It was a very peaceful week not being hooked up to the internet and visiting my family in Colorado. I missed all the hullabaloo about Abu Gonzales, the hypocrisy of Larry Craig, and the continued inane ramblings of the worst US president in history, bar none (and I thought no one could ever beat out Herbert Hoover, James Buchanan and Milliard Fillmore for that title). My relatives are still very conservative for the most part, but we managed to elide political discussions in the interest of harmony and creating a positive environment for my sister who is undergoing radiation treatment for her breast cancer.

However, I did have one interesting discussion with my sister about our broken health care system, which she has had the chance to see up close and personal. She now favors “socialized medicine” by which I take it to mean she favors a single payer health insurance plan administered by the federal government. She now believes we will never cure cancer until the incentive to treat cancers after tumors have already manifested with drugs and radiation is removed. Considering how expensive most new chemotherapy drugs and radiation treatments are, she may have a point.

I also discovered that my parents believe Hillary Clinton is a shoe-in for the Democratic nomination, a prospect they dread mightily. So at least we had that one point of agreement (though probably for very different reasons).

Hope you all survived your summer. I can hardly wait for the Petraeus bamboozleganza to begin. Oh, that’s right. I forgot. It already has.