No, tonight’s debate is all about Palin. Collectively, we still can’t look away, even when it seems she is about to enthusiastically drive off a cliff. Perhaps especially if we think she is about to enthusiastically drive off a cliff.

What kinds of reality creation will no longer be available to us? Here’s a partial list:

• No more blaming terrorist attacks on countries we want to invade.
• No more climate change happy talk.
• No more tax breaks for the wealthy to help poor people.
• No more solving the energy crisis by invading other countries or drill, baby, drill euphoria.
• No more bankrupting government as a service to taxpayers.
• No more killing social security in order to save it.
• Most likely, not even another heckuva-job-brownie.

Nope, all we would have in front of us is the long slog of facing up to our problems and engaging in actual work to fix them. Yuck.

Perhaps that’s what God had in mind with commandments and sins. Think of it as a piping hot transgression of a commandment placed within the warm, toasted enclosure of a general sin. But there are too many commandments and not enough sins, which require you to go to church every week to try to reconcile them. God may get a lot praise for being omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, but in my opinion, people don’t praise His or Her marketing genius nearly enough.

I’m not depressed because Republicans now think the election is over, since it was a brilliant and game-changing pick. And it isn’t because Democrats now think the election is over, since it was an irresponsible and desperate pick. No, it’s depressing because it closes the circle of hypocrisy and now allows everyone enthusiastically to call everyone else a hypocrite until Election Day.

Ultimate Washington insider or not, I will always have an emotional soft spot for Joe Biden. It’s not because of his policies or his experience, or because he does such a good job of calling people out on their idiocracy — for example, his money quote on Giuliani: “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and 9/11”. No, Joe will always get the benefit of the doubt from me because he is an important part of my 9/11 story, which I hope not entirely to bore you with right now.

• Sports are more interesting and broadcast-worthy when Americans are good at them.
• The love of sport and competition is important, but the big endorsement deals don’t go to losers.
• Individuals need skill, determination, hard work and sometimes luck to win. Nations sometimes need forged passports to win.
• China is concerned with worldwide attention on human rights, but not so much that they are going to give Tibet back to the Tibetans.

These are all fine lessons, and I am wiser for having learned them. However, the single biggest lesson I learned from these games turns out to be one of my favorite Stephen Colbert lines: The market has spoken, and global warming is real.

But it just so happened that on bill day this month, I decided to buy a knife magnet, and remembered Coop America. By knife magnet, I don’t mean a magnet in the shape of a knife. That would be both useless and dangerous (unless there was a shiny, metallic robot coming after you, in which case you would have bigger problems than a magnetic knife could solve).

Michael Scott is the ultimate nightmare boss, played by Steve Carell on The Office. But he’s not the mean kind that yells at you and demands unreasonable production and hours. He’s the kind that wants to be your friend while being completely clueless about how to interact with others.

I had always thought of Michael as representing bad bosses or buffoons, but not necessarily representing (or caricaturizing) his race as a white person. Perhaps this is because I watched The Office only intermittently until this summer. Then the miracle of DVD season releases gave me a more complete picture of him. His main qualities seem to be 1) he wants everyone to like him 2) he’s unwilling to let go of any privilege or power that he has, and 3) he’s generally unaware how his actions negatively affect others. This is uncomfortably close to how a lot of white people generally behave towards minorities.

I say all this to provide some evidence, pathetic though it may be, that I do venture out into the country at times, and usually do not run screaming back to suburbia. And yet, I learned something this weekend that I feel I should have known, and also that I feel is kind of gross, in a city slicker kind of way.

This week’s entries are from Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, and Cal Thomas, far right-wing Christian apologist.

As a married person, I think I should chime in. It is unfortunate that Ryan should get this message directly from the billboard. Married people often have long discussions on this topic in their monthly cabal meetings, and we all generally agree: The message that single people suck should be subliminal, so as not to arouse heated arguments. Heated arguments just distract people away from their sole purpose in life, which is to get married as quickly as possible to the nearest person they can find.

Every parade should be like the Washington Street Parade.

It should be led by a single fire truck, followed by a homemade sign.

The band should be filled with neighbors who value community and know only one song: “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

This seemed unfair to me. Asking me to reduce drug demand in the United States is about as realistic as me asking Colombians to ignore the profit on the supply side or to share it equally with everyone. We should do our parts on both sides, of course, but we shouldn’t be under the illusion that people’s desire for drugs and money is going to go away anytime soon.

Note that I would be perfectly willing to list the ten best Champaign-Urbana movies of all time, but I couldn’t even come up with ten movies that reference Champaign-Urbana, much less are set here. Perhaps local movie aficionados can weigh in with a good list.

And yet, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

My wife was driving us home from a game last week with the van window open. She felt a sudden sharp pain of something thrown into her leg, which she naturally assumed was the first volley of some kind of tantrum in the backseat. She yelled “Ouch!” then pulled the van over and glared into the backseat. While she found nothing amiss there, she did notice someone about a half-block down throwing stuff at us.