I’m a morning person— the perky, annoying kind that wakes up without an alarm. Night owls tend to view folks like me with suspicion, as if we’re asking them to join a religious cult like Scientology or Weight Watchers.

The key to a happy morning is making sure your routine contains at least a few minutes that you can call your own. If you have to wake up 10 minutes earlier, do it. I don’t care if you spend that time on the toilet while you play Candy Crush on your cell phone for so long that the edge of the toilet seat creates a red ring on your butt. It’s still worth it. You can get an ointment for that.

I love my morning routine. I wake up, eat an English muffin and check my email. Unlike Hillary’s lost classified goodies, most of my email is junk from random companies that want to sell me crap at 10% off. It doesn’t take much brain power to tap the delete button, so while I’m doing this, I watch the morning news on TV.

I love watching the morning news, but recently it has majorly sucked. It seems the entire broadcast is devoted to the presidential election and/or celebrity news. There are probably hundreds of children dying in third world countries— but we’d have no way of knowing because the TV anchors are too busy giving a recap from the MTV Video Music Awards.

When the media does choose to cover real news stories, it’s incredibly unhelpful. I’d like to know when debating a presidential candidate’s physical robustness became an important issue? I don’t care if a candidate has high cholesterol, has spray-tanned skin and small hands, or sometimes has a cough. I care if they are mentally prepared, capable and qualified.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the greatest US presidents and the longest-serving, was in a wheelchair. Polio struck him as a young man and he never regained the use of his legs. The truth of his condition was known to most journalists at the time, but they chose not to make a big deal of it. They recognized that FDR was a devoted public servant that was fit to be president.

Have we now regressed? To the ancient tribal days when the chieftain or warlord was always the brawniest guy with the biggest… err, sword?

In today’s political climate, I’m very sad to say that a person like FDR would never be elected president. It wouldn’t matter how qualified he may have been. As a person in a wheelchair myself, this makes me very disappointed to admit that. But, in a culture that only values beauty, celebrity and strength, it comes as no surprise.

For the next couple of months, perhaps I should forgo watching the news during my morning routine. I think playing Candy Crush might be a better bet…