SHANGHAIED is coming

You can click on the poster to see it BIG.

Carnivorous Tibetan monks

Corrupt killer bankers

A murderous, sociopathic veteran of the U.S. invasion of Grenada

Comely kung-fu bodyguards

A painful dumpling accident

Drugs, sex, rock & roll

The usual coterie of business moguls and hookers, friends and foes

And the return of Ray's Chinese-Mexican colleague and pal, Wen Lei Yue.

Set in Hong Kong during the 1997 Handover back to China, and then in Shanghai.


The manuscript will be back from my editor this week. Watch out for an excerpt on my website sometime by the end of the year.

Here's another picture of Shanghai to keep you amused in the meantime:

VARIOUS GRIPES

In alphabetical order:

Airlines: Perhaps they are actually a lot smarter than I think they are and the reason they do everything they possibly can to make the experience of flying unpleasant, is that they're trying to discourage people from flying. If it was more palatable, the friendlier skies might be even more crowded and awful than they already are and then it would, perhaps, be even worse. Every time I fly anywhere these days, I take a very deep breath of relief that most of my travel in recent years has been by car.

Families: Break them up and assess their component parts individually, and often as not they are composed of nice, interesting, polite human beings. Put them together in one locale and often as not they turn into ravenous, vicious packs of snarling brutes whose behavior is informed by little more than the assembled lifetimes of perceived slights, insults, personal failings and betrayals. They are thrown together by genes, not by choice, and too many of them have no good reason for their unity.

Holidays: See families. Take that terrible dynamic and blend with enormous amounts of social pressure to have a good, cheery, warm and "familial" time - and what do you get? I don't have to tell you what you get. Most of you reading this have families. Most of you dread, for good reason, seeing them in large groups around holidays.
And don't even get me started on gift-giving. At least Thanksgiving doesn't demand loot. Sure, I like getting gifts as well as the next guy, but they're pretty meaningless when they're given in the context of obligation during a certain time of year. I would much rather have someone stumble across something they think I might like at any old time of the year and get it for me then. That has actual meaning. It isn't merely someone filling out their list.

Hotels: Why is it that the more expensive a hotel is, the more likely it is to nickel and dime its guests to death? At cheap hotels and motels across America, you get free internet access. Only in the expensive ones do you pay for it - $9.95 to as much as $19.95 per day. I get free bottles of water, at least one, in most of the cheap places I stay. At the W in New York City the bottle of water they put by the side of the bed is eight bucks. And you have to hunt around a little to discover they're going to charge you for it. At cheaper places they tend to quote you the actual price you're going to pay for the room, including taxes. At fancy hotels they quote you a price, either mumble or put in small print that it doesn't include taxes, and in places like New York and San Francisco you can end up paying twenty percent or more higher than the price you were quoted. I don't care if your hotel gets the tax or not, it's still part of the price I have to pay for the room.

Ivy-League Educations: There's been an awful lot of blather lately about the fantastic team of Ivy-League talent assembled by Barack Obama for his administration. They do seem like a smart crowd and I do have high hopes that they'll make less of a mess of running things than the Bush Administration has. But I'm really fed up with people equating the university that someone attended with their ability to accomplish great things. Hell, George W. Bush, arguably the worst president we've ever had, is the proud possessor of a Harvard MBA. The Unabomber graduated from Harvard, as did Hitler's foreign press secretary Ernst Hanfstaengl. The last president to assemble a group of the annointed "best and brightest" was John Kennedy. That was the crowd that gave us the Vietnam War and who achieved very little else of lasting significance. So shut up already. I'll judge Obama's team on what it accomplishes, not where it got its degrees.

Royalty Statements: I spent many years as a business and financial journalist. I'm not an accountant, but I'm not unversed in figuring out statements of accounts. I have seen a very wide variety of bizarre financial statements over the years. I have never seen any quite so incomprehensible - in uncharitable moments (which is most of them) I think it must be deliberate - as the ones I receive from publishers to account for royalties, or the lack thereof.

TV News: It's not news, it's chatter. In a desperate attempt to fill up the 24-hour cycle, it elevates the mundane to ludicrous heights, making people think that important, intelligent matters are being reported and analyzed, when they aren't. It's the dumbing down of journalism. I have actually had people tell me they like seeing "news they can agree with." Huh? I tend to agree with Rachel Maddow much of the time, but I'm sorry, she's no more a journalist than Sean Hannity. Keith Olbermann is no more a reporter than Bill O'Reilly.

There, glad I got all that off my chest.

RELATIVELY SPEAKING

Distance is, of course, relative. It is roughly 21.7 million miles from the Earth to the Moon. Since 2005 I have driven 43,223 miles flogging my books. (That's only 1/502 of a trip to the Moon.) My most recent book tour, from which I got home yesterday, was a mere 4,779 miles.

It seemed longer. I knew it was getting time to stop for the night Thursday when toward the end of 12 hours behind the wheel I cranked up The Grateful Dead on my car's stereo. I was passing some very colorful trucks. Hallucinating, perhaps? (I hadn't listened to The Grateful Dead in, oh, I don't know, maybe ten years.) So I pulled in at Harris Ranch, just south of what a friend of mine refers to as "Cowschwitz" - the gigantic Central California feedlot. Steak, whisky, sleep. It was an easy 2-1/2 hour drive home the next day.

In Portland, Salem and Seattle I kept company with Bill Cameron a very fine writer - LOST DOG and CHASING SMOKE - and a swell traveling and book eventing companion.

He even managed to exert some sort of parental control and convince his obviously well-raised (she bought a copy of my book after all), daughter to show up for our book event at Portland's Murder By the Book. And the event was well-received. You can read about it from the perspective of the bookseller here. (You may have to scroll up to actually read the blog post.)

So, once more I'm confronted with trying to decide whether or not book touring is worth all the time and expense. (That's right, unless you're with a big publisher who has forked over a fairly large advance for your book, you pay for book touring yourself.)

On the plus side:

It's fun. What could possibly be bad about driving around one of the most beautiful and diverse countries on the planet, stopping in at bookstores to talk with people about your own book, and other books, and whatever else comes to mind. At this point it is like a holiday spent visiting friends.

It's educational. I learn a lot on book tours. About the places I drive through, the people I meet, the book business, all kinds of interesting and useful stuff. After my eleven years living in Asia I didn't feel really re-connected with home until I'd driven all around and across the U.S. Getting out of my comfortable, "elite" existence in Southern California, is one of the only ways that I feel like I can even begin to understand this country. And the more I understand it, the more I love it.

It gives me time to think. What else is there to do on long drives?

I listen to a lot of music. Again, what else is there to do on long drives?

I hear really bizarre stuff on the radio. Yet again, what else is...?

I eat. Sometimes I encounter really great, regional or unexpected food. (Sometimes I don't.)

