Over here in the US, we had a 50/50 split in the Senate between the Republicans and the Democrats. Yesterday (or a few days ago, depending on when you read this), one of the Republican Senators quit his party and became an independent, or rather, non-party affiliated. He still retains his seat in the Senate. This move means that the Democrats now have enough people to block any legislation if both Republicans and Democrats cast votes along party lines, which they usually do.

To illustrate this, CNN Headline News (an all-news station that does a rather mediocre job of reading all of the nation's and the world's news in a half-hour minus commercial breaks, four-minute fluff pieces about Bob Dylan's birthday, sports recaps, financial news, national weather, and a recap of the three news stories they just covered fifteen minutes ago) had a graphic that looked like fifty red boxes and fifty blue boxes. Yes. They were showing a representation of what an equal division of one hundred looked like.

"Do they think that people don't understand the concept of '50'?" I thought to myself. "Are we all in the second grade?" Right above the 50/50 image, there was a legend: in red, "Republicans: 50"; in blue, "Democrats: 50"; in yellow, "Independents: 0".

Then the graphic changed. One blue seat turned yellow. The legend now read "Republicans: 49", "Democrats: 50", "Independents: 1".

They changed the wrong seat color.

They aired this graphic every fifteen minutes.

-Faux "no, *they* are in the second grade" Pas