Here is your Morning Brief for the morning of March 28, 2013. Give Chad your feedback below and tune in to The Chad Hasty Show for these and many more topics from 8:30 to 11am.

Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images
Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images
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1. Gay Marriage and the Government

The past couple of days have been dominated by talk of gay marriage. Republicans have been calling out other Republicans over the issue and Democrats have been trying to look like they have always supported gay marriage. You see people referred to as homophobic and bigots if they don't support gay marriage, and those that do support it can't possibly be part of "your" party.

It's left me shaking my head many times at people on both sides of the argument.

Last night I posted a hypothetical question on Facebook and most seemed to like the idea. It's one I've had before and one that is so radical I don't see it happening.

What if the federal government just got out of the marriage business completely? How about the feds announce that they will no longer be granting marriages but instead civil unions and that anyone could get a civil union. Marriage would be left up to the churches and the feds couldn't tell a church who they can or can't marry. Wouldn't that be the ideal solution for all of this? No one has to redefine marriage, which is a religious term, and couples could still get all the benefits from the government.

Turn the argument and debate into a religious freedom debate. Let the government handle the paperwork and the contracts and let the churches handle the spiritual side of things.

Anyone else with me?

2. Americans Unhappy (link)

There aren't many people left in the U.S. that like what is happening in D.C. In fact, 80% of Americans are dissatisfied with Washington. 30% of the population describe themselves as angry.

Eighty percent of Americans are dissatisfied with Washington — including 30 percent who are angry, the highest level of anger recorded since polling on that question began in 2010. A new CBS News poll shows rapidly slipping approval of President Barack Obama and very low ratings for the Republican Party.

Anger at Washington has increased nine percentage points since December, and while the overall unhappy sentiment cut across party lines, Republicans and independents are more likely to say they were angry.

Additionally, 61 percent said that they believe the country is on the “wrong track,” up from 54 percent since February, according to CBS. Nearly nine in 10 Republicans say the country is on the wrong track.

While 61% of the country thinks we are on the wrong track, 57% of people still like or find President Obama favorable. The President basically escapes blame for what is happening to this country. It's sad and hopefully this country will wake up.

3. Partisanship (link)

Who can we blame for the rise in partisanship in the United States? FOX News? MSNBC? How about ESPN? According to Politico, ESPN and HBO are to blame.

Princeton professor Markus Prior has written a new academic paper that upends the conventional wisdom that partisan channels like Fox News and MSNBC are to blame for the rise in political partisanship.

The problem with that argument, Prior reasons, is that very few people actually watch cable news — "no [more] than 10-15 percent of the voting age population." That's a steep drop from the 1960s and '70s, when "even people with little interest in news and politics watched network newscasts because they were glued to the set and there were no real alternatives to news in many markets during the dinner hour."

The sea change wasn't the rise of Fox News, it was the rise of other channels that offered something besides news. "The culprit turns out to be not Fox News, but ESPN, HBO, and other early cable channels that lured moderates away from the news and away from the polls," Prior writes.

Roger Ailes often says Fox News was created to counter the biases of the mainstream media. But it was also created in response to these entertainment channels (ESPN was founded in 1979, Fox News in 1996). In the era of drab old CNN, Fox News strove to deliver "compelling" — read, "entertaining" — packages and personalities that could compete not just with Ted Turner's news channel but with his entertainment properties as well. Hence, "infotainment."

Talk to cable news hosts now and many of them will tell you that they don't view other cable news hosts as the competition. Their competition is "CSI" or "Dancing With the Stars."

So it's basically the informed vs. the low information voters.

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