I sell some books that I might not have sold otherwise.

I meet some fans. And that's great for my ego.

I get to know booksellers. And as a type of people go, they are among my favorites.

Booksellers get to know me. And I like to think that if they get to know me, they'll like me and do a better job of "hand-selling" my books.

I could probably come up with a few more if I spent some time thinking it over, but those are the plusses that come to mind.

On the minus side:

Well, there's really only one minus - it's expensive and it probably isn't effective.

The chances of it paying for itself in sales is pretty slim. If I look at it in terms of my royalties, I would have needed to have sold around 900 hardback copies of FLIGHT OF THE HORNBILL simply to break even on this book tour.

I took pictures of everyone on my tour who bought a book and had me sign it. (Two people managed to slip through the cracks.) Here's the 90 photos. Now some of these people bought several copies, although most of them bought paperbacks. (Accounting for royalties, my break even point was about 1,500 paperbacks.)

Every store I went to had me sign some stock for them before I left. Four books in one store, as many as 40 in another. If all the stores I visited eventually sell all the stock I signed, I'm still not at the break even point. If they order the same amount again and manage to sell all those, I'm still not at it.

There is a lot of talk in the book business about "hand-selling" - store clerks recommending your books to customers, to book clubs, etc. That can account for a whole lot of extra sales, but do the numbers actually add up if you're hoping to make a living at this?

No, they don't.

Many small press books, mine included, don't show up in most of the big box chain bookstores such as Barnes & Noble or Borders. They don't show up in airports or drugstores or at supermarket checkout counters. Where they do show up is in independent bookstores, and independents are where most hand-selling takes place.

At most there are 50 or so Mystery specialty bookstores in the U.S. There's another two hundred, at most, independents that carry enough mysteries that there's a chance they'll sell my books. Let's pretend that 200 stores sell, on average, 50 copies each of my books. That's 10,000 books - not enough to make much of a dent in anyone's best seller list. But 50 copies each is wildly inflated. Even if 200 stores do carry my books, the average is likely to be no more than five books each. (Some stores will sell a lot more than that, others will sell none.) That's nothing.

These days the biggest number of my sales are likely to come from online sources such as Amazon and B&N online. You can, in a sense, tour those places by being very active online and linking to your sales pages. But that's just not as much fun as going out and doing it in person.

My next book, SHANGHAIED, will be out in June next year. Am I going to be dumb enough to do a big book tour for it?

Probably. Look for me at a bookstore near you in June and July 2009.

DRIVING ME CRAZY

The drive from Boise to Portland was beautiful; through the rolling hills of Eastern Oregon and then down into the Columbia River Gorge and along the river. It rained a little, but mostly the weather cooperated by becoming part of the landscape. Somehow I avoided killing myself and others at high speeds while shooting the following photos out the window of my speeding vehicle.

Then I got to Portland, checked into Hotel Lucia - which tends to be my headquarters when I'm here - and went out to find something to eat and to make a pilgrimage to Powell's - possibly the greatest bookstore on the planet.

Now If you recall, last year Powell's and I had something of a lovers quarrel. I showed up on tour for Grave Imports, only to find that they were selling the two ARCs (advanced reading copies) that the publisher had sent them for free, and not carrying the actual, finished edition of the book that they would have to pay for. In essence, they were stealing from both my publisher and from me. I was annoyed. I made my annoyance known. I may have even implied in my blog that were someone to go to Powell's and shoplift my ARCs and send them to me, I'd be happy to sign them for them and send them back. Powell's wrote me a rather distressed email over the whole thing, and I rescinded the offer, but nothing was really settled.

So this year I went back, not sure what I was going to do if they were selling the ARCs of Flight of the Hornbill if they didn't also have the real book on the shelf. I was thinking that perhaps I would shoplift the ARCs myself, deliberately get caught, and then make a big case of it by insisting on going to trial and defending myself by claiming that I was simply trying to prevent their stealing from my publisher and myself.

I didn't get the chance. They don't have any copies of the book on their shelves at all. (You can order it from them online if you know what you're looking for.) They also didn't even have any copies of my friend and fellow Bleak House author Bill Cameron's new book, Chasing Smoke, and he's a local Portland author.

I found the whole thing utterly depressing. There were a bunch of books I wanted to buy at Powell's. I decided against buying any books there if they aren't going to carry my books. It could be that my love affair with Powell's is now officially on the rocks, and that saddens me.

Sorrows were drowned over drinks and dinner with an old pal who lives here. It was a very good evening, but a hangover ensued. Hopefully things will perk up by the time of my book event in Salem this evening.

A MIGHTY FINE CUP OF BROTHEL BREW, THEN THE REST OF THE DAY

After dinner the night before at the Four Way Casino, Cafe and Bar in Wells, Nevada, I figured I'd be a lot better off breakfasting somewhere else. And I was. Surprisingly so.

One of the two brothels in Wells is Bella's Hacienda Brothel. It's one of the only, maybe the only of the Nevada brothels that is owned and operated by a woman - Bella. They also run Bella's Espresso House and Diner, right by the exit for Wells off of Interstate 80. So that's where I went for breakfast.

Now I gotta tell you, I'm pretty fussy about espresso. I make an excellent one at home, I'm particularly fond of the one to be had at El Cochinito - a Cuban cafe near my house - and also at LaMill - a fancy schmancy coffee place near my house. Add Bella's to the list.

There I was, in bumfuck nowhere Nevada, drinking one of the most truly excellent espressos I have ever had. (I drink it straight, no milk, no sugar, no nothin' between me and my near strong enough to walk on it coffee.) I had two doubles and would have had a third if I didn't think it would get in the way of rational driving. It was, without a doubt, one of the very best espressos I have ever enjoyed anywhere.

Breakfast was good, too. Fresh made biscuits, perfectly cooked and spiced homefries, perfectly cooked fresh eggs and a very good sausage patty. I was one happy author on tour. If a night at Bella's brothel comes complete with breakfast the next morning, it is well worth considering showing up in Wells with a wad of cash.

As is, I bought a couple pounds of Bella's Brothel Brew Beans, a couple of Bella's coffee mugs and a Nevada Brothel Cookbook and headed north on Highway 93 through the very top of Nevada and into Idaho.
I lived in Boise from about September 1970 until June 1971. I'd followed a high school girlfriend there because I wanted to get out of Los Angeles and go work among the "real people." That didn't work out so well at first, so I ended up in Boise State University for a couple of semesters. A lot of my spare time was spent hanging out in Hannifin's Cigar Store with that girlfriend. We'd play pinball, leaf through magazines, drink Moxie and listen to farmers and ranchers who sat around the old coal burning stove, trying different kinds of pipe tobacco and swapping lies. So today I went back to Hannifin's. It's still there, but the pinball machine is gone, the magazine rack has been replaced with a wall of coolers stocked with beer and soda pop, there weren't any farmers or ranchers and the guy working there hadn't ever heard of Moxie. Still, I took a couple of pictures. I appear in the exterior shot.

