Excuse me, Hootowl, but when you tell me "Don't you dare blame them for your stupidity," I don't know what you're talking about. It must be because I am "tired and lame" as you so nicely put it.

I said thst it's incorrect to blame all of Obama's problems on racism and, in the remark that you quoted, that "in my small town, the people who won't vote for Obama because he is an African-American would never have voted for a Democrat in the general election."

The people I speak of who will not vote for Obama because of his race would never have voted for Hillary Clinton, the candidate I supported in the primaries. They didn't want a woman president any more than they want one who is African-American. They would have voted for McCain, Bob Barr, Ron Paul or stayed at home rather than vote for either Obama or Clinton.

For a long time, I doubted those who suggest that there are many Republicans on Salon working overtime to build up hatred between supporters of Obama and Clinton as their best shot at keeping the White House in November. But it's becoming obvious that the only way McCain will win is to attract Clinton's voters, particularly women.

That strategy is going to backfire because as angry as we Democrats get at each other, we still share far more in common than we could ever have with a party that nominates someone with Sarah Palin's ultra-conservative views as vice president.

I live in a small town and the people here who won't vote for Obama because he is an African-American would never have voted for a Democrat in the general election.

For some of his supporters to continually blame all of his problems on racism accomplishes nothing. No Democrat has won a majority of the white vote since LBJ, who said when he signed the Civil Rights Bill that he had lost the South for the Democratic party for a generation.

Obama and Biden need to focus on the voters they can win, and with the help of Bill and Hillary Clinton, I think they can reach many of those who are still on the fence, particularly women who will realize when they read more about her positions that Sarah Palin is not somebody we can identify with on the issues.

But please stop making it all about race because it isn't. If America was as bigoted as these people seem to think, he would never have become the nominee.

The real problem is the Democratic party's failure to attract white male voters and it's not because Sen. Obama is African-American because it's been happening for more than 40 years.

The last Democratic president to receive a majority of the white male vote was Lyndon Johnson and the last one to get more than 38 percent was Jimmy Carter. If Kerry had gotten 5 percent more of that vote, he would be in the White House, not Bush.

I keep hearing white male commentators discussing whether Hillary's voters are going for Palin, never mentioning that the group they belong to is the one least likely to vote for Obama and Biden.

While a few Clinton supporters, perhaps 25 percent, have not committed to Obama, the majority of the women switching to McCain/Palin in the latest poll were young mothers, not older women who tended to vote for Clinton in the primary.

Pedinska, you say "we have lost sight of the fact that there was once a time when the definition of 'news' was, first and foremost, the presentation of objective and observable things called 'facts'."

That's precisely why many people object to commentary passing as reporting. When reporters present the unvarnished facts, an informed electorate can make its own decisions.

In their Washington Post articles through which they almost singlehandedly brought down a corrupt Republican administration, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein didn't have to write that Richard Nixon was a liar. They presented well-researched and sourced evidence of his crimes and the American people and their representatives made up their own minds as to his guilt.

Today, too many people seem to think "the news" should cover only the good about their party and the bad about the other side and prefer to seek their news from sources where their opinions will never be challenged.

There is a difference between covering the news in an even-handed manner and offering opinion. Ideally, the media reserves the latter for shows clearly labeled as commentaries and for op-ed pages.

Matthews and Olbermann haven't been silenced. They will continue to freely offer their opinions on the debates and the election, just not to serve as news anchors, who are supposed to be fair to all sides.

Blurring the lines between news and opinion as Fox News and MSNBC have each done is what causes people on both sides to claim the media is biased and to have plenty of examples to prove their cases.

As more people get their "news" from the blogosphere, it's easy to just be exposed to opinions that reinforce what you already think. That's why we wind up with people talking at each other, not to each other.

Seeing only one side of a story doesn't challenge voters to think through information about candidates or issues nor does it help a candidate's supporters make a persuasive and informed case to those who disagree with them.

Thank you so much for the update and for making the point that when Clinton supporters complained repeatedly during the primary about bias by Matthews and Olbermann, there was absolutely no response from NBC. Perhaps we should have told them we were right-wing Republicans in order to get the network to take us seriously.