After purposely isolating myself from national news for about a week (except for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report), I’ve just spent about an hour with MSNBC and CNN playing in the background.

What a waste of time.

AIG, Chris Dodd, and Tim Geithner are still on the hot seat over those gawdawful huge bonuses. Congress is in trouble over a constitutionally questionable bill they just passed to recover said bonuses with a 90% tax. Sheesh, what a circus. Everybody’s pointing to someone else saying, “It’s his fault, not mine!” And party affiliations don’t seem to matter much.

The public, including yours truly, is furious over the whole thing, with some, at Stephen Colbert’s suggestion, even waving pitchforks in protest.

Wasn’t most of this going on when I turned the news off a week ago?

Actually, I’m sort of on the fence about the bonuses. I think they’re awful, greedy, shameful, embarrassing, infuriating. But had they not been funded with bailout money, I’d probably have to uphold the rights of corporations to conduct their business without government oversight or interference, as long as they are operating lawfully. Those old Republican roots of mine run pretty deep when it comes to money.

Looks like the stock market is holding on to most of its gains from last week. That’s good. Or at least not bad. And nobody has even mentioned job losses — so far.

Obama will be on Leno tonight. I heard that from watching Leno, not from the news. It will be weird seeing a sitting president on a late night talk show.

There was a spacewalk today.

Okay, that’s enough. TV is off.

Nice! It’s balmy here today, close to 75. The windows are wide open (allergies be damned) and there’s just the slightest hint of a cool breeze on my arms. I hear birds out there calling back and forth, some close by, others answering in the distance. Robins, if I’m not mistaken. Finches are chirping, twittering, and tweeting (yes, the birds did it first) around the seed cakes on the back fence. Kids are talking happily in the tot lot behind me. A couple of dogs up the street are barking. There’s a lone prop-driven plane droning overhead, and two bicyclists just whined by. All’s well, after all.

And all it took was pushing the “off” button.