who is trying to get the Glass-Stegall legislation re-instated. It was a post-depression era piece of legislation from the early 1900s which separated commercial and investment banks. It had been repealed in the 1990s, which had lead to the so-called "sub-prime" mortgage meltdown, which was made much worse by bundles of mortgages marketed by banks as good investments, even as they bet against them.

Of course these senators are bought off. Most politicians are. And the U.S. senate is worse than most. But it's very shocking to hear a fellow member of congress say it.