Poor Jim Lehrer.

All he wanted was some presidential eye-contact last night during the debates. After the months of smears and vicious ads, Jim pleaded for Obama and McCain to man-up and be forthright with one another.

The candidates seem mystified by their disciplinarian's insistence they they address each other like human beings and not robots regurgitating their programming codes.

LEHRER: Say it directly to him.

OBAMA: I do not think that they are.

LEHRER: Say it directly to him.

OBAMA: Well, the -- John, 10 days ago, you said that the fundamentals of the economy are sound. And...

MCCAIN: (to Lehrer) Are you afraid I couldn't hear him?

LEHRER: I'm just determined to get you all to talk to each other. I'm going to try.

No such luck. What Jim (and the American people) got were two politicians doing what politicians do best -- reciting their stump speeches, and for the most part, trying to avoid the blade of a snappy comeback.

McCain got to repeat his snarky lines about hunting down deviant politicians and writing down their names on his revenge list, and Obama spat up his painful go-to line about Main Street versus Wall Street.

Obama didn't even raise an eyebrow when McCain professed his love for the troops, even though McCain opposed the G.I. bill that would have expanded benefits for veterans.

Obama surrogates love to talk about what a classy gent their boss is, which is why he didn't want to deliver a "Gotchya" moment at McCain.

But if Obama can't nail McCain on mirroring the behavior of one of the most despised administrations in the history of the country, the Democrats are doomed come November.

The Democrats needed a firm leader, who arrived outraged on behalf of a country gone to hell. What they got was a gentleman with a fine memory, who largely repeated the same message he's been delivering for half a year.

It makes one long for the presence of Ralph Nader, who at least would have stirred the pot and forced Obama to push his political message left.

Nader's presence may have even put Obama on offense instead of the pathetic, stumbling defense where he muttered "That's not true," as McCain blasted him with a mixture of half-truths and lies.

Alas, not even McCain had enough energy to make this debate interesting. It looked like John was using every ounce of his iron-clad will just not to die on his feet. I don't even think he looked mean like some pundits are claiming. Instead, he also looked pathetically weak and apathetic.

In an election promising to be about "hope" and "change," we got a lukewarm argument like every other debate come before it.

Two hours before Troy Davis was scheduled to die, the U.S. Supreme Court granted him a stay of execution.

Davis is an African-American man, who was convicted of the 1989 killing of a white police officer, Mark Allen McPhail. However, since his conviction, seven of the nine witnesses to the crime have recanted their testimonies, and now claim they were intimidated into making their initial statements against Davis.

There is no physical evidence tying Davis to the scene. There is no murder weapon. Three witnesses now claim they overheard another man confessing to the crime.

The whole case stinks of fraud, deception, and racism. Martina Correia, Davis's sister, claimed in an interview that the Georgia parole board is the only entity, non-judicial, that's able to act in secrecy. There are no transcripts. There are no recordings. There is no media presence.

So, people in the world were not able to hear the witnesses come forward one by one and talk about how they were fifteen and sixteen years old, and guns were put in front of them in interrogation rooms, and they were told that, you know, not only that Troy killed the police officer or they had something to do with it, and, you know, how the prosecutor would tell people that if you change your story, I will charge you with perjury. And it's amazing that the parole board can sit and listen to that over and over, witness after witness, and still ignore it.

Correia believes the Davis case is being handled by the state of Georgia under a shroud of secrecy because the state has already experienced a string of embarrassing death row exonerations.

If they expose it, then you would have another exoneration yet from the same county. In that county, there's been two out of the five death row exonerations for the state under the same prosecutor (Spencer Lawton,) who's run unopposed for almost thirty years.

Diverse voices such as President Jimmy Carter, Congress member John Lewis, and the South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu have all called for a Davis retrial. Many advocates have condemned the Georgia death penalty system, where the average odds of receiving a death sentence among all indicted cases were 4.3 times higher in cases with white victims, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

This is yet another opportunity for the U.S. court system and the American people to reexamine the archaic system of institutionalized murder.

In the last 35 years, 129 innocent people have been released from death row. Five of the exonerees are from Georgia.

Sometimes cases are tainted by police misconduct. Other times, important evidence is withheld from the court. Eye-witness testimony, which has sent many prisoners to the death chamber, has proven itself to be prodigiously unreliable. More than 75 percent of the 205 people exonerated by post-conviction DNA evidence in the United States were imprisoned because of mistaken eyewitness identification.

The U.S. Supreme Court's justices are scheduled to meet Monday. It is then that they will decide whether to hear Davis' appeal and they will become witness to the incredible racism and corruption that has been a trademark of the U.S. law system.

