Wow. Let me just say, I don't think I have ever been so proud to be an American. Last night, the country showed that it could be broader and richer and more beautiful than any of us imagined possible. Everything feels different now, like the promise of America has finally been realized. This is huge.

A few observations:

America, this is really important. If you're not already registered to vote, you can do so now by clicking here

or

here

or

here.

Nick and I went to the Kansas Democratic caucus last night, and it was total craziness. For starters, there was a record turnout. Two thousand two hundred and eighteen people were all crammed into the livestock area of the Douglas County Fairgrounds. (Do I even need to point out the whole people-as-cattle thing going on here?) The event was set to start at 7 p.m., but the caucus organizers let us know pretty early that it would be delayed until 7:30 so that the new/undeclared voters could register as Democrats. There were tons of people voting for the first time, which was really really cool.

Come on. Really. Are we seriously talking about this? Are we seriously having a nationwide spasm of moral indignation because a game known for its extreme violence and gritty content has a secret sex scene embedded somewhere within it? (Thanks to the media, millions of American kids now know about this feature, and most of them probably wouldn't have discovered it on their own. Congratulations, Hillary!) Speaking of which, doesn't Hillary Clinton have any real issues to tackle, like, say, poverty or something? I'd call her gesture quixotic, but that implies a certain nobility of purpose, and I'm pretty sure there's no nobility whatsoever driving this pandering effort to garner votes from more conservative types. Has she even stopped to think about what this sort of crusade will mean for the youth vote, which would otherwise be more likely than any other age group to lean her way in a presidential bid? I used to like Hillary Clinton a lot. I used to defend her when people made nasty remarks about her behavior while first lady. But now I'm just disappointed, because her desire to be seen espousing 'family values' has seemingly triumphed over her personal ethics. This moral posturing does not make her worse than other politicians, I know. It just means that she belongs in their ranks more than I ever realized before. Alas and alack.

The notorious bunny show has been canceled! After Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings lambasted an episode of "Postcards from Buster" (a show about an animated bunny) and demanded that PBS refund the money used to make the show, PBS quickly dropped the episode. They dropped it before Spellings had even finished her sentence. A PBS spokesperson, however, claimed that the Education Department's statements had nothing to do with their decision not to air the show. She said that the decision was due to a realization that homosexuality was a sensitive issue that parents should address with their children in their own time.

1. The tax code is archaic. It will be replaced with Hammurabi's Code.
2. In the year 2525, if man is still alive, if woman can survive, then the social security system will be totally screwed. We need personal retirement accounts now! Quick, before the aliens come!

So check it out. Kinky Friedman is running for governor of Texas.

His campaign motto is "why the hell not?" For those who aren't familiar with him, Kinky Friedman is one of the greatest personalities of our time. Rarely seen without a smirk, a fat cigar, and full-on cowboy garb, Kinky is a somewhat paradoxical character. He writes hilarious mystery novels (with titles like Greenwich Killing Time and Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned) and is the frontman for a country group called "The Texas Jewboys." His platform is the "anti-wussification" of Texas (Kinky is of the opinion that the current governor, Rick Perry, is a prime example of how his home state has become wussified). Kinky has spent time in the Peace Corps. He's best friends with Willie Nelson, and likes to hang out with Presidents Bush and Clinton. He's against political correctness. He's the founder and organizer of Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch, a haven for mistreated cats, dogs, and, yes, chickens. He has his own brand of salsa, as well as some serious concerns about the death penalty.

Farewell, John Ashcroft. You'll be sorely missed
By neocon reformers, bums, and hacks.
While thousands daily make your "terror list,"
The real al Qaeda's slipping through the cracks.

Man, I'm irritated right now.

You there, in all of those gay-marriage amendment states (those of you who voted "NO" are exempt), you are no longer allowed to watch Will & Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, The L Word, or Queer as Folk, and you are also not allowed to talk about how much fun your gay hairdresser is.

#10. Convert to Shinto.

#9. Be caught with a little boy.

#8. Publicly acknowledge his blood bargain with Lucifer.

#7. Sell the Statue of Liberty to Colombia for a couple kilos of Bogota's finest.

#6. Host a pharmaceutical company shopping spree at the Federal Reserve building.

#5. Die.

#4. Use the Force to strangle his top admiral on national television.

#3. Accidentally nuke a third-world nation out of existence, then blame the mistake on intelligence failures, then shrug the whole thing off with a good-old Texas guffaw.

#2. Kill the firstborn son of every family in America.

#1. Trick question. Apparently, Bush could do any of these things and be re-elected. Way to go, America. You make me real proud.

My first through fifth favorite people are Nick, my friends Thomas and Erin, and my parents. Below that, things get reshuffled quite a bit. But as of three days ago, number six on the list is Jon Stewart (this is an impressively high ranking for someone I've never met). I'm a big fan of The Daily Show. Always have been—even in the primitive days of Craig Kilborn. But the thing that has propelled the show to unprecedented success in recent years is the dry, self-deprecating wit of Jon Stewart. He has turned the show into a satirical tour-de-force that boldly goes where no fake news organization has gone before.

When I heard the candidates were going to be speaking about domestic issues tonight, I was hoping they would be debating about who had the privilege of doing my dishes and my laundry. Alas, twas not to be. All they did was talk about the economy and taxes and stuff.

Nevertheless, here's the third installment of my in-depth series on Bush and Kerry in Debate Land. (This is sort of like Disneyland, without the ten-dollar sodas.) Once again, this is all my approximation of what the candidates said unless denoted by quotes. And even then, don't hold me to it.

