An editorial / By Dale McFeatters, Scripps Howard News Service

Smears spread as rumors are an unfortunate but seemingly inevitable fact of life in political campaigns. And in the 21st century it's also a fact of life that the Internet is the best way of knocking down those rumors and also the most effective way of spreading them.

Conservative Republicans regularly accuse liberal Democrats to trying to solve problems by throwing money at them. The Federal Reserve has been throwing billions into the banking system to stabilize the credit markets and no one has been complaining about it.

Treasury won't release the official tally until later this month, but the Congressional Budget Office puts the deficit for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 at a record $438 billion. This is worse than anybody thought, $30 billion more than CBO's estimate of just last month and $50 billion more than the White predicted in July.

The Bush administration has suffered another significant setback in its long series of court defeats over its handling of prisoners in the war on terror.

Using Depression-era emergency powers, the Federal Reserve Board has launched a program potentially much bigger and far reaching than the $700 billion bailout. The adjective most commonly used is "radical."

Slipping in the polls, Republican John McCain has decided, as his exuberant running mate has repeatedly urged, to "take the gloves off," and Democrat Barack Obama, perhaps sensitive to charges that he is too often slow to counterpunch, has decided to reply in kind.

The Europeans watched bemusedly while the storms swept through the U.S. financial markets and the supposedly laissez faire Bush administration pleaded with Congress for a $700 billion government intervention in the marketplace.

If there were any doubts the House would pass the revised $700 billion bailout package, they were quickly resolved when the unemployment figures for September came out in advance of the vote.

The Senate has handed President Bush probably the last foreign policy victory of his presidency, easily approving, 86-13, a measure to end a 34-year ban on nuclear trade with India. The House had earlier approved it, 298-117.

Czar Nicholas II and his family have been dead for over 90 years but Russia's last royals continue to exert an impressive hold on the national imagination.