Senator Hillary Clinton holds a 48-24 lead among Democratic primary voters over rival Senator Barack Obama, and Giuliani tops McCain 42-26 among Republicans. Do remember that this doesn’t matter, since it’s a national poll and the national popular vote means squat. I just thought I’d share.

I’ve been absent from the blogosphere as of late, due in large part to my new job. Since my policy is not to speak a word about my employment on the Internet, and since my employment has practically been my main focus lately, I have had very little else going on to write about. Well tonight that changes…

Since my last post, Dick Cheney forgot everything he knew about political science (then relearned it under duress), Ann Coulter wished death upon yet another liberal but thinks the left is “godless,” some bombs were defused in London, Paris Hilton finished her best June ever, and the iPhone enjoyed the benefits of free publicity on every freakin’ news program in America. So there’s that.

But undoubtedly the biggest legitimate story today (if we measure by the impact it will have on who occupies the White House in 2009) has to be the fact that in 1983 Mitt Romney strapped his dog to the top of his station wagon for a 12-hour family trip from Boston to Ontario. Ingrid Newkirk, president of PETA, says it was “a lesson in cruelty” for Romney’s kids.

Romney said Thursday that his dog liked being on the roof. “He scrambled up there every time we went on trips,” he said at a campaign stop in Pittsburgh. Hmmm, apparently the dog liked being on the roof so much that he “expressed his discomfort with a diarrhea attack. When Romney’s eldest son, Tagg, and his four brothers complained about the brown runoff down the back windshield, their father quietly pulled the car over, borrowed a gas station hose and sprayed down both the dog and the kennel before returning to the road.”

Not that he had my vote before, but how a person treats the family dog speaks volumes about his character. And this is speaking quite loudly.

Good thing I absolutely LOVE my new job! I will try to post some photos from our weekend trip this week, assuming we get the disposable camera developed. I hope to have a digital camera in my arsenal soon so this pesky film business is out of my life for good. Hello, 21st Century!

Dave and I are heading to Shenandoah again for a weekend in the wildnerness. This time we’re better prepared, with walking sticks, first aid, ample water, etc. I just wanted to put this message out there so that if we turn up missing, someone will know where to send the search party.

Oh, and we’ll stay away from the bears this time.

Only in America can a person violate the law repeatedly and be rewarded with more money than most people will make in a lifetime.

So Monday I finished all 571 pages of Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat: Version 2.0.” My review? It’s the 21st century for old people. It offers an interesting perspective on globalization, and takes a rather staunch position that outsourcing to India is a good idea and we shouldn’t fight it. He makes a convincing argument. He also details the events of the last 18 years (starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall) that have “flattened” the world and leveled the playing field for anyone with reliable power and a broadband hookup.

Check it out if you have a ton of free time. I’ve been putting off finishing it for awhile but now that my commute to work is over an hour long, I needed something to pass the time. It’s a provocative read.

South Carolina Treasurer Thomas Ravenel was indicted today on federal cocaine charges. That’s news enough on its own, but Ravenel is the state chairman for Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This guy’s in the lead?

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that he has switched from being a registered Republican to an Independent. Since the last few months have been peppered with stories of his conjecturing that he might make an independent run for the White House, I think it’s a safe bet that the self-made billionaire will be throwing his hat in the ring.

The real question now is which side will he be sapping votes from in 2008? Or will he be sapping votes from both? This one’s gonna be exciting!

Scrumtrulescent.

So Thursday night I had a root canal planned. I’ve had two in the past and they weren’t painful at all, beyond the first pinch of the anesthesia. I have terrible teeth–always have. So I left work at 4:45pm to make it to my dentist’s office by 5:30pm. Once I arrived, we got right to business. Red flag #1: my dentist shares with me that she’s “so tired.”

First, she attempted to numb the nerves along my jaw. This process involves injecting the anesthesia into the nerve at the back of the jaw. A simple pinch, really. And I’m a great patient, so I sat completely still for her and made not a move or a sound.

