This is just another symptom of the same constitutional cancer that led to the FISA disgrace a few days before. We have abandoned the idea that laws should govern this nation and given ourselves over to the rule of men. That's always a recipe for disaster. Men inevitably succumb to greed; laws don't. Men have self-interest; laws can't. Men become corrupt; laws never do.

What is it going to take for the free market fundamentalists to admit that the only way markets work is with a blend of robust investment and freedom underpinned by equally robust and merciless regulation defined by laws that spare no one from scrutiny? Without that, Lincoln Savings becomes Enron becomes WorldCom becomes Fannie and Freddie and IndyMac, world without end, amen.

In that, Wall Street is not unlike our Beloved Resident.

If Obama doesn't want to tarnish his above-it-all image and attack McCain personally (which he should), then he has a ready alternative: attack the way he's been attacked, attack McCain's record and policies, and attack the things McCain has said.

There's a huge body of target-worthy material that has more to do with McCain the campaign, McCain the senator and McCain the speaker than McCain the man. So get down and dirty, Barack, and be relentless in going after the man's hypocritical voting record, his incompetent blunders in speaking about foreign policy, his insulting ad campaigns, his association with Bush and failed GOP policies, and above all his support for the war. Then if you're up against it in October, you can still get nasty and personal and run the "Is he too old and out of touch to be president?" and "Does he have too short a fuse to have his finger on the trigger?" ads.

But I agree with most here. Do something, for chrissake.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Speaking to donors at a San Diego fund-raiser last month, Barack Obama reassured the crowd that he wouldn’t give in to Republican tactics to throw his candidacy off track.

“Listen, I’m skinny but I’m tough,” Sen. Obama said.

But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama’s skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them.

“He’s too new … and he needs to put some meat on his bones,” says Diana Koenig, 42, a housewife in Corpus Christi, Texas, who says she voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

“I won’t vote for any beanpole guy,” another Clinton supporter wrote last week on a Yahoo politics message board.

The last overweight president to be elected was 335-pound William Howard Taft in 1908. As for tall and lanky presidents, “you might have to go back to Abraham Lincoln” in 1860, says presidential historian Stephen Hess. “Most presidents were sort of in the middle.”

OK, I'll admit this is hardly a representative sampling. But people...the electorate contains members who might not vote for Obama because he's too FIT? Yes, that might be "fogging" by people who really don't want to vote for the black man, but the general impression that's coming across is, we don't want to vote for the #1 in his class Harvard-educated lawyer who's in great shape and is bloody brilliant, because that scares the crap out of us.

I'm sorry, but I want my leaders to be highly educated as well as experienced in the real world. I want them to be smarter than I am and fitter than I am. If that means calling them "elite," then fine. Elect me an elite president.

It's hard to look at the issues that matter to millions of Americans, as well as how easily swayed voters are by vapid nonsense like Willie Horton, Al Gore inventing the Internet and Swift Boating and not conclude that Americans are grossly stupid people. Gussy it up in "intellectually lazy" clothing if you like, but the fact is that stupid is as stupid does, quoth Forrest Gump. If your decisions are emptyheaded and ignorant, it doesn't matter whether you are truly too dumb to understand the issues in an election or too lazy to get off your ass and find out about the candidates, their positions and

their records. The results are the same: the election of criminals and the criminally incompetent.

Americans: willfully ignorant, intellectually infantile or dumb as whale shit? In the end, does it matter?

I just heard Corsi interviewed on NPR. My goodness, our standards for journalism have become loose, haven't they? When I was in school getting my communications degree, your stories needed to have some kind of, er, facts involved to be classified as nonfiction. This book belongs on the fiction shelf, or at least the "political and personal axe grinding" shelf. Corsi's nothing more than a character assassin who's done secondhand research and ginned up what sound like a lot of half-hearted "scoops" about Obama for the purpose of raking in a buttload of cash. Never mind the election; these parasites don't care. It's all about the buck.

What a travesty.

According to journalism law, being considered a public figure raises the standard for libel exponentially in the courts. If Corsi were to write a smear book about McCain, Hillary Clinton or Bill Gates, the same would apply. When you're in the public eye, unless a piece is a blatant fabrication clearly written with only malice and harmful effect in mind, a libel case is almost unwinnable.

Guess it's up to the blogosphere and Netizens in general to do a Corsi takedown. Anyone game to do some digging and link him to the McCain campaign? Bet there's a link somewhere.