Then I walked around town for a bit. It is a fairly attractive old downtown, the once swank Idahana hotel still perches on the street like a timber town castle - although it is now infested with chichi businesses, and there are a couple of blocks of Basque businesses - something that is new since I lived there. Perhaps the most impressive site, however, was Otis the dog.
Rediscovered Books, where I had my event, was a very nice shop with an excellent set up for events. They've got a loyal clientele and a good, varied stock. They sent out 1200 emails to their list about the event, and did all they could to publicize it.

Still, that's book events for you - three people showed up. They enjoyed the show, asked interesting questions, but only one person bought one copy of Living Room of the Dead - wanting to start the series at the beginning. Another of the attendees apologized for not being able to buy a book until Wednesday, when his unemployment check shows up. Sheesh. I felt like I ought to just give him a copy. But I don't have taxpayers money to throw around, so I can't go bailing out book lovers.

It was one of those nights when you have to remind yourself that book events are for the bookstore, rather than for the audience who does or doesn't show up. It's good to get to know the stores and have them get to know me and my books. They'll sell more books in the long run that way. Still, it's no wonder that so many of us writers drink.

THE LONELIEST HIGHWAY IN AMERICA

That could refer to almost any book tour, at least for us lesser known writers. But it's not really true. There's the people who work in the bookstores and spending time with them is like visiting friends. And someone does always show up.

At Cheesecake & Crime in Henderson, Nevada, five women from a book group showed up. They didn't know me or my books, but they seemed genuinely interested and they bought plenty of books and asked good questions. Here they are, with me:
Afterwards I went back to my hotel. I was in room 23-319 of the MGM Grand (it has 5,044 rooms in its main wing.) The rooms are perfectly engineered to make you want to go out. The bed is okay, but not so comfortable that you want to spend a whole lot of time on it. The desk chair is too low for the desk, so working is a problem. The air conditioner cranks up no matter what you do to the thermostat at night; and the heater kicks in high in the morning. The TV gets lousy reception and has no cable. The whole room, like everything else in Las Vegas, shouts: "Get out and gamble."

Well, I didn't gamble, not even a dollar. Instead I went to Michael Mina's Stripsteak in the Mandalay Bay Hotel where I had the finest French Fries I have ever had. They were double fried in duck fat and served with, among two other sauces, a white truffle oil aioli. Along with them I had an incredible steak - a Black Angus ribeye cap that wasn't on the menu. Washed down with a good single malt and I was very happy.

After that I walked around for a while, but Las Vegas doesn't change much. Having been there last year, it was the same place - except for the enormous multi-building project that is fast rising on the west side of the Strip. It looks like it will have some great looking, quirky buildings. On the way back to my room I was stopped by two cookie cutter Blonde 101 hookers - bleached, plumped and siliconed, squeezed into tight red dresses. The casino at the MGM seems to be one of the current strolls for what is known as CGs - casino girls. They wanted $500 for one of them or $600 for the pair. Don't they know there's a financial crisis? I politely declined and went to bed alone.

Today I hit the road to Boise, taking Highway 93, one of the two roads that lay claim to being "America's Loneliest Highway." It quickly became apparent why. It was strangely beautiful.

I stopped for lunch in Ely - a truckstop of a town that is also historic.
And I've stopped for the night in Wells, at the junction of Interstate 80 and Nevada 93. It seems to exist entirely for tired truckers: gas, groceries, casino, cafes and brothels. It has the remnants of a historic downtown, and two busy brothels - Bella's and Donna's. (Just imagine if they ever merge.)

Tomorrow morning it's off to Boise, my triumphal return - 37 years after my one year at Boise State University.

THE BEAT GOES ON

Book touring has not been quite as frantic as for previous books. Time and budgetary constraints have seen to that. It's still tiring though. And I still enjoy it. More pictures of those who have bought my books and had me sign them at events can now be found at my Flickr page if you click here.

Here's a random preview:




Tomorrow is the end of what seems like the world's longest election campaign. I've been complaining about it, but even I can change my mind sometimes. The current issue of The Economist has a column by Lexington that makes a pretty good case for why a long, expensive presidential campaign might be a good thing. I don't think you need to subscribe to the Economist's website to read it by clicking on this sentence. I could have summarized it for you, but I'm lazy this morning.

Speaking of which, here's some random thoughts that have been popping into my head lately:

BAILOUT MONEY - More like takeover dollars. A bunch of banks that are receiving our tax dollars are using them to buy other banks. It's easier to make money that looks good on your books, quicker, that way than by loaning the money out - which is what they were supposed to do with it. There oughta be a law. That's sleazy and will make matters worse in the long run. I was in favor of some sort of bailout. I figured it was necessary. But strangely enough, maybe it should have been regulated.

SMART REPUBLICANS WANT MCCAIN TO LOSE - The next president is going to be fucked. They'll be expected to put the country back together again and fast. But it isn't going to be fast. It is going to take at least a couple of years for the economy to even begin to balance out. Withdrawal from Iraq is likely to be a lot messier than expected. A comprehensive healthcare plan isn't going to get through Congress any time soon. Americans have short memories and expect miracles. The next president is going to get blamed for a whole hell of a lot that isn't really his fault, no matter who he is. If McCain loses and the Democrats take a much bigger majority in Congress, two years from now the Republicans will gain back a whole lot of Congress, four years from now they'll have a better shot at the presidency - and without having to deal with Sarah Palin in a strong position to be their candidate - having been vice-president. My guess is that the savvier Republican strategists are hoping Obama wins this time out.

I've been reading Beijing Coma by Ma Jian. It's extraordinary. He's one of the very best contemporary Chinese writers. Read it.

Thursday I'm hitting the road again. Off to Las Vegas for an event at Cheesecake and Crime in Henderson, then a drive up "America's Loneliest Highway" to Boise for an event at Rediscovered Books, then off to Portland, Salem, Olympia and Seattle before returning home in mid-November. I shall send dispatches from the road. I promise.

HAVE MERCY - I'M STRESSED

They just now called from the car mechanic. If I do everything they're suggesting, it's going to set me back a bit over three thousand bucks. They offered to have me come in and look at it, but there's a problem. I wouldn't know what I was looking at. I don't know enough about cars to reasonably judge whether I'm begin scammed or not. Most people don't.

If I had the time I could pick up the car and get a second opinion. That would be the smart shopper thing to do. But I don't have the time. The place I take my car - the dealer (I know, I know) - is expensive, but they've always done good (so far as I can tell), fast work and my experiences with them in the past have led me to conclude that they are basically pretty honest.

