First of all, I'm not buying this study too much. I've always voted GOP, and after hours of being in front of a computer, commuting or running around at events all day, it's nice to plop in front of the TV for a little bit when I can squeeze it in. When I wake up, first thing I do is turn on the news. Before I go to bed, I check the news again. When you're deluged with reading and writing news all day long, it's nice to just escape once in a while with some occasionally mindless TV: my favorites include "Sex and the City," "The Tudors," "South Park," those VH-1 countdowns of the worst songs, etc., and VH-1's "Behind the Music," History Channel fare, and reality shows including "American Idol" and the highly amusing "The Girls Next Door." (I even met a conservative book editor last year who once wrote a column on why "Sex and the City" is really a conservative show, and having seen every episode umteen times I concurred with her points.)

Now from Carrie's Manolo Blahniks to Michael Medved's Townhall piece: Medved's a personable guy; a couple years back I gave him a ride from the airport and he was nice enough to chat with my mom (a huge fan) on my cell phone as we cruised up LaCienega toward a film festival. But paragraphs like this:

"Either way, the isolation associated with hours and hours in front of the tube leads to liberal values and viewpoints. In every election, single people prove vastly more likely to vote for Democrats than do married people: Republican Presidential candidates have won majorities of married voters even in elections where Democrats proved victorious overall (as with Bob Dole’s ill-starred race in 1996).

People who see themselves as alone in the world, with no network of spouses or fellow congregants, frequently turn to government as a source of support and comfort—just as they’d turn to television as a source of phony companionship. It makes sense that loneliness and helplessness and disconnection would breed both liberalism and heavy TV viewing; just as a vibrant family life, and communal participation, would produce less television and more conservative self-reliance."

That's just uncalled for. When will single people, divorced people, people without families (but who still happen to have values!), stop being the punching bag of conservatives who engage in the "my family is better than yours" arrogance? I ask this as a political conservative. Why is the wisdom of believing that first comes love, then comes marriage -- and not getting hitched just to be married and reproduce -- written off as loneliness and helplessness, rather than acknowledging that unmarried people add just as much to society as couples having kids? It gets really tiresome. This is a big reason why, when asked to describe my conservatism, I swing toward the libertarian-tinged conservatism described in my friend Brian Anderson's book "South Park Conservatives" (that, and I don't believe F-bombs in movies spell the end of humanity).

Medved continues:

"Wholesome stories (in the dated style of 'Leave it Beaver' or 'Father Knows Best') have gone out of fashion not because they don’t exist anymore (most of us actually live such stories) but because the desperate competition for viewer attention (among literally hundreds of cable channels, video games, DVD’s, and networks) promotes a bias for the bizarre. This in turn connects to a sense that the world’s gone mad, and requires some sort of radical (usually leftist governmental initiative to avert looming apocalypse."

Most people have "Leave it to Beaver" families? Now that's just wishful thinking!!