Michelle Malkin needs to shut her donut hole.

True confession: I am a registered Republican.
Another true confession: if I can hold my nose long enough, I can find things on Fox News to sort of agree with.

I am a moderate, a fact which causes my mother (a National Review-reading WFB conservative) to despair. “You’re going to vote for Hillary, aren’t you?” she moans.

Well, probably not. McCain, mom. Which causes her to moan worse.

I don’t usually agree with National Review, and I never agree with their tone. I don’t agree with the tone or the content of The Nation, either.

I say all this so you can understand where I’m coming from when I say that Michelle Malkin needs to STFU, especially when it comes to this flap about Rachael Ray.

The absolute best response I saw was this. Next thing you know, Malkin will go after Helen Lovejoy and her falafel fixins.

I know. Let’s get Fat Tony on this one.

High Anxiety.

You can tell how old you are by counting the rings in your magazine subscriptions.

No, seriously. You can. When I was in high school, I read Seventeen. College and young married? Glamour and Cosmopolitan. (I had to give up Cosmo pretty quickly though: just reading all those italics made me hyperventilate)

I really knew I had hit The Beginning of The End when I let Glamour slide in favor of my Better Homes & Gardens subscription. I finally let *that* one go when I realized two things:

1. The houses in BH&G are not anything like the house I live in. I live in a tract home in the desert, with stucco walls and tile roofs that looked really exotic when I was growing up in Philadelphia but now are all ho-hum. The houses in BH&G are interesting. They’re the homes that George Washington slept in or on the beach or on a lake or in a forest. I kept looking through the mag trying to find pictures of rooms I’d like to replicate (the only way I can decorate anything) and realized that I wanted what was outside the windows: the forest, or the meadow, or the ocean. Anything but the desert landscaping and my neighbor’s wall.

2. BH&G was never going to feature a house that was like mine. When they have a magazine called Tract Homes & Dog Runs, I’m gonna be all over it.

I thought I had found Magazine Nirvana when I found a magazine called Real Simple. It’s subtitled “Life made easier” and it really did, in fact, make my life easier. Cool ways to use old things, great comparisons of products…it was wonderful.

Until yesterday, when I read the continuing feature: One Woman’s Money Diary. The idea is simple: woman sends in her money worries and a certified financial planner analyzes ‘em and helps the worries go away.

June’s Financial Centerfold is a woman who is married with a baby. She stayed home with him after his birth and quit her job. She and her husband are facing these traumas, even after she quit her job:

- no debt, other than their house
- when they moved, their mortgage went down by $1,000 a month
- they earned $285K in profit when they sold their old house
- they save 12% of the husband’s income in a 401(k) and
- put $500 a month into the baby’s college fund and
- still have a ridiculously low monthly outlay

Her dilemma? She can’t feel good about spending any money on herself.

Ahem.

I don’t want to minimize anyone’s pain here, but could we get someone with a real problem? I can’t learn anything from this other than I obviously should have married someone who worked in technology and maybe done a little better with birth control.

This woman has anxiety? Try the anxiety of knowing that your husband’s last camping trip (and supporting trips to REI and Cabela’s) sent your checking account reeling so hard that you came within thirty-seven cents of bouncing six checks. Or realizing that you’re either going to have to work until you’re about 86 or pray that those life expectancy tables that chart you to live until you’re 102 are dead wrong.

That’s anxiety.

She may not be Carol Brady, but she’s no Carmen Electra, either.

Thank goodness.

It took a little while to get it into the AFN, but better late than never, I present Mom, Interrupted’s Mother’s Day column.

In other Mom-related news, Carmen Electra is going to hold off on Carol Brady-hood a little bit longer so she can develop her line of portable stripper poles. I guess it’s safe to conclude that she may not be Donna Reed, but she certainly knows a lot about the Beav.

C’mon. You KNEW I had to go for that one. It was just sitting there.

A bit of a twist on shell collecting.

You’re standing on the beach, minding your own business, and then this.

Words are failing me at this point. The story, with its matter-of-fact details (the coroner is racking up feet in his office this very minute; left feet float differently than right feet…how on earth does anyone know this kind of thing? Just how often does this question come up, for God’s sake?) is one of those where you sit at your computer for awhile with your mouth hanging open.

Has it really been that long?

Have you ever had one of those deals where you meant to take care of something and you kept thinking, “Whoa, I have to take care of *that*” but other things kept getting in the way, like family members getting sick and scout campouts and kids doing their level best to flunk out of school so your life became a whirlwind of teacher meetings and progress reports while other kids were graduating so high in their class that they couldn’t fit their heads in their cars anymore and you had to spend all your soi-disant “free time” compiling photo tributes and getting them (the photo tributes, not the kid) laminated (which is surprisingly inexpensive, by the way; I’m thinking of laminating the dog and some of the sloppier kids, come to think of it) and hauling them off to various places for enshrinement and then you got one more phone call from yet another kid saying that their science teacher insists on meeting with you at 3 p.m. today and you have a sneaking suspicion that it’s not to collect a prize for having The Best Science Student Ever? and so then you started hoping that the blog you hadn’t updated since April 27th would just die a natural death or at the very least WordPress would fall off the face of the earth so you wouldn’t have to think about it anymore but it just stayed on the face of the earth and the guilt just got heavier and heavier and so you just decided to suck it up and suck down too much coffee and just start typing dammit?

I knew you’d understand.

What got me going this morning is more random clicking. I really should stop this, because it just raises my blood pressure and lord knows I have enough of that, what with Mr. Science Guy and his teacher and all. A very entertaining blog called Ads of the Weird reviewed a series of Suave ads targeted at moms and their ability to ‘keep themselves up.’

The blog is interesting; what is more interesting is what happens in the comments, which has turned out to be a brawl between one woman who apparently was a pregnant widow, a software architect, owner of her own business who still manages to look SO good at rained-out high school band concerts that her son’s friends compliment her, her fan club, and the rest of the us who are standing in the shower just discovering that our teenaged daughters have yet again wandered off with our razors.

Every time the MILF of the Year posts she adds yet another accomplishment to her list (I think the last time it was making her own bread during board meetings), so that the rest of us will be stunned and amazed at how she juggles and still manages to fend off Hef and his repeated requests for her to pose naked, holding nothing but her briefcase and her mixing bowl. (Note to my own sainted mother: please don’t ask me what a MILF is. Please google it the acronym and after your hair falls out, let’s just assume you called me and yelled at me, ‘k?)

There are some side discussions: ruminations about how men sit on their collective cans balancing beer cans on their guts, don’t help around the house, but still manage to find time to wonder why their wives have let themselves go.

You know: the classics.

The Romans had the gladiator fights. We have Competing Moms. If you will excuse me, I have to go find my razor. To shave my legs or to slit my wrists because my butt’s too big and I haven’t baked bread during a board meeting in an age…haven’t decided yet.