And I need the car no later than Thursday afternoon - this being Tuesday morning - and the other (independent) mechanic I know can't usually keep a promise to get me the car by a specific time. The car has 125,000 miles on it and hasn't required a whole lot of expensive maintenance so far. I'm about to embark on five to six thousand miles of hard driving on my book tour. So I'm stuck.

All of which makes me think of other aggravating expenses in my life, most notably healthcare.

Since I expect that my body - it's only got 56 years on it - will hold up until after my book tour, I've postponed the treadmill stress test that my doctor thinks I should have. And I'm shopping around for a discount.

My doctor, who I think is a great doctor, charges around $1,800 for a treadmill stress test. That comes on the heels of my having been hit with a bill for $939 for a recent routine visit for a blood workup and an EKG. (My despicable insurance company did fork over $426 for the visit, otherwise the bill would have been $1,366.) The insurance isn't likely to cover any of the stress test.

The thing is, a treadmill stress test is pretty simple. So long as the monitors are positioned correctly and the machine is in decent working order, any idiot can administer one. Hell, even I could administer one to myself if I had to. There can be a little diagnostic art to interpreting the results, but none of this comes from the rocket science side of medicine.

So I'm looking for somewhere cheap, or at least cheaper, to get my stress test. I can have them send the results to my doctor - who will no doubt charge more than I'll be happy about to look them over.

This is, of course, especially of interest during an election year. Both candidates for president say they want to fix healthcare in this country. Neither one of them really has much hope in hell of doing anything about it.

Part of the problem is that healthcare is one of the areas in which free market economics don't work. They can't work. The incentives are skewed.

In most industries the free market creates incentives for companies to provide as high quality goods and services as they can, at competitive prices, so that their customers keep coming back for more.

But, if you are "lucky" enough to have health insurance, your insurance company makes more money when it doesn't provide you with the products you've paid for, than when it does.

It is far more profitable to sell insurance to people who won't use it, or who won't use it much, than it is to people who actually need it. And that's what insurance companies try to do. That's their free market incentive.

You can't really blame them. No company exists out of the goodness of its own heart. They exist to make money. Most of the time, the "enlightened self-interest" of free markets works out pretty well for everyone involved.

But healthcare is a necessity. And when it comes to necessities, the free market can easily get bent out of shape. Sooner or later, everyone needs healthcare to some degree or another. Society at large has a high stake in people remaining relatively healthy.

There is a very good reason why pretty much every single other industrialized nation on the planet has a national, government subsidized (whether administered by the government or not) healthcare system. It is the only way to ensure the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Some things do require government money, regulation, oversight and even participation. Healthcare is one of them. I'd love to hear one of the presidential candidates own up to that. They'd probably lose some votes. But they'd sure gain my respect.

DRIVE BYS AND ROCK AND ROLL

First off, the 2008 Eric Stone Drive By Book Tour of America is underway. So far I have delighted and confused audiences in Houston, Thousand Oaks and Westwood Village (Los Angeles). My quest to take pictures of everyone who buys one of my books and has me sign it at a book event, goes on. The evidence is here. There have been a few people who wouldn't let me immortalize them, and a few who I have missed. But the pictures will keep coming.

But now, before I return to the subject of my book touring, I want to say a little something about rock & roll.

Rock & roll and assigned seating are an oxymoron. I've mellowed, slightly. There was a time when I didn't think it was rock and roll unless at some point in the course of the proceedings, you began to get worried about what would happen if the place you were hearing it in caught fire. I still always check the fire exits when I first get into a place, but I rarely concern myself with them after that.

Saturday night I went with some friends to see Patti Smith at The Orpheum in downtown Los Angeles. It is a beautifully restored, magnificent theater from the 1920s. The sound was excellent. But there were assigned seats, narrow aisles and not much chance to wander around or dance or anything else of that nature.

I've seen Patti Smith, maybe five or six times over the years, the first time being in the early 1980s or late '70s. She's 61 now, on the ripe side for rock & roll and I was a bit concerned before the show, and if the truth be told, during its first half, that she was moving a bit beyond her sell by date. But in the end, she really cranked it up big for the best live versions I've ever heard her do of Horses, Gloria and then an encore of Rock & Roll Nigger. The woman can still rock with the best of them. (Gives us 56 year olds some hope.)

Still, it was a shame about those damn assigned seats.

In Houston I was at Murder By the Book, for the third time. It's a big store that has always been very supportive of me and they manage to turn out a good sized crowd. Thanks yet again. I'll be back.

Earlier in the day I was having a coffee with my pal Sheri, a Houston cop. She looked around the place and estimated that about eighty percent of the people there were armed. Now I don't worry one lick about Sheri packing heat. As a matter of fact I find it reassuring. She knows what she's doing. She's well trained in how to use, care for and store her guns, and my guess is she's a pretty good shot. But if something erupted in that coffee shop, I'd hate to have my life depend on the ability of all those other people to know what they're doing and to remain level headed enough under fire to not fill me full of holes by mistake. Guns are like any other tool, they're only as good as the person using them. The difference is that a fuckwit with a hammer can do a whole lot less damage than one with a pistol.

I came back to L.A. and on Saturday I had an event at Mysteries to Die For in Thousand Oaks. It's a small, but nicely stocked, store with a very enthusiastic crowd of readers. I always get more people turning up there to see me than I expect, and it's always, as it was this time, a great audience. They were getting ready for Michael Connelly the next day. They were going to hold his event in the parking lot. Something for me to aspire to.

Sunday was my official West Coast Launch Party at The Mystery Bookstore in Westwood Village (near UCLA.) The first job I ever had in my life was in a bookstore right across the street from where The Mystery Bookstore now is: Book Bargain Center, a mix of used bookstore, Leftist bookstore and headshop. So every time I have an event here, I feel like I'm coming home. They also tend to get my biggest crowds - 30 or more people at each event so far. Yesterday there were Indonesian snacks - from a great little Indonesian market and cafe on National Blvd. called Simpang Asia, as well as my show of Indonesian music and photos that seemed to be well received. FLIGHT OF THE HORNBILL is the store's Crime Club selection this month, for which I am very grateful.

I've now got a few days off to get some writing done. The next book, SHANGHAIED, is likely to come out next June, so I've got to get a cleanish manuscript to Alison my editor by the end of November. To work.

SIGN POSTS

One of the best things about book touring is the chance to meet people who are buying my books. I suppose some writers eventually get over the sense of humbling pride and downright astonishment that there are strangers out there willing to fork over good money to read something they’ve written. I’m nowhere close to that yet, and I hope I never get there. To do what I do is a great privilege.

So I’m taking pictures of everyone I sign any of my books for on this tour. These are people I want to remember and to in some way recognize in my blog.
I already took pictures earlier this year of everyone who got a signed Advanced Reading Copy of FLIGHT OF THE HORNBILL at Book Expo America in Los Angeles. You can see those photos here at my Flickr page.

