Time to take Albert's advice......

I am obviously watching too much CNN. One night this week I dreamed I was in Libya with a group of people who were fighting against Gaddafi's militiamen. Harry was up and said he heard me mumbling loudly in my sleep, and he said I sounded extremely agitated. The truth was I was terrified. I am sure there are many Libyans who would love to be able to wake up and get out of the nightmare they are living in under their insane dictator.

That morning I went looking for some sanity with my coffee and television. Instead of CNN, I tuned into the Today show and found the world currently obsessed with the insanity of Charlie Sheen. Sheen wants his job back after his drug and hooker binge and anti-Semitic rant, demanding 3 million per episode rather than one million for starring in the sit-com Three and a Half Men. There is a rumor that Sheen is going to Haiti with Sean Penn, but it wasn't clear if the "goddesses" were going along or not. (These are the two early-20-somethings who now share his bed.) Most of the women in Sheen's life have been verbally and physically assaulted by him. He allegedly told his most recent ex that he would like to chop her head off and send it to her mother in a box. The mother of one of the goddesses was quoted as saying she hoped her daughter would soon come to her senses and take her leave of him.

Then on my prep time at school I downloaded the latest New Yorker to my Kindle, looking for news of something sane, or at least positive. I went to the weekly Talk of the Town section, which is usually light and interesting. The topic of the first article was economic inequality. The author wrote that in 1980, the economically best off Americans collected one third of the nation's income. Today this group, approximately one tenth of the population, collects half of it. The final point of the article was that with the growth of the economies in India and China, the concentration of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere will double or triple by the end of this century. (Talk about climate change!)

Lastly I came home and checked my email, and on the Comcast news page was the story that Mike Huckabee claimed he mis-spoke when he said Obama grew up in Kenya. Then he went on to say that growing up in Indonesia, Obama was surrounded by the evils of the Muslim culture, i.e.madrassas, not the "purity" of the Boy Scouts and Rotary Club. This is the reason our president has such a demented world view. One might argue that the Boy Scouts' homophobia is demented. Huckabee also took time to lash out at Oscar winner Natalie Portman for having a baby out of wedlock.

Is is just me, or does this qualify as a depressingly insane day? Sometimes it is just better not to turn on the television, your computer or your Kindle. But the next day, of course, I did all three again.

*a madrass is Arabic for school. In recent times the use of the word by conservatives means a school that promotes terrorism.