In the lone dissenting opinion, state Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears wrote: "If recantation testimony, either alone or supported by other evidence, shows convincingly that prior trial testimony was false, it simply defies all logic and morality to hold that it must be disregarded categorically."

But the entire death penalty system inherently "defies logic and morality."

The death penalty was originally created to preserve a system of rewards and punishments. Good behavior guaranteed individuals their freedom, while bad behavior garnered the severest of punishments -- death.

Except, this "perfect system" harbors corrupting variables: tainted or lack of evidence and human error and prejudice. The risks are too great to claim that the death penalty is a necessary crime deterrent. If just one innocent prisoner is executed, then the entire "cleansing system" comes crumbling down.

Countries where the death penalty is still legal include Iran, North Korea, and Iraq, the very same countries over which the U.S. claims moral superiority.

The U.S. cannot masquerade as a shining beacon of civility when we execute our own citizens, some of whom are later exonerated of any wrong-doing.

Ronald Reagan was the best liar.

Yes, George W. Bush's lies have had far more dire consequences, and Karl Rove is master of the brutish smear campaign, but no one matches Reagan's stylized lies. He made you feel like you were the only other person in the room when he lied right to your face.

Take, for example, Reagan's famous "Chicago Welfare Queen" story that he used to illustrate the dangers of a socialized welfare system. He was loosely referencing a story about a welfare recipient in Chicago, who was publicly exposed in 1977 for having defrauded state welfare programs out of $8,000 by using two identities.

Never one to let the truth get in the way of a good yarn, Reagan turned the news report into a heartwarming tale of a "Welfare Queen" who cruised around in a Cadillac and collected an annual tax-free income of $150,000 by using "eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and...collecting veterans' benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands."

Reagan repeated this story to anyone who would listen. He did so with a folksy charm that put people at ease and many bought into the Welfare Queen smear. They ignored Reagan's legendary tendency to prevaricate. Like a quasi-racist relative drunkenly ranting at the Thanksgiving dinner table, Regan had everyone nodding along even though he was exaggerating some details to fit his preconceived notions of minorities.

If only the old bastard lived long enough to see the Bush administration's baby, the misshapen, inbred offspring of Cronyism and Deregulation . If Reagan's fuses blew at the first sign of a hungry black woman, imagine what would have happened to his Swiss cheese brain when the first CEO came knocking at his door for a hand-out.

Or maybe he would have been happy to lend his fellow rich, white people a couple (or 700 billion) bucks. After all, Neo-Conservatives are fine with Socialism as long as the right kinds of people are receiving the hand-outs. They love sharing, but only if the sharing concerns debt, and the taxpayers are the ones sharing it.

Yet they hoard profit among themselves, which is why they went Paulson to push through this bailout as quickly as humanly possible. Heaven forbid any kind of deal can be constructed that involves taxpayers getting their money back, or maybe even getting a slice of profit if the economy can somehow rebound from this disaster.

If Congress gets to debate this thing, they may...ya' know...remember they're working for the American people and try to stop the Wall Street crooks from raiding the Federal Reserve.

My advice to our representatives in Congress is to deliberate long and hard about this ridiculous scam Paulson is laughably trying to pass off as fiscal solvency. It's good for no one except the Wall Street Welfare Queens, who have come looking for a hand-out from the government.

Gee, but I thought the big, bad government was the thing repressing their entrepreneurial spirit by demanding regulation and oversight. Of course, a little accountability may have circumvented this disaster. What's the word for all that regulation and oversight and accountability in government?

Oh yeah! Conservatism.

Now, more than ever, we need the Republicans to flex that Conservative muscle they're always bragging about. Wall Street tycoons don't get to come in, borrow $700 billion, and run off without making some really specific promises. For example:

1. The taxpayers they're borrowing get to own some stock in the performances of the banks and companies they're about to save.

2. If our tax dollars go toward bailing out foreign banks, then foreign capital better flow back into our economy. I hear that's how the "natural" ebb and flow of the immaculate Free Trade agreements are supposed to work, but it may take some extra muscle from our government to ensure it actually happens.

3. No do-overs. We got to see unfettered Capitalism do its thing. It sucks, and it doesn't work. This doesn't mean everything switches to a Socialist regime, so that hysterical talking point needs to die. All we need is regulation.

While Reagan exaggerated the story of the Chicago Welfare Queen, there are real welfare leeches in our presence. They're the least needy, and they're in trouble now because of their shady economic policies. They don't get to set the agenda now that they're reaping what they sowed.

As Reagan would say: No Free Rides, people.