Now that this year’s Eric Stone Drive By Book Tour ’08 has got underway at Bouchercon in Baltimore, let the picture taking begin.

The new book wasn’t fully out in time for Bouchercon, but my publisher, the estimable Bleak House Books, cranked out some fast paperbacks so that there’d be some available at the conference. Not everyone managed to get a copy tracked me down to have me sign their book, but I've shot the ones who did. Since I can't figure out any easy way to post all of these photos on this blog. To see them, you can go to this Flickr page.

Meanwhile, here's some more photos from around Bouchercon. My publisher Ben and editor Alison locked in mortal combat.
It is better to have your publisher at your feet, than at your throat.
A pair of unshaven publishing industry reprobates.
The audience for the panel I was on at Bouchercon. Considering my panel was competing with Lawrence Block - a very big name - it was well attended.
Tasha Alexander, a fellow writer with my editor, Alison Janssen in a cozy hotel lobby nook. Or is it a cranny? Alison should know, she's an excellent editor.

BOUCHERING AROUND BALTIMORE

Sure, it's plenty of fun hanging out in the hotel bar with my fellow authors during Bouchercon. And the panels, well, they're pretty entertaining, and the bookroom is a grand place to sit around and talk to booksellers, who are, after all, on the front lines of this business. But it is all too rare that anyone manages to get out of the hotel and wander around town and that is a terrible shame.

Especially here, because Baltimore is a town well worth wandering.

My first night here I went with a friend to Obrycki's Crab House where we ate astoundingly good steamed, peppered crabs. They cover the table with paper, give you a hammer and a smallish knife, and a bib, and away you go. Great eating.

Mostly though you end up eating in the hotel coffee shop or bar because it's convenient. And most of the time the hotel coffee shop and bar are overpriced and undergood.

Today, however, I ventured out for a walk rather than going to a couple of the big publishing company parties. Somehow I was able to resist the allure of free booze, for a long walk along Baltimore's beautiful waterfront and into some of its great neighborhoods. I have long said that if anyone were to hold a gun to my head and tell me that I had to move to the East Coast of the U.S., I would happily comply by moving here to Baltimore. My walk today simply further convinced me of that.

Here's some photographic evidence:

Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

The Inner Harbor development.

Barnes & Nobel in the Inner Harbor.

The National Aquarium.

Condos in an old warehouse / factory building near the Inner Harbor.

The Can Co. Building.

A perch on top of an old row house.

Neighborhood diner somewhere north and east of Fells Point.

The monument to the Katyn martyrs - Polish victims of Stalinism.

Some sort of Eastern European church in the distance.

Waterfront condo development.

In spite of Baltimore being the site of the National Aquarium, I took this jellyfish picture off of a jetty along the waterfront.

It's an excellent drinking town. But I'm not sure these guys are why.

I GUESS I WASN'T JOKING AFTER ALL

Here it is, possibly the single most important vote that some senators and representatives are going to make in their whole careers and...

THANK GOD, OREGON'S CHILDRENS' WOODEN TOY ARROW INDUSTRY IS SAVED! THE PUERTO RICAN RUM INDUSTRY WILL THRIVE TO DISTILL ANOTHER DAY.

Earmarks. Of course there were earmarks on the economic bailout / rescue bill.

JUST HOW SHAMELESS ARE THESE PEOPLE?

That wasn't really a question.

Mark Twain said: "America has no distinctly criminal class, excepting maybe Congress." It is as true today as it was in Twain's time.

I'm at Bouchercon in Baltimore. It's the huge annual mystery readers and writers confab and is as fun, and at times useful, as ever. Large amounts of booze are being drunk - some of it probably Puerto Rican rum at that. Plenty of both inebriated and sober talk about writing and publishing is in the wind. Some people are sneaking around the hotel corridors. Awards are being given out. Books are being signed. It's like any convention anywhere, I suppose. For us writers, who spend our days sitting alone in front of computer screens or pads of paper - I even know one who still uses manual typewriters - it's a welcome and necessary reminder that we are part of a community, an industry and that no matter if we write about serial killers or cats solving crimes, we share a common cause and bond. I like it.

MAIN STREET AND WALL STREET ARE STUCK WITH EACH OTHER, SO GET OVER IT

First off, a soothing note for my readers who don't give a rat's ass for my political / economic rants, raves and, obviously well-informed opinions: next week I'll be in Baltimore for Bouchercon. That is essentially going to be the kick off of my Fall 2008 Drive-By Book Tour. So soon you'll get your fill of amusing anecdotes from the treacherous road of book promotions. Still, in the meantime:

What's all this constant bullshit and whining about "Main Street" this and "Wall Street" that?

This morning I saw a story in my L.A. Times headlined: "Lehman collapse suspends Ritz renovation." That's as good a place as any to understand why you can't possibly separate the needs and activities of "Main Street" from those of "Wall Street."

Lehman Brothers was the primary lender to the Ritz Carlton, Rancho Mirage hotel. Lehman goes belly up, the money stops flowing to the hotel group, then on to the construction companies involved in the project and everything comes to a crashing halt. Think about what that means.

How many workers have now lost their jobs because of the halt in construction?

How many suppliers of materials to that job - many of them small,local companies - have now lost a customer? If too many of their customers disappear, how many people are they going to have to lay off?

How many local businesses are losing the laid off workers as customers because they now have to pinch even more pennies to get by, or even have to move out of the area to find work elsewhere? And, once again, if their business suffers, sooner or later they're going to have to lay off workers.

What does that do to the local tax base, and consequently things like school funding, police and fire services, road repairs, etc.

I could spend a very long time listing all of the potential negative affects that the halt in construction on this one major project will have, due to the bankruptcy of a huge "Wall Street" institution.

And you can bet that there are plenty of small companies that borrowed money from Lehman Brothers, too. And they're scrambling like mad to find someone to take up those loans so that they can continue to do business. And these days, until things are worked out, they're not finding those loans. What's happening to their workers and suppliers and communities?

The worst pain of the collapse of Lehman Brothers is being felt all along "Main Street." Like it or not, "Main Street" has a huge vested interest in the health of "Wall Street."

Where do you think the money comes from for all those small and other business loans? Who's providing the credit cards, the mortgages, the student loans, the insurance policies, the management of 401-K and pension fund money, the trade finance, etc?

Now it is true that that money isn't made by "Wall Street." It is made, earned, generated by "Main Street" and then filtered through "Wall Street" for purposes of management, manipulation and protection.

And that's a necessary part of the process. If a stranger comes to you and asks for a loan to buy a house in your neighborhood, are you going to directly loan them the money? If the Ritz Carlton wants to build a fancy new hotel in your town and that's going to create a lot of jobs and knock on business opportunities, are you going to reach into your pocket to loan them the money? Of course not.

