Paul Krugman misses few marks. On Monday, he wrote a thought provoking piece on what should be everyone's pet peeve: the pursuit of nonsensical yardsticks by which to measure our candidates. "The point is that questions about a candidate shouldn’t be whether he or she is 'authentic.' They should be about motives: whose interests would the candidate serve if elected? And think how much better shape the nation would be in if enough people had asked that question seven years ago."

The conventionally held notion that all of politics, like the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina, is local got a free pass from many who should know better. Why wasn't that performance the reason Americans rejected Bush outright?

People and campaigns that would stoop to every last cost to win should incite a vigilance alert. That Bush has 'pulled a McCain' on the whole country is just about self-evident with hindsight.

The pendulum swing toward outright plutocracy should be the hottest domestic topic. But, as Krugman points out, how authentic could someone like John Edwards be on the subject? After all, he lives in a big house.

Positions on issues can be bold-faced lies which is why you don't want to rely on some kind of "Q" when choosing our leaders and representatives. News coverage which buys into the marketing lingo of hacks at the expense of diligent reporting does the nation a disservice, regardless of viewership and shareholder profits.

Remember that it was all those neo-cons, some who've come and gone, some who linger like some cruel joke, who inhabited the 'spin rooms' after Bush's debates and major appearances. Their foreign policy leanings were a know-able, despite the 'read my lips - no foreign wars for nation building' folklore Bush was instructed to campaign with.

Tom Friedman made the point that Al Qaeda showed its true colors a month ago when it  sicced one of its zombie death merchants on a funeral procession. What was the neo-con reason again that crime and punishment was the wrong frame for our response?

Bill Moyers interviewed Andy Stern of the service workers' union, Friday, who sounded an alarm over the re-emergence of the holding company. Call them private equity funds or anything else and they still stink up the place. Theirs is the power of the blackmailer, railroad dick, goon and slumlord, made all pretty for the Wall Street Journal.

He's not one to call for a return to the New Deal or anything like it. He believes modern times and problems deserve more forward thinking. He may be dead right that the American dream is way to the back row of burners for these laissez-faire opportunists. They don't need no stinkin' dream.

Our friends on the right like to refer to George Soros as some Marxist/Leninist multi-gazillionnaire, on a mission to restructure America in some frightful way. But really, he's just a guy. A guy who's willing to display the courage of his convictions and speak for the nation's conscience, as he finds it. Soros might resonate with the almost half who've given up on political responsibility if his ideas were ever the focus of the coverage. Instead, he exists as a characterization by 'strategists.'

What should we make of war profiteers, operating under Bush's and Cheney's ample skirts, pulling the strings that keep clowns like them around and all the cash headed in their direction?

Bush's war of choice, unchecked by accountability or competence, might actually be a sidelight to a restructuring unlike any in American history.

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