Alternative to the Rules Committee meeting: Red State Update

Sometimes we need to eat our vegetables, sometimes we need dessert. (I happen to be one who enjoys dessert first, for one never knows when the Lord will call, but this is a personal matter.)

In politics as well as in gustation, there are vegetables and there is dessert. I consume more than the daily recommended allowance of political fiber, mainly through CNN. I want one of John King's "telestraters." I want to sit between Donna Brazile and Paul Begala on the CNN set on Election Night, and pick David Gergen's brain myself. I get a kick out of Wolf Blitzer's personal public relations campaign to promote the "best political team on television." Because a dear friend of mine in Raleigh and I often arrive at conclusions days -- sometimes weeks -- before Blitzer and his team get there, she and I wonder aloud often why we're not on CNN. And because my colleagues at work take in as much political roughage as I do, I'm fond of calling us "the best political team NOT on television."

But I want my dessert too. And where I used to get it only from Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" and Stephen Colbert's "The Colbert Report," there is one more place I go to get my sugar fix: "Red State Update" at YouTube.

I first saw Jackie Broyles and Dunlap last summer, when CNN and YouTube were collecting questions to include in the presidential debate set at the Citadel in Charleston last July. Daisy and I stayed a few nights at Ocean Lakes, a little family vacation park south of Myrtle Beach, and we spent an evening there watching Red State Update's archived videos. We cracked up.

CNN selected the question selected by Red State Update for the debate, and Jackie Broyles and Dunlap were the ones who took note of all the light and heat and attention being given to the "Draft Gore" effort. They asked the Democratic candidates if it upset them, which cracked up the candidates as much as the crowd. Daisy and I were in the field house at the Citadel that night, and the Red State Update question was an audience favorite.

Okay, enough introduction. Go here and watch them for yourself. They're a riot.