You put your money in the bank, buy stocks and bonds with it, etc. all so that big institutions can more efficiently put it to work - hopefully paying you something for the right to use your money - and you don't have to personally take the risks involved in making those loans or higher risk investments.

The problem isn't the system. The system - sort of a partnership between Main and Wall Streets - actually works quite well so long as everyone does their part in good faith. The problem rose when, for all sorts of reasons and made possible by willy-nilly ill-thought out deregulation without concurrent oversight, the stewards of all that money that was raised on Main Street, started taking enormous, ill-considered risks with the money. And, the people on Main Street did the same thing; taking out loans they couldn't really afford. Everyone figured that a steady, never-ending upward spiral of the economy would let them get away with it.

Only it came crashing down, as it was inevitably bound to. Regardless of who should take the blame for it, all of us now need a bailout. Even those of us who played no part in causing the problem. A bailout is not a good thing. But it's a necessity. We are in a situation where a bailout of Wall Street is also a bailout of Main Street. You just can't separate the two.

That doesn't mean it shouldn't be well thought out. There ought to be some potential for taxpayers to recoup their money, if not even make a profit. There needs to be oversight so that we aren't simply throwing good money away. There needs to be a means of ensuring that the avaricious assholes and nitwits who got us into this mess to begin with don't reap windfall profits from saving their asses from the mess they got us into. (And that means all of those people: no big executive parachutes, and also no debt relief for people who snapped up two, three, four houses using sub-prime loans that anyone with a lick of sense knew were too good [sounding] to be true.)

But that's all there ought to be. Right now the job is to stop the bleeding and settle things down so that they can get better. Once the patient is stabilized there will be plenty of time for figuring out what to do to make sure this doesn't happen again. It's not unlike a heart attack. Diagnose it, treat it, and only after the patient is back in the recovery room read him the riot act about how he needs to lay off the triple bacon cheeseburgers, fries and super-sized drinks and maybe throw in a little exercise from time to time.

In this morning's paper I also read about the Senate bailout bill that will be voted on today. It includes a provision mandating that companies above a certain size that provide health coverage to their employees, have to make sure the coverage treats mental and physical ailments equally.

HUH? What the fuck does that have to do with it? What's next, a bunch of earmarks finding their way onto the bailout bill? Ted Stevens may be on trial, but I'm sure he can think of something to attach to the bill, a rail line to nowhere perhaps.

POINTING THE FINGER, GIVING THE FINGER

It might be easier to simply state who isn't to blame for the current financial meltdown that is in some way going to screw almost all of us:

Honest, not overly greedy bankers, brokers and CEOs. Believe it or not, there are some.

Honest members of congress and scrupulous regulators. Well, I'm not so sure there are any of those. But I can always hope. Do they even allow that ancient Greek guy with the lantern to wander the halls of Congress?

Honest realtors. There must be some. I know of at least a couple who have tried to discourage potential customers from buying houses that they couldn't really afford.

Informed, careful borrowers and home buyers. Yep, there are some of these folk, too. People who know how to balance a checkbook better than the government does.

Of course it's a whole lot more fun to cast blame, to give the finger to the crooks, miscreants and feckless morons who got us into this fix. Who are these swine (I shouldn't say that, I like pigs)...Who are these evildoers (to lift a phrase from one of the chief evildoers himself) and fuckwits?

Our lame duck, shit for brains, president. He may have put aside his coke habit and disco shoes in the late '80s, but he's done his best to promote the ugly attitude of "greed is good." His profligate spending, at the same time as his slavish devotion to tax-cutting - mostly for his cronies and those of his ilk - have led the country into a state where if it was a corporation it would have no choice other than to file for bankruptcy.

Our corrupt, lobbyist tit-sucking, pipe-dreaming Congress. Maybe it's an honest mistake - fat chance of that - maybe they are a glass-is-half-full crowd on the Hill and they think that people are basically good and that left alone to their own devises they will be honest and good and work for common benefit. Why else would they be so quick to deregulate as much as they could - not, in itself a terrible idea - but without realizing that deregulation requires oversight and that some things actually do work better when they are regulated because otherwise bad people will, oddly enough, do bad things that throw it all into imbalance.

Alan Fucking Greenspan. Yeah, we all loved him when things were cruising nicely along and housing prices and stock prices were booming and the dollar was strong and all that. And yeah, he coined the term "irrational exuberance" to warn us all that we might be cruising for a bruising. He should have listened to himself. He kept lowering interest rates, over and over and over again and that just added rocket fuel to all of our irrational exuberance. And when the rocket ran out of gas before getting into permanent orbit - watch out below. What he was pushing was the financial equivalent of crack.

Corporate irregular regulators. In spite of what the white haired, ill-informed old fart running for president has to say, not so much the SEC. Sure there were plenty of artificially inflated stock prices on the market, but that was due to the artificially inflated economy as a whole, not so much to stock fraud, which is what the SEC is supposed to oversee. But, in spite of deregulation and in spite of Executive, Congressional and Corporate efforts to thwart the work of corporate and financial regulatory agencies, those agencies do actually exist and they could have done something, or at least said something. Instead, they just rolled over and allowed everyone to get away with whatever they wanted.

Greedy, short-sighted, thieving corporate executives. They've been so busy lining their own pockets that they have come close to killing the goose that's laying their own golden eggs. Of course they don't really mind, because they've stacked the deck so that even when they fail, their fall is cushioned with ludicrously large payoffs for having screwed up, or in some cases, having been caught cheating. They have no incentive to do good for their customers, the economy as a whole or even their own shareholders if they can still rake in seven, eight and nine figure severance packages when they fuck up.

Stupid, complacent, short-sighted shareholders, especially institutional shareholders. The first line of defense against corporate fuck ups shouldn't have to be regulators, it should be corporations' own shareholders. They have more at stake and so they ought to be more vigilant than anyone else when it comes to oversight. Mom and pop shareholders with their small portfolios are pretty much just along for the ride, they have no clout. But institutions, with their large portfolios, can make a real difference in corporate governance, if they can see past the quarterly reports - which they usually can't because they tend to suffer from the same willful myopia that infects too many corporate executives. If major shareholders see something going on that might hurt the long term prospects of a company, even if it looks good in the quarterly reports, they need to throw the bums out, and they need to take away the perks of failure when they do. When they don't, they're making their own bed of nails, and helping to make ours, too.

Speed freak, action-junkie greedy speculators. There are some very good uses for financial instruments like short selling, derivatives, hedge funds, etc. When they are used properly they help keep markets stable. But when people start seeing them as the means to turn a quick buck, and they all start piling on at once to try and move the market rather than adjust to it or simply to protect themselves from its fluctuations, they can quickly destabilize the market. Some of these assholes, too many of them, prefer volatile, wild markets, that's where they make the most money.