Red flag #2: after several minutes of checking in with me to see if my lip and tongue were numb–which I told her they weren’t–she decided to move forward with the procedure. It was almost 6:00 at this point.

For your edification, a root canal procedure involves drilling a hole into the center of the top of the tooth all the way to the pulp chamber. There the doctor removes the nerves and pulp, replaces them with a chemical that acts to reinforce the tooth for the remainder of its life, and seals the job up with a crown.

Well, my dentist proceeded to drill through the top of my tooth, which took nearly an hour, given that she had to stop every few seconds for the pain to calm down. Each time she pressed onto the tooth with that drill and bore down, the pain was inarticulable. Red flag #3: she persisted, despite my grunts of agony. She even brought me tissue in case I started crying.

Once she believed she had cut through (and believe me, I thought/hoped she had cut through as well), she promised to numb the nerves directly with a needle full of “calm juice.” I was delighted to hear this. But jabbing into that hole with the needle hurt like bloody Hell and I shouted. She didn’t stop though, despite my protests, and my mouth strangely filled with a foul-tasting liquid: red flag #4 (more about this in a minute).

She gave me a mouth-rinse and waited a few minutes for the tooth to finally go numb. It didn’t.

And she persisted. She lied to me and told me she was going to expand the hole a little to get a look, when really she was attempting to insert the “barbed broach” used to hook and extract the nerve from the tooth. She confirmed to me after holding me down and dentally raping me far longer than any of you reading this would have allowed–believe me–she revealed the truth that this is what she was actually trying to do, but she lied because she wanted me to keep calm with the element of surprise: red flag #5.

All this time, my dentist kept telling me that anxiety was blocking the anesthesia from working. I diplomatically told her that I wasn’t being a baby and that I only made noise when the pain was beyond what I could stand. But she continued to presume it was my fault the procedure was moving so slowly and that I was experiencing such pain. My fault and not hers: red flag #6.

And she persisted.

Another needle down the hole and another mouth full of anesthesia–anesthesia wasted on my taste buds and not on my #19 molar. Another grunting spell and more dental rape.

At last, at 7:30, she decided we should do an x-ray and see what’s up. Turns out not only did she not anesthetize me correctly from the very beginning, but the hole she drilled didn’t even go through to the pulp chamber. She’d been attempting to remove the nerve and only pulling out part of my gums! How’d she get to my gums, you ask? Well the hole she drilled emptied out into my cavity. My mouth had been filling with anesthesia during all those injections because she was just shooting it out the bottom of the new drillhole out of my cavity into my mouth. There was still drilling to be done down the middle to actually break through to the chamber!

She suggested I come back in a couple of weeks, but rather than ever see her incompetent, insensitive, prideful face again, I took her much-needed prescription for Vicodin to the only 24-hour pharmacy in the area, popped the pill, and looked for endodontic specialists near my office who accepted my insurance and would see me ASAP. I was walking around with new pain (the tooth didn’t really hurt before the procedure, but my dentist told me I needed a root canal since the cavity was already so close to the nerve), and a gaping, quite visible hole through a very important chewing tooth, which now hurt from even the coldness of my inhalations.

Friday morning at 9, I made an appointment with the office of Dr. Levin. Because who can you trust more than a Jewish dentist? Saturday morning at 8:00am, I had my root canal performed 10 miles from my normal dentist’s God-forsaken place. It took an hour. My insurance covered 80%. And it was pain-free. The office was sterile (it doesn’t look like the dentist lives in the back room), there was a dental assistant present the entire time, and the doctor found the nerve at the very beginning so I didn’t feel a damned thing. They even covered my feet because I said I was cold!

Several hours later the anesthetic wore off. At that point, Dave and I had already finished shopping at Tyson’s Corner and having a delicious lunch. My numbness went away and my pain never returned.

I won’t be making it to my olddentist’s office on November 27 for my 6-month cleaning. Neither will Dave.