Guest Post by Track Fellarn

I have long been confused by the way that people follow sports. It is certainly possible that a person would care about who won what game (I guess), but why would it then be important for this person to follow the specific play-by-plays of this game? Why watch a game when the next day the paper prints the name of the winner (and often the loser! and the score!)? It's often been suggested to me, though, that the reason I cannot understand the relevance of a specific pas de deux by Peyton Manning is that I also don't care about the outcome. That sounds fair.
Except for one thing. I do care about politics. I like following this current general election campaign, and am very interested to see who will be the next president. Actually, I'm more than interested. I'm emotionally invested. I'm fairly confident that sports blogs aren't supposed to be explicitly political, but this blog is unpopular enough for me to comfortably say that if any of the Republican presidential candidates win this election, I will not emerge from my bedroom until mid-August 2010.
Back on point, though, CNN has a thing it calls the "Political Ticker," where it posts short articles about what's happening in politics. For a while, it was interesting ("Oh, look, Elizabeth Edwards says that John Edwards is at a disadvantage as a white man running for president."). But lately, its minute-by-minute minute coverage is exhaustively stupid. Here are some examples of "newsworthy" headlines from CNN's Ticker:

• McCain 'perplexed' on Romney comments
• Obama: Clinton thinks more 'conventionally'
• Edwards attacks Clinton stance on Iran
• Obama: Clinton doesn't know where she stands
• Obama camp: Clinton flip-flopped on Iran?

Eventually, there will be an actual election, and Clinton can tell us then why Giuliani would not be a good president, and those of us from New York can be embarrassed to have ever voted in local elections. But until that point, I don't care at all about which candidates are attacking which within their own party. Much in the same way that I don't care if the Red Sox beat the Yankees. Just tell me which is playing in the World Series. Actually, scratch that. Just tell me who won the World Series.
Actually, you really don't have to.