Several of you, like me, have forsaken the news as an irritant, but wrote to tell me that you appreciated my recent rundown of the U.S. presidential campaign. So as a public service, I'd like to offer my latest installment of News by Osmosis:

In election news, Barack Obama was discovered to be a member of the Evangelical Church of Farrakhan, but insists that he only mouthed the words during the hymns. Hillary Clinton's camp has also accused Obama of trying to prevent blacks from voting, due to his fear, no doubt, of the tremendous appeal that a privileged, uptight white woman has for African-American voters.

Clinton, meanwhile, reluctantly revealed that she was a Navy SEAL in Bosnia, where she and her daughter Chelsea took sniper fire while rescuing orphans — regardless of their religion, ethnicity, or sexual persuasion — from danger.

On the Republican side, John McCain has died of old age.

In local politics, New York governor Eliot Spitzer revealed that he's been patronizing hookers, but insisted that this was part of an elaborate sting operation directed against corrupt HMO executives, who are the real enemy here. The scrupulously ethical New York legislature is investigating whether Spitzer used public resources to underwrite his peccadilloes, and why he couldn't use interns like everyone else.

On the economic front, we are in the Great Depression II. From now on we have to call the first one Great Depression I, which means we'll have to change all the history books, which Paul Krugman believes is exactly the kind of stimulus we need to get the economy going. Both Depressions were caused by twelve years of Reaganomics, along with feckless 1960's-era liberal Democratic spending, which is always what happens when Republicans control Congress.

The War on Terror, meanwhile, is a catastrophic failure, and an unmitigated success. Everyone agrees that we should withdraw as soon as possible, so long as we stay the course.

In college sports, four teams are set to play for the NCAA men's national basketball championship in San Antonio. The NCAA wants you to know that all of the student-athletes on these teams are majoring in medicine or engineering, and quite possibly both, and that they are students first and foremost, and that it is these fine student-athletes who are the nation's future leaders. In related news, NCAA schools stand to rake in roughly 100 gazillion dollars this year from media and merchandising revenue, but the NCAA stresses that it wouldn't be fitting to share any of this with the student-athletes, who are, after all, students.

The Olympics, meanwhile, are set to begin in China, which is an open and free country where citizens are encouraged to make their voices heard, so long as they do it quietly and respectfully between the hours of 10:00pm and 10:05pm Beijing time. A few rabble-rousers have tried to disrupt the torch procession, but these are the same people who don't like McDonald's and waterboarding, and given that otherwise we'll be denied thirty-seven straight weeks of tae-kwon-do and ping-pong, they should all just stow it and let the games begin.

In professional baseball, all past players are drug-addled cheaters, but the current crop is squeaky clean.

Your local weather is crappy, with variable crappiness, and possible crap in the very near future. Unless you live in California, in which case the rest of us think you should go straight to hell.

Finally, our ombudsman reports that the major media outlets are unashamedly biased for and against each presidential candidate, which is exactly what we should expect from an unaccountable left-wing cabal of lock-step liberals wholly owned by conservative corporations. Only Fox News can be trusted to give us a fair and balanced argument for an end to universal suffrage and the reinstitution of slavery.

Thank you, and good night.