called projection. The way it works is that John, who seems to have an almost paranoid need to appear strong and courageous, is increasingly disturbed with the way he can't seem to turn this race around. Meanwhile, he has papered over all the cowardly doubts and fears he harbors about the shortcomings of his own history, personality and the mysterious place he comes from, and in order to beat down his fears regarding all these things, he projects them onto his enemy, Obama and criticizes him for characteristics that Obama doesn't have at all.

So if we turn all these things around and consider that these criticisms are describing the things that make McCain uneasy about himself, I'm left wondering whether there may be a great deal about John that we don't know, despite his time in the senate. What kind of pilot was he? What really happened in the Hanoi Hilton - his much vaunted heroism as a P.O.W. smells like cowardice to me (didn't he prove he was willing to betray his country in order to preserve his own life or at least make it easier while a P.O.W.). How did he escape the Keating five situation?

Based on his accusations directed at Obama, I can't help but wonder how much McCain really has hidden and how much he's terrified it will all be revealed before November 4th. Perhaps it will do him good (psychologically, not politically) if it all comes out.

Then, again, I once worked for a boss who demonstrated similar psychological characteristics. Turned out it was rapidly-developing Alzheimers. Within three years he didn't recognize his own wife and children.

the only people who should be allowed to vote are the kinds of people who will take a massive government loan to bail out their company, right after giving massive bonuses to their exec's, then send the exec's off on a luxury junket right after the bailout comes through (AIG).

According to this type of supremely spoiled rich brats, the rest of us must come to realize that the richest of the rich are the "good" people. Those of us with lesser means need to stop being so uppity and continue to work our backsides off to support the lavish lifestyles of our "superiors."

After all, just because we don't allow political feudalism anymore, doesn't mean we can't accomplish the same thing economically. And they have, and they will, unless we take back the country and, sadly, go through the pain of having the system come back down to economic reality for all of us. But at least those at the top have the farthest to fall. Those who have already been suffering the most can't go all that much lower, and know how to survive being down there.

Some of us have been there before. Some of us know others, still alive from the last time, who can help us figure out how to get by on nothing.

I, too, have had the opportunity for multiple conversations with older folks who were adults during the Great Depression and those who grew up in the midst of it. They survived and so shall we. But something else happened, too. They relearned the value of neighbors and interdependence (things which had been forgotten in the selfish hedonism of the roaring 20's). They learned what's important in life (food, shelter and people you care about who care about you).

That we have forgotten exactly these same things is what has brought us to where we are now. We will relearn what's important, and those who can't adapt may, indeed, leave early, but we will survive and live on even as we try to wake up from our own stubborn blindness and save the planet.

Now, if we only had a credible leader who could remind us that irrational fear is our biggest enemy and who could propose and carry out programs that would reassure us and help those in need instead of the self-serving weasels we have now and their friends on "weasel" news who can do nothing but seek to bail each other out and cover their own and each other's backsides, since the public knows already beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are culpable.

Is there a new FDR on the horizon? We can only hope (and pray) that this is so even as we hope (and pray) for personal wisdom and the collective wisdom once demonstrated by the American population to reassert itself as we begin to build a new day and a new society more faithful to each other, to the trust bequeathed to us by our forbearers and to the God to whom we pray (and whom we call by many different names).

Is it Newtonian physics to say that what goes up very rapidly, is likely to come down just as rapidly... the inevitability of parabolic curves of ascent and descent and all that? With what's looming on the horizon, this dead cat is likely to bounce like a superball for a long while to come before settling down to the low level at which it will eventually end before the most gambling-addicted folks on wall street begin creating the next bubble. (And would somebody remind me what the original purpose of Stock Ownership and Stock Exchanges was, because I suspect we've long ago left all that behind in favor of casino gambling...?)