As a Minnesotan, I was embarrassed, but not surprised, by McCain's Lakeville, Minnesota hate rally last week, the one where an audience member referred to Obama as an "Arab."

It brought back a personal memory, as well. Over twenty years ago, as a real estate lawyer, I represented a developer of an affordable condominium project in Lakeville, then an exurban farm town with neither condominiums nor a significant minority population. Opposition was fierce, so the City Council meeting to consider the project was held in the local high school gymnasium to handle the overflow crowd. The project was turned down, after a parade of residents took to the public microphone to protest it, one speaker actually articulating what others dared not: that "the project will bring black people from Minneapolis down here."

As the McCain rally so graphically illustrates, we may have made progress, but there is still a long way to go.

Like that final part of the horror movie where the possessed victim's head rotates 360 degrees, spouting black vomit, the McCain campaign's end is an ugly, horrific, spew of right-wing venom.

But Barack's people won't be drawn off their game. His poll numbers continue to climb, as the GOP circles the drain.

I'm loving it.

Shapiro is right. But to catch and ride the wave on the Wall Street meltdown, Obama needs to make his response real, for ordinary voters, in plain, forceful English. McCain, by his demonstrated (and admitted) economic illiteracy, has left the issue to Obama practically by default.

He should be upfront, and clear, on "smart" re-regulation of investment banking to control the abusive (and hidden) trade in exotic debt instruments, to stabilize our our financial system and to protect the jobs and retirement security of each one of us.

And he'd strike a real chord on amendment of the tax code to reward individual savings and investment in productive industries, as opposed to housing speculation and overbuilding.

Don't spend time agonizing over Kouric, Williams, Gibson, et. al.

Instead, recognize that the phrase "television journalism" has become oxymoronic. Journalism and broadcast news parted company years ago. The fault is not with the anchors; they are simply the public face of a corporate infotainment system that elevates pretty news readers to star status. But their "news" is a false front: behind their desks are no real news bureaus, no working journalists, nobody teasing out the real story, as Cronkite and Murrow did in their day.

Most of television "news" is already stale by the time it airs, most of it borrowed from print media who have run the same stories hours before. And even that is often thin gruel, the product of slimmed-down, impoverished print media newsrooms. The core problem is that real news, real journalism, is unprofitable in today's market.

So what we get are not real journalists, only actors who play them on TV.

Iraq is one result.

Let us also remember Churchill on his proud, often prickly World War II ally, Charles de Gaulle: "Indomitable in defeat. Insufferable in victory."

Jonathan Scoll

Iowa Republicans can be forgiven their lack of enthusiasm for their candidates this year. Whatever else the Bush years have wrought, they have hollowed out the GOP in a way that hasn't happened since Hoover. The result is a crop of dwarf pretenders, not one of whom is remotely presidential, and a level of discourse that is borderline infantile. The zealouts will turn out, of course, but they will be fewer in number this time, and next November, the electorate at large will likely look elsewhere.

AnnieW is absolutely right. As someone who lives in the Cleveland Mountains, she knows what she's talking about. It is, as she says, just weird to politicize wildfires. You might as well politicize drought, or the meteorology of the Santa Ana wind.

My home in Fallbrook (San Diego County) came within a hundred yards of incineration in the Rice Canyon fire. This is not back country, but an area 15 miles from the Pacific, settled for over a century. The fires this time (unlike much of the 2003 Cedar inferno) came through thickly settled, older communities along the coast.

Fire suppression and prevention need open and honest discussion. It comes down to money and policy change -- lots of both. How do we fund increased fire-fighting resources? How do we change land use and vegetative practices? There are no easy answers. Hopefully, after two severe fire seasons, 2003 and now 2007, real dialogue will start.

Jonathan Scoll

Patrick Smith is right on. But the big winners in the airport security game aren't just the vendors to the "security-industrial complex" selling hardware and ZipLoc bags. They are right-wing politicians, beginning with Dick Cheney, whose very political existence is based on fostering a supine, unquestioning public paranoically fearful of a vague, faceless "terror."

We get our "security booster" every time we fly. No need in this country for totalitarian-state "Leader" posters on walls and public places. The smiling TSA guy at the screening point, taking away your too-large tube of toothpaste or extra deodorant, delivers the message far better, directly and in person.

Jonathan Scoll

Watching and listening to Ahmadinejad puts me in mind of another strutting populist loudmouth closer to our own history -- Huey (Kingfish) Long of Louisiana.

Like the Iranian president, Huey Long was an uncouth bigot, an outsider from the backwoods, anathema to power-center sophisticates; Long, too, liked nothing better than taking center stage to deliver his particular brand of raw, down-home political rhetoric. And his constituents loved it.

Jonathan Scoll