If you're like me, no housing crash can suppress your obsession with the real-estate market and the TV shows that chronicle it. If you're not like me—and you're not—well, it's August, so you may want to watch the return of Bravo's real-esate reality saga, Million-Dollar Listing.

I hear the price was just slashed to a $799,000 listing, and it's very negotiable! The sellers are motivated!

HIMYM's Marshall and Lily: what kind of example are they setting for the children? / Eric McCandless/CBS

The Parents Television Council issued a report today on sex on broadcast TV. The report, "Happily Never After," you may not exactly be stunned to learn, finds there to be too much of it. In particular, the report finds, there's much more out-of-wedlock sex than marital sex: verbal references to nonmaritial sex outnumbered those to marital sex by 3 to 1, and for sex scenes, the ratio goes up to 4 to 1.

I'm fine with that. The report, I mean. (Maybe the sex too, but that's another post.) I've locked horns with the PTC before, but mostly over their lobbying for government intervention to reshape TV to their liking. If they want to analyze and lobby TV with their complaints about content—in other words, to be TV critics—hey, the more the merrier.

Of course, I do disagree with some of their arguments. But I actually agree with some!

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I'm aware, by the way, that it seems sometimes as if I blog about nothing but politics here nowadays. But it's August, and it's an election year and that means that by default the election is itself the watercooler show on TV, at least until the Olympics start.

But don't take my word for it. Ask the producers of Last Comic Standing, for whose Thursday finale John McCain and Barack Obama are taping "funny campaign ads," NBC announced yesterday.

Yeah, yeah, I know—silly season, lowest common denominator, cheapening of the public discourse, etc. But far more people will be watching than see any given episode of Hardball. Both candidates have been conscious of the pop-culture primary, having taped messages for Army Wives and WWE wrestling, and they could both stand to gain something here: Obama, to show a bigger audience that he can laugh at himself; McCain (whose campaign has been in the snarky-ad business lately anyway) to show that he can be funny without being Don Rickles. It may be silly, but it's no joke nonetheless.

The panel on MSNBC's Hardball yesterday offered a novel explanation of why John McCain has gone so sharply negative in the past week or so (link via Talking Points Memo):

ANDREA MITCHELL: I have maybe a counterintuitive view that John McCain also doesn't like this kind of politics, went along with his new, tougher political advisers, and I think on some of his responses such as saying last week, personally saying that he thought that Barack Obama had retracted some of his previous comments—I think he's inside a bubble. And he's not aware that Barack Obama never did say that, and he's being told by some of his advisers that he did this, he did that, Obama did this. I think he's been ginned up a little bit.

MIKE BARNICLE: I agree with you.

AM: All these candidates are being handled a bit too much. They're traveling, they're giving speeches. They don't see what we all see when we're fixated on this stuff. They don't know.

MB: I absolutely agree with you. Do you agree with that, Roger?

ROGER SIMON: Oh, I do. For a guy who's supposed to have such a famous temper, McCain really doesn't like attacking.

Yet another example of the pervasive media bias against McCain!

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Although I Want to Work for Diddy sounds like it should be a show about people fighting each other to get a minimum-wage job, it is instead another entry in VH1's vast raft of celebreality shows—in this case, one where aspirants compete to be P. Diddy's personal assistant. The premise, at first, made me worry for Diddy's career. After all, one of the conditions of doing a celebreality show on VH1 is that you are no longer a celebrity. Times haven't gotten that bad for him since Making the Band, have they?

Judging by last night's debut, we don't need to worry for Diddy; while he has a show on VH1, he's still celebrity enough not to appear on a show on VH1. Not much anyway; he sits down for an interview that's spliced into the episode at points, but the actual job of finding his assistant is left to other employees—a former assistant, a former manager, and other hired hands who vet the applicants. It's not I Want to Work for Diddy; It's I Want to Work for the People Who Used to Work for Diddy. Or maybe they should call it The Apprentice's Apprentice.

In the first episode, Diddy's proxies organize two teams of contestants to go out and run errands for the boss man, including videotaping a cheer for him and buying a longboard for his son. Remember back in the innocent days of the early 21st century, when on Making the Band Diddy would show up in person to make the contestants walk from Manhattan to Brooklyn to get him a slice of Junior's cheesecake? Back then, he actually had to lower himself to appear in person and make his unreasonable requests himself. Now he delegates that crap out. That, my friends, is a businessman.