By MARTIN SCHRAM, Scripps Howard News Service

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has been videotaped palling around -- well, maybe not palling around, but certainly engaging in mutual discourse -- with a man known to have filed false income tax returns.

Obama has been seen in the company of Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

America's rudderless ships of state sailed themselves onto the shoals of shallow governance Monday. The wreckage was a failure heard -- and felt -- 'round the world.

It was a true September Surprise. A calamitous financial crisis that not only toppled Wall Street's corporate icons and sent global markets plummeting but may have given Barack Obama's seemingly mired campaign the one thing he may never have secured on his own: Victory.

It's time to tell two truths about Big Lie politics -- and one about the news media, whose job is to make sure that you are not deceived by the lies.

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like it. It is where the heart is.

It is home. Today, homes -- our homes and those of our presidential candidates -- are all over the news. The stories range from heart-wrenching crisis to comic ridicule. The coverage about our homes and theirs reveals much about the concerns of our government, our news media and us.

Ever since John McCain caught the Grand Old Party elephants with their trunks down by announcing Alaska's Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice president choice, his desperate apparatchiks have been frantically flacking two kinds of information: "mis-" and "dis-."

Democratic and Republican national conventions are mainly about politics as performance art these days. And usually there are just two categories of performers: The Wheels and the Spinners.

The noise over the so-called "cone of silence" -- and whether John McCain was really hermetically sealed in it during last week's evangelical civility summit -- grew in intensity and idiocy.

We have just witnessed a rare happening in the political galaxy when the stars and the moons -- the facts and the politics -- line up perfectly. So perfectly, that a politician who made a wrong prediction or assertion can take the high road and still come out better than ever.

PATIENT (waving his right arm in a big circle): Doctor, it hurts when I do this. So what do you recommend?

DOCTOR: Don't do that.

-- Old vaudeville joke.