If you didn't watch "The Wire" rent the DVD or watch it on HBO. It just ended its five-year run on HBO, although it will have a long after-life in reruns. It has gotten universal praise for its gritty realism of inner-city life. I agree with the critics who compare "The Wire" to a great literary novel. Unpredictable plot twists, deft foreshadowing, and complex characters justify that judgment. The show juggled over 65 characters and kept them vividly evil, sad, or humane.

Like most great stories, the main characters were morally ambiguous, but so finely etched that we cared about them. Each week, I couldn't wait for the next episode. It was Dickens for television. Sadly the Wire is over. I looked forward to every episode.

But what's worse, it won't accomplish what its creator, David Simon, wanted the show to do. Simon wanted to spur our country to do something about the drug war and the plight of America's inner-cities.

Sid Blumenthal, a close friend and advisor of Hillary Clinton who has been widely credited with coining the term "vast right-wing conspiracy" used by Hillary in 1998 to describe the alliance of conservative media, think tanks, and political operatives that sought to destroy the Clinton White House, appears to be exploiting that same right-wing network to attack and discredit Barack Obama. And he's not hesitating to use the same sort of guilt-by-association tactics that have been the hallmark of the political right dating back to the McCarthy era.

Blumenthal regularly dispatches emails to a list of opinion shapers, including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers -- an obvious effort to create an echo chamber that will reverberate among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists.

Below is a piece that I wrote with Peter Dreier that appears in The American Prospect. We explain "Everything you ever wanted to know about the mortgage meltdown but were afraid to ask."

To many Americans, the sub prime crisis seems too complex to comprehend. To understand it, we need to know: What is the problem? Who benefited? Who got hurt? Who is to blame? Who should we help? What should be done?

John Edwards. He was presidential. He came across as optimistic and patriotic. Most important for the first time, he appeared tough enough to compete in a general election, with the kind of tough, eloquent passion he formerly demonstrated when he ran for president in 2004.

As the New York Times observed, Edwards repeatedly challenged Clinton's credentials and credibility. "Senator Clinton says that she believes she can be the candidate for change, but she defends a broken system that's corrupt in Washington, D.C.,' Mr. Edwards said. 'She says she will end the war, but she continues to say she'll keep combat troops in Iraq and continue combat missions in Iraq. To me, that's not ending the war; that's the continuation of the war.' He added, 'I think the American people, given this historic moment in our country's history, deserve a president of the United States that they know will tell them the truth, and won't say one thing one time and something different at a different time.'

The Nation's columnist, John Nichols got it right when he said,
"Edwards hit hard, and effectively, on every front. After detailing the front-runner's contributions from defense contractors and other corporate interests, he said. 'If people want the status quo, Senator Clinton's your candidate.'"

As much as I like Hillary and Barack Obama, John Edwards, was the candidate who had done the best job of defining himself as the alternative to Hillary Clinton.

The mainstream media missed an important moment in last week's Democratic Presidential debate. It happened when the moderator asked John Edwards about his criticism of Hillary Clinton.

Edwards charged Clinton with messing up health-care reform in the '90s and her mistake had left tens of millions of Americans uninsured. He criticized Clinton for relying on a "bunch of Washington insiders who sit around tables together" to plot the fate of the health care system.

A week before Edwards said, "The lesson Senator Clinton seems to have learned from her experience with health care is, 'If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.' I learned a very different lesson from decades of fighting powerful interests -- you can never join 'em, you just have to beat 'em."

Edwards, unlike Clinton, promised to push for a universal health care plan through Congress by mobilizing public opinion and building a movement through grassroots organizing.

Edwards said the other candidates, including Clinton, believe that the way to get a health care bill is to broker a deal between "Washington insiders" -- insurance companies, drug companies and other lobby groups. "Its like the rest of America doesn't exist," Edwards noted.

He referred to himself as a "President who is willing to go to America and make the case for universal health care."

Edwards pledged to be a leader, not just a deal-maker. Twice during Wednesday's debate, he mentioned his hard work over the past few years helping community organizing groups like ACORN, and activist unions like SEIU, who will provide the troops trying to change the balance of power in this country to counter the powerful insurance lobby.

You remember unions, don't you? Those organizations of working people that have fought for and actually won healthcare, pensions, better wages and all the other things politicians make empty promises about?

Those organizations that have been under vicious attack. Remember President Reagan destroying the air traffic controllers union? Remember so-called right-to work laws? Only 8 percent of the nation's private sector workforce is now union. Most American workers can be fired for no reason at all. Without severance pay, most Americans don't have pensions. And 47 million have no healthcare.

You may not have noticed that last Monday we were supposed to celebrate labor. If you missed those special stories, it's understandable.

You may have heard about the execution-style killing of three college students in Newark, New Jersey 2 weeks ago. This Monday, August 20, 2007, the Republican anti-immigrant wing-nut, demagogue, and candidate for president, Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, came to Newark this week. You know that he doesn't give a hoot about the safety of Newark's residents. But he had a point when he blamed officials of responsibility in the slayings of the college students by failing to report the prior arrests of two suspects to immigration authorities.

Bob Herbert, one of my favorite columnists, concluded "the most effective anticrime effort begins at home with parents who raise their kids to know better than to point a gun at another human being." This has merit too.

I was reminded of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago, during which, as in Newark, gang victims were lined up against a wall and shot. Although the victims in the horribly sad Newark incident, unlike the criminals in Chicago, were innocent, we don't know yet whether this is gang related.

Suppose you were going to decide your vote for president entirely on the issue of who could best reduce poverty. Who would you vote for? That's the question New York Times columnist, David Brooks, posed. I like many of Brooks' columns because he is the only prominent columnist that regularly and intelligently focuses on how culture and psychology affect poverty.

You would think he was going to praise Barak Obama and John Edwards for raising the issue of poverty. Right? Edwards especially deserves our praise for elevating the profile of poverty in the 2004 presidential campaign and again this year, with his call to end the Two Americas. For Edwards the two Americas are the "very rich and everybody else" -- not only the extremely impoverished but also all workers who are struggling because of a lack of adequate benefits and wages.

Instead, Brooks, who last I looked, had not called for the eradication of tax breaks for hedge fund billionaires or subsidies for big agriculture, ridicules their solutions as ineffective. He attacks Obama's support for Community Development Corporations and Edward's call for a million more Section 8 housing vouchers as ineffective. His criticism on CDCs is illogical.

It's the 40th anniversary of the Newark "riot." Here in NJ, the media has focused on this. Newark is still coping with the legacy of those five nights of unrest in 1967. One question continues to plague Newark. Why more has not been done to make it a better place to live for the thousands of poor and working class families? As the entire news world, including the Ledger show, journalists, activists, and public officials can't even agree on what to call the events of that summer. In a retrospective piece in the New York Times on July 8, the reporter, Andrew Jacobs found that people have 3 major interpretations. Was it a "riot", as the frightened white residents who later abandoned Newark claimed? Was it a "Rebellion", as some black activists, left wing academics, and a recent documentary claim? Or was it something more neutral -- simply a civil disturbance, a one-time response to an incident of police abuse? Does anyone really care?

I am a big fan of the type of community organizing done by groups like Acorn and the IAF. The NY Times has an article a few days ago about the community organizing work of the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago, focusing on its work in the Muslim community as part of a broader interfaith effort.

The mainstream media rarely write about community organizing, but Sam Freedman who wrote this piece is a major exception. And he writes so elegantly about it as he did for his book, Upon This Rock. Check it out.