From the appearance of the agenda, tonight’s Senate meeting will be less than enthralling. One can only hope that it will be less than lengthy. Watch here as your humble correspondent tries to make the monotonous less mundane.

The state of the city address always seems to be occasioned by talk of “Kitty Piercy.” I don’t know what that means, but I’m just going to go with my natural assumption. I just want to say that, even if it leads to free parades celebrating football, piercing cats can get you sent to jail. I hope the video below serves as a reminder.

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Who know’s why Donald Rumsfeld likes Paris Hilton? Anyone? I’ll tell you why. People who care about Paris Hilton don’t care about Donald Rumsfeld. And Rummy loves that.

When historians write the saga of the decline of American society, it will not be from plague or nuclear war or famine. It will be from sensational media and the brainless twits that follow it. Every time Perez Hilton gets a hit, every time a radio is tuned to Howard Stern instead of NPR and each Nielson ticker that records E! instead of PBS, agencies can rest assured that these people place a higher value on sensational but irrelevant news.
Instead of educating themselves on global warming or the economy or health care reform, people can find out that Lindsay Lohan is going to jail, or that Michael Jackson’s physician is in his preliminary hearing.

So if you happen to walk in on your sister watching Entourage, or your significant other perusing the latest issue of People, you are formally obligated to strap them to a chair and force feed them good media. Anything with content and depth will do: 60 Minutes, the New York Times, the National Review. Shred the Twilight novel and replace it with The Dark is Rising. Incinerate their copies of Terminator 3 and throw in a copy of Die Hard.

Over Christmas, I discovered to (to my dismay) that my cousin’s music library carried pop-rock and Sysco. I won’t stand for it, and neither should you. The only way to fight the rising tide of bullshit media that we’ve come to accept in U.S. society is to take a stand and replace it.

In today’s Ol’ Dirty:

Cheap Kelly stopped at a favorite local pizza shop on Christmas Eve. He was served two of the freshest possible slices. It is a small town, Chip. In your moment of luck and fame and good fortune (and obscene contract money), it seems like you might have enough class to leave a tip.

Until then, your name is Cheap Kelly. Go Ducks.

Editor’s note: It may have been Chip’s doppelganger.

Some business, first and foremost: a post on the new Voice and Ethos is on its way, but there is a lot to read yet on that score.

With that down, I’d like to draw our attention to the words of Eugene resident Leslie Graham, who gives the following pointer to Guard columnist Bob Welch: “I love my Ducks! That’s what Welch should have said, over and over again.” Also, who here wouldn’t like to see Eugene’s Bob Welch perform a set of Fleetwood Mac covers, or possibly turn out for the Oakland Athletics?

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The dramatic story of the 2010 elections up until election day was that of the “Tea Party,” a group that grew from anti-tax protestors to a national political front, albeit a somewhat disorganized and unusual one. They were noteworthy in their anger and their disregard for political establishments, which combined to create their throw-out-the-baby-with-the-bathwater treatment of incumbent moderate Republicans. In the end, they had a few victories, such as putting Pat Toomey and Rand Paul in the US Senate, and a whole host of defeats, Sharron Angle, Joe Miller and Christine O’Donnell leading the pack. Particularly entertaining is that Miller was bested by a write-in candidate, the incumbent, Sen. Lisa Murkowski. As a whole, the Tea Party revolution was pretty meek. Furthermore, ultra conservative Tea Party nominees were the direct cause of a number of Republican losses in races that should have been slam dunks, Angle and O’Donnell again topping that list.

After the fact, Congress utilized the lame duck session to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” ratified an arms control treaty, passed a bill extending health-care benefits for those who worked on the cleanup of the World Trade Center site and cut a bi-partisan deal with President Barack Obama to extend some tax cuts but not others. Naturally, the Tea Party was pissed.

As the New York Times explained, “Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, a social-networking Web site, declared after the approval of the arms-control treaty that ‘the G.O.P. has caved.’” Of course, Tea Partiers claimed next-to sole credit for all of the lame duck session’s products which met with Tea Party approval. Again from the Times, “’The Republicans, frankly, have been a disaster,’ [Mark] Meckler (co-founder of a noted “Tea Party” group) said. ‘They stood strong on some things, but the only reason they stood strong is because we stood behind them with a big stick.’”

The election, its results, the resulting lame duck session, and right-wing reaction to it demonstrate, to me at least, that the Tea Party is only a major political force in the minds of Tea Party members, candidates who receive their political life or lifeblood (read: cash) from Tea Party groups, and Fox News. Their actual impact on real lawmaking, not to mention lawmakers other than their own bunch, would appear to be fairly minimal and often procedural, rather than substantive. Sure, Republicans will read the Constitution at the beginning of the 112^th Congress and force its reference in new justifications for prospective laws, but I don’t anticipate a vast change in the workings of Congress as a result of the Tea Party. Thank God. On the downside, this will only serve to fuel the fires of Tea Party politics, so I’m sure we’re not done with them yet.

Welcome back to school. Today, the Emerald tells us about the creation of the universe, and let’s just say the University of Oregon doesn’t get enough credit. This is the only video of the Big Bang I could find and embed, and I can only say that it is not at all the way I imagined.

Five new UO professors, presumably.

This is a bit late because I’m still figuring out how to have an academic schedule that involves a 9 a.m. class and a blogging schedule that involves being up late at night.

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