...at this point my mother would send me to my room, saying, "...AND STAY THERE UNTIL YOUR ATTITUDE IMPROVES!"

I'm feeling very cranky right now. I have a build-up of excessive irritation. It is hard to be miserable alone, so I will share another item with you. Again, this was NOT my own writing, but I TOTALLY agree with the author. I contacted Dennis Hartig, Editorial Page Editor of the Virginian-Pilot to get permission to quote from this as long as I give credit where it is due. From the editorial page (page 6) of the July 29, 2008 issue of the Va-Pilot...under the column entitled "punditry".

"McCain's Gaffes"...by Bob Herbert.
"...[W]hat we've learned over the years is that [John} McCain is one of those guys who never has to pay much of a price for his missteps and foul-ups and bad behavior. Can you imagine the firestorm of outrage and criticism that would have descended on [Barack] Obama if he had made the kind of factual mistakes that John McCain has repeatedly made in this campaign?
(Or if Obama had had the temerity to even remotely suggest that John McCain would consider being disloyal to his country for political reasons?)
We have a monumental double standard here. McCain has had trouble in his public comments distinguishing Sunnis from Shiites and had to be corrected in one stunningly embarrassing moment by his good friend Joe Lieberman. He has referred to an Iraq-Pakistan border when the two countries do not share a border."

It isn't just those stupid things he said above. Didn't he say something earlier in the primaries about not understanding anything about the economy? And duh, isn't that a serious problem right now? Oh, wait, I forgot, there's no problem...his good buddy and advisor, Senator Phil Gramm (YOU check my spelling, I'm too tired) says we're just a bunch of whiners. Well, when the cost of everything is rising more than twice as fast as our paychecks, I think that just might be something worth whining about. I guess it's hard to relate when you don't have to borrow from Peter to pay Paul. Perhaps when someone has been rich for too long, it becomes difficult to relate to the "common folk". And you might want to watch this U-Tube story from Keith Olbermann's program, "John McCain's Connection to Big Oil & The Enron Loophole" by going to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdRbuUQNcxw -- I don't know how to do a link from here to there, but you can copy and paste it and watch it for yourself. Further, he bee-otched about Obama not going to the Middle East. Now that he has, McCain is complaining about that too. First, someone's got some "'splenning" to do. Second, stick to the issues.

I'm going to go to my room until I straighten up.