Here's one vote against the town hall format from Tuesday's debate.

It's not the questions from the audience or the public at large that trouble me; I think they were good questions and reflected people's serious concerns. But there was no chance to follow up, no give-and-take as we saw in the first debate.

And there were times we needed it.

I think John McCain made big news early in the debate when he said, "As president of the United States, I would order the secretary of the treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes, at the diminished value of those homes and let people make those, be able to make those payments and stay in their homes. Is it expensive? Yes."

That may have been the single most significant statement of the debate - and we heard no more. I suspect we will in the next few days. That's a dramatically different approach than the one taken last week to target banks and other financial institutions. There were some advocates of targeting homeowners instead. Let's see where that goes.

I also wanted to hear more about health care as right or responsibility.

An obvious follow-up for McCain would have been, "Whose responsibility?"

And for Obama, "Is this an unchecked right to all the most advanced (and expensive) treatments? Without responsibility for any of the cost?"

One point in favor of Tuesday's format: Having an audience present discouraged either candidate from sinking into a playground session of "His neighbor is a terrorist" and "His patