Okie dokie.

So Bush wins, Kerry looses, and I should just be absolutely devastated, right?

But I'm not. Disappointed, yes, aggravated definitely, but not devastated. Mainly because I'm watching this whole thing unfold with a sort of detached amusement.

I'm not going to put on a tin foil hat, but I will say something is awfully fishy about how quickly the channels wanted to call Ohio and Florida for Bush. Florida especially, with only a tiny percentage of the votes counted. And what was more disgusting is how no one stood up to the media to tell them to put a lid on it.

But what's really going on is what Eric Alterman talks about here: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/

There ARE two Americas, and pretty soon we're gonna start kicking each others asses. They kicked ours last night... now it's time we started kicking theirs for real.

Who are you gonna believe... me or a dirty trial lawyer?

You know that's going to be the underlying theme of Dick's attack tonight at the debate. As if being a trial lawyer makes you any less believable than a politician.

However, we know how Cheney really feels about lawyers, don't we? Given that those lawyers are doing the dark, evil work of Satan, that is.

My grandma was a huuuuuuge football fan. I mean, a serious, serious fan of the game. She was such a football fanatic that she had a hard time watching games, she would get so nervous for her team to win. She would listen to her games on the AM sports radio station, and then turn the sound down if the game got too close. She'd hop up and down throughout the game, wringing her hands and giving herself high blood pressure.

I am my grandmother's granddaughter. And I'm going to have a reeeeeeeally hard time watching the debates tonight.

Kevin Drum makes some excellent points about the current state of blogging and asks the question, can blogging retain its integrity once it becomes a recognized source of news and information?

And there's one more thing that might be the most important of all: the sense that bloggers are having an impact. When you have an audience of a few thousand, you can just write what you want without giving it much thought. But once the idea takes hold that maybe — just maybe — serious people are taking blogs seriously, it changes how you write. There's just no way around that.

I've noticed it. Before Atrios became the "big thing", back when he was still anonymous and wasn't regularly featured on mediums such as Air America Radio, something was... different. I can't quite put my finger on it. It's not as if his tone has really changed, nor the quality of his blogging. But now it's as if he's very aware that so many eyes are on him and what he has to say.

This topic got me to thinking about another instance where blogging was referenced in and affected the media: the recent episode with Dan Rather and CBS. I was privy to the conversations of right-wing bloggers burning the midnight oil to compare font kernings and to study the history of typesetting from 1930-present. It makes me wonder... if blogging does become "mainstream", will bloggers be accountable for what they blog, and if so, who will hold them accountable? Their readers? Will mainstream blogging add to the everpresent problem of "infotainment" and "opinionists" rather than real journalism? This NPR piece by John Powers on Fresh Air delves into this a bit.

The mere fact that Drum asks these kind of questions shows the main difference between the blogosphere and the mainstream press: bloggers have a conscience.