Greedy, lazy and corrupt realtors. Not everybody should buy their own home. Plenty of people can't really afford it. For other people, it doesn't make financial sense in their current circumstances. But there are more than enough realtors out there who are happy to convince them otherwise. They want their commissions. They get those commissions no matter how bad a deal gets made, so long as the deal gets made. A new homeowner can default on their loan a month after escrow closes, and it's no concern to the realtor who put together the deal. Their check is already banked.

Crooked, slimeball mortgage brokers. The greedy, uncaring realtor's best friend. They knew what they were doing but they didn't care. "Of course you can afford this house. I know a guy. First month's free." They knew they could package all those crappy loans into big juicy bundles that helped pump up the quarterly reports that everyone paid so much attention to and sell them on the bogus basis that, "sure, some of these are gonna crap out, but it's a risk worth taking because of the ones that won't fall apart and the property market's gonna keep going up anyhow, right?" Yeah, right.

Venal, loan-sharking credit card pushers. Just like some people can't actually afford to buy a house, some people ought to live on a "pay as you go" basis. It's got so that you don't even need credit to get a credit card. Whoopee, free money! At least that's what all those TV ads and credit card pushers on college campuses would like us to believe. Two percent APR for balance transfers. Oh boy! What they do is no different than what a heroin pusher does, only its more profitable.

Media fuckwits and pundits (which ought to be a swear word unto itself.) I don't give a shit whether they're liberal or conservative, what they mostly are is stupid and unable to live up to the task of being the most important watchdog this country ought to have. Analysis? "We don't need no stinking analysis," is what they'd say if they were honest, since that seems to be their real attitude. Why weren't all the so-called experts warning us all about this stuff for a long time now? Surely they weren't that stupid as to buy into it all? Well, apparently they were that stupid. They just got hypnotized by all the big numbers, because they figured that was something they could get their audiences all jacked up on. If mortgage brokers and credit card issuers were pushing heroin, the media's been shoving meth crystal into our brains.

You and me. (Well, not so much me, the only debt I've got is a good, solid mortgage that I can afford. I don't even use credit cards.) Now don't get me wrong, some people have little choice but to use credit cards, and for some people it does make sense to do almost whatever they have to, to buy a house. But let's face it, buying a house is, for most people, the biggest, most important expense they will ever incur. While there is plenty of blame to go around, part of that blame must be shouldered by people who leapt before they looked. When you're about to spend the most money you've ever spent, on something of vital importance to you and your family's future, you have to do your homework. If you don't understand something, you need to get it explained to you in a way that you do understand. If something seems too good to be true - "Credit, income, job? Oh, you don't need those to buy this house, I can get you a mortgage without even filling out any paperwork." - you need to assume that it is too good to be true. And if you don't, you're being a fool and you need to share in the blame when things go wrong. Even in a market where everyone is for the most part honest, the concept of "let the buyer beware" is vital to its smooth running.

Yes, we have a lousy educational system in this country, especially when it comes to teaching people about such things as fiscal responsibility. (And it's not like the government is setting a good example, either.) But everyone, when doing something, anything, significant, has to bear at least some responsibility for knowing what they're doing.

And yes, there are unscrupulous people out there who will lie to you, or at least deceive and confuse you, to get you to do things that aren't good for you. And if you're not aware of that already, grow up, fast. Con men have long been successful preying on the unthinking greed and stupidity of their victims. That's what's been going on in huge parts of the housing and credit markets. Sure, the con men are bad guys and ought to be stopped, locked away if they've actually violated any laws. But that doesn't entirely let their victims off the hook for being greedy or stupid or culpable in the mess that this country now finds itself in. "I didn't know that I should try and understand all that confusing paperwork involved in the biggest expenditure of my entire life, and the mortgage guy said I didn't need to," is an excuse that doesn't cut it.

Do I even need to say anything about people who max out their credit cards buying shit they don't really need and can't afford: giant flatscreen TVs, gas-guzzling SUVs, cruises, lost weekends in Vegas, whatever? And then they transfer the debt from one card to the next, maxing out one higher credit limit after the next, until they can't do that anymore and presto chango they're in some sort of huge financial trouble and contributing to the economy's problems when they default.

There are plenty of people who have no choice but to resort to credit cards to pay for legitimate necessities: food, clothing, housing, transportation. And those people are exempt from what I'm about to say.

But there are plenty more who have overextended themselves on consumer crap because they think that's their god given right as Americans - the most powerful, richest people on the planet. To them, I'd like to shout out a hearty - FUCK YOU! If there was any way to cut you morons out of any bailout programs, I'd be happy to do it.

For that matter I'd be thrilled to cut pretty much any of the miscreants listed above out of any bailout program. Or at least limit their participation in it to the bare necessities for preventing a total economic meltdown. I'm not sure how, or if, that could be accomplished. But it seems like giving Bush and Paulson carte blanche to do it the way they want to is just going to encourage too many of these crooks and cretins to eventually do the same things all over again.

HERE'S WHY BRISTOL PALIN'S PREGNANCY IS POLITICALLY RELEVANT

Because her mom, Sarah Palin, candidate for vice president of the United States, as governor of Alaska, cut state funding for teen pregnancy programs.

Because her mom has strongly opposed sex education in public schools - something that has been shown over and over again to reduce the incidence of teenage pregnancy.

Because her mom has strongly opposed access to information on contraception, as well as contraception itself, to teenagers.

Because her mom is opposed to legal abortion, even in circumstances such as pregnancy resulting from rape or where a continued pregnancy threatens the life of the pregnant woman.

Need I also point out that less funding for teen pregnancy programs, lack of sex education and lack of information about and/or access to contraception all result in more abortions, not fewer abortions.

Sure, I feel bad for Bristol Palin and the young fellow who is no doubt being herded into a shotgun wedding. What they are going through ought to be a family matter and none of the rest of our business. What they do about their problems should be their own personal choice.

But it is our business for the very reason that Sarah Palin wants to create a world in which none of us have the personal choice to deal with these same sorts of problems in the way that we want to. She wants a world in which these problems crop up more frequently, not less so, because she lives in some fantasy Christian world in which faith and "morality" trump reason, logic and practicality.

Now that she is the Republican candidate for vice president, running with the oldest man to ever run for president, her medieval, ignorant nonsense cannot simply be dismissed as a matter of her, and her family's, personal choice. It is not merely the lunatic raving of some nutjob religious crank on a street corner; or even the silly notions of the ill-informed soccer mom next door. It is something that could have a very real impact on every one of us.

I feel bad for Bristol Palin. I feel bad for her because she was raised in "the bosom of a loving Christian family" that did its best to keep her in the dark about the real choices that all people ought to be able to make for themselves in an informed manner. Now that family is having to deal with the real world consequences of their ignorance. And the fact that they are, and that Bristol's mom wants to be elected to within a fast-aging heartbeat of the most powerful job on the planet, seems pretty damn relevant to me.