For you hardcore politics junkies who didn't happen to catch the second debate tonight, I have prepared a by-the-minute account of the event. I have illuminated the major points and commented when I was puzzled or irritated by what I heard. No edits have been made except for clarification and where I stupidly left words out or something. Comments in quotes are direct quotations. All others are approximations.

So did y'all watch the debates last night? What did you think? It seemed to me that one of these men is a good public speaker and one is not. I don't know. Maybe it was just me. Bush said some mighty strange things, and for awhile it seemed his brain was stuck on some kind of loop:

As I've mentioned before, Nick and I recently went to Colorado. What I didn't mention was that we stayed in a hotel with one of those Nintendo things in the room. We scanned the menu listing the available games, and when we made it through the list, the menu continued into the adult films. For a lark, we checked out the titles and laughed at their ridiculous pictures. But after the catalog of 50 or so films had gone by and we went back to the games, a gnawing realization began to insinuate itself on my brain. Every single one of these films—whether about chesty cheerleaders, naughty nurses, or buxom beekeepers—was targeted toward white heterosexual men. What's up with that? Notice to hotel chains everywhere, not everyone in this country is a white heterosexual man. Perhaps you've never realized this? Once in a great while someone who is of another gender, race, or orientation may happen to wander into your hotel. They may be feeling lonely and seeking out a few creature comforts. But instead of solace, they will be faced with adult media that in no way represents their culture or interests. It's a travesty, is what it is.

Ladies, are you tired of going home night after night to an empty house? Are you tired of family members haranguing you on holidays, asking if you're "seeing anyone special"? Dating is difficult. We've all had those embarrassing conversations at the bar, and experienced the anxiety of memorizing a three-minute speech for speed-dating events. Who needs the headaches? Try my new program, called Find Love at the Voting Booth.

Within the universe, there are two known singularities that cause time to slow down and come to a grinding halt: black holes, and presidential elections.

I've been thinking a lot about black holes, ever since Stephen Hawking lost his famous bet. You see, Hawking had always claimed that it's not possible to recover information once it's been sucked into a black hole. But in July of this year, he changed his mind. Black holes do release some kinds of information, he said. And because he changed his mind on this, he owes John Preskill from Caltech a big, fat set of encyclopedias.

1. Bottled water at Lollapalooza
2. Frogs
3. Health care
4. Gravity
5. Siamese fighting fish
6. College
7. College textbooks
8. Hair pieces
9. Slinkys
10. Youth
11. Beauty
12. The Brothers Karamazov
13. String theory
14. String cheese
15. Buns of steel
16. Our sense of dignity
17. Language
18. Profanity
19. Conspiracy theories
20. Jungian archetypes
21. Hot Wheels
22. The iconic cult status of Kerouac
23. Transmogrification
24. Transsubstantiation
25. Tintinnabulation
26. Advice at the Oracle of Delphi
27. Portraits of the Queen
28. Radiohead
29. Igneous rocks
30. Schlemiel, schlimazel, Hassenpfeffer Incorporated
31. Kinetic energy
32. Our souls

Last Friday, at 11:15 in the evening, Nick and I went out to the Amtrak station in town. Kerry and Edwards had just finished a rally at Union Station in Kansas City, and their whistle-stop train was due to come through Lawrence about 11:30. No one was exactly sure what would happen then, but the rumor was that if there was a crowd, the train would stop and the Brothers John would say a few words to the party faithful of Lawrence, Kansas.

There was a crowd, alright. By 11:30, there were about seven or eight hundred people gathered on or near the tiny train platform. Most were Kerry supporters, armed with balloons, signs, etc., but there were a few Bushies and anarchists. A group of tough-looking middle-aged men held signs reading "Laborers for Kerry," and they were standing immediately in front of some College Republicans with Bush/Cheney signs. If there was going to be a riot, I figured, that was where it was going to occur. There, or where the anarchists were perched.

First there is an entity, a single cell, which comes into being within an idyllic pool of ground water. There it is, the first living thing on the planet. It is quite solitary, but it decides to make the best of its situation by creating copies of itself. Over millions of years, these copies bind together and eventually diversify, creating primitive plants and sea creatures. Here we have mollusks, echinoderms, coelenterates, and worms, which feed on the water plants and collectively prefigure every form of modern life. Before long, the most precocious of these sea creatures becomes larger and develops a skeleton.

I've been amazed by so many things as of late. I was amazed when the Supreme Court struck down a Texas anti-sodomy law last year. I was amazed by the recent Massachusetts court decision saying that gay marriage could not be prohibited under the state constitution. And I was amazed when San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom began marrying same-sex couples a few weeks back. Maybe, I thought, this country is not totally, mind-numbingly hopeless after all.

Remember in Logan's Run, when the computer tells the 25-year-old Sandman that he has to go undercover to capture the 29-year-old runners (who are fleeing Carousel, the laser-light show that kills), and all of a sudden the red light on his own hand starts blinking and he realizes he's just lost four years? That's kind of what I imagine happening the moment a President steps into the White House. They all go into the presidency as vital, robust young men, and emerge as weird zombie versions of themselves.

Come on, everybody. Ease up on my boy Howard Dean.

I've heard the primal scream. I've even heard it set to music. But I fail to see why the media considers it to be such a monumental screw-up. Sure, it was a little raucous for a concession speech. Okay, more than a little, but did anybody really expect him to lay down and die after the disappointment of Iowa? This is Howard we're talking about. Good old grass-roots Howard. He was trying to re-energize his supporters, and how was he supposed to do that without getting excited himself? Yeah, it was kind of cheesy, but it was genuine, which is more than I can say for anything that was said in the State of the Union. Doesn't anyone remember when Mr. Keating explained the cathartic value of Walt Whitman's "barbaric yawp"?