SOME ASSORTED THOUGHTS ON THE OLYMPICS AND THE DEMOCRATS

FORTY ONE BILLION DOLLARS! That's what China spent on the Olympics. Sure the country has the biggest cash surplus of any country on the planet at the moment. But it's also got 800 to 900 million people who live on two dollars a day or less.

I enjoyed watching Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps and the Brazilian women's volleyball team as much as anyone. But I would have happily foregone those pleasures if that FORTY ONE BILLION DOLLARS had been spent on something that benefited at least some of those impoverished, oppressed Chinese people.

And these figures don't even account for the cost to a number of farmers who lost this year's crops due to diversion of water from their farms to the creation of the sailing and kayaking venues; or the fact that the fancy new facilities were built in the same way that most government building projects are built in China - with near slave labor.

Sure the Chinese got to wallow in national pride. And now Beijing has some pretty new sports venues. And here in the U.S. we got some great TV to watch - albeit with really inane commentary for the most part.

But I'm sorry, the Olympics isn't worth it. IT WAS DISGUSTING.

And speaking of stupidly expensive exercises; the Democratic Convention kicks off today.

This is, of course, to anoint one of the two men who are going to spend OVER A BILLION DOLLARS trying to get elected by telling us, among other lies, how responsible they are going to be with our money.

Before I start excoriating the Democrats (I'll excoriate the Republicans during their convention) for being fuckwits, let's get a couple of things straight.

I'm a registered independent.

I mostly vote for Democratic Party candidates - although I have voted for a few Republicans over the years and once or twice when I really couldn't stomach voting for either, I voted for third party candidates without a hope in hell of winning in the hope they'd get enough votes to stir the pot up a little. (I never, by the way, voted for Ralph Nader. I think he was a fine consumer advocate. Other than that, I think he's a cretin.)

I am going to vote for Barack Obama, and happily so. I think one more term of a Republican administration at this point will seal the deal on the destruction - for at least a generation to come - of many of the things I love about this country.

We cannot afford any more of this nonsense about cutting taxes at the same time as boosting spending enormously to pay for ill-advised, in the long run unwinnable, wars justified through lies.

We cannot afford any more of the remarkable culture of financial malfeasance without at least some effective oversight - that the Republicans have been more responsible for than the Democrats. I'm all in favor of free markets, but at a certain point certain unregulated economic activities, even so-called "free market" ones, can skew the free market in ways that make it not work. There is a difference between "free" markets and "anarchic" markets where the strong have free rein to cheat, lie, steal and generally crush the weak.

We desperately need to repair our relations with the rest of the world. Barack Obama is far better positioned to accomplish that than John McCain.

And, maybe most importantly, the next president is going to appoint, minimally one, possibly as many as three, Supreme Court justices. The current court already leans further to the right than is good for our civil rights and liberties, as well as the environment. Balance needs to be restored. A Republican president will - and candidate McCain has already said that he will - appoint similar justices to the appointments made by GW Bush. That will complete the transition of the court to the right wing, for a generation or more. No American who loves the ideals that this country was founded upon, could possibly want that.

OKAY, SO IT'S CLEAR - I WILL VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA. I might even contribute some money, maybe a little work, to his campaign.

That said, THE DEMOCRATS ARE IDIOTS AND THEY COULD WELL LOSE THIS ELECTION BECAUSE THEY ARE TERRIBLE CAMPAIGNERS.

The recent kerfuffle over McCain's failure to know how many houses he owns, is a case in point. McCain, stupidly, admitted to not knowing. Obama then blew a perfectly good opportunity to take the high road, cut off any attack response from the McCain campaign, and put his message across.

Because Obama attacked McCain for being an out of touch rich guy, he opened himself up to being attacked back: "Wait a minute there, buster, you too." (At the current rate, it's going to take me somewhere between sixty and eighty years to earn the four plus million bucks Obama took in last year. And I'm above the national average.)

The fact is, anyone who gets as far as the two final candidates, is going to be out of touch with the daily lives of ordinary people. They're not going to the grocery store to shop. They're not pumping their own gas. They're not wondering if they can afford to take their family to a ballgame.

But that's got nothing whatsoever to do with their ability as president to deal with the problems of ordinary people. Franklin Roosevelt, arguably the American common man's greatest friend of the Twentieth Century, came from a life of fabulous wealth and privilege. Hell, if you're a leftist and you're still worried about it; Frederich Engels supported his poorer pal Karl Marx with the wealth from his family's textile mills.

What Obama could have said is something along the lines of: "Sure McCain's out of touch [a nice little dig there], neither of us is living the day to day life of the average American. The difference is in what we plan to do about it. My plan is better. Here's why..." He would have cut off any counterattack at the knees and he could have taken an opportunity to get one of his most important points across.

But, he didn't. And that's because politics in this country has been distilled down to attack and defend. Usually it's the Republicans attacking and the Democrats defending - which is one reason the Democrats have been losers so much in most of the years since Richard Nixon. A charge, which is leveled first and usually easy to sum up in a few short words, is always going to be better remembered than a response, no matter how well reasoned, which comes second and more often than not requires a more complex or nuanced explanation. The whole point of an attack is to get it in first and make it simple. That's nearly as effective with a lie as it is with the truth. The Democrats have lost over the years by playing the Republicans' game.

Maybe I'm naive, but I think there might be an argument to be made in favor of "promote."

>>>Sure, us pampered candidates are out of touch with ordinary Americans, but I'm a good study, I've got good advisers and here's what I plan to do about it. What's the other guy got?<<<

>>>Sure I'm more charismatic than my opponent. But I'm smart, too, because here's how I plan to use that to get things done that need doing and here's what I'm going to do. What's the other guy got?<<<

But, what's going to happen, and is already happening, is that the Democrats are going to fall into the Republicans trap just like they always do. Obama's plan actually lowers taxes for a whole lot more people than McCain's does. But because McCain's plan lowers taxes on the wealthy - who make the biggest stink about taxes - he's trying to pass himself off as the tax cutter of the two. And since he made the charge first, it is more likely to stick even though it's total bullshit.

What happened to: >>>Hey, eight years of huge expenditures at the same time as big tax cuts have left our country in a terrible financial position. We are going to have to raise some money. That's going to mean some higher taxes for some people. I plan to squeeze some of that from the pockets of the people who can most easily afford it and ease up on a lot of you who are being most hurt by this financial mess. What's the other guy got?<<<

But, unfortunately, this one, like all elections, will deteriorate into the usual politely veneered name calling - with surrogates permitted to strip off the veneer and outright attack the other guy.

If that's the case, I suppose - SIGH - the Democrats ought to start doing it first, fastest and most viciously so as to put the Republicans on the defensive for a change. And that's going to make me like them even less than I already do. But I'll still like them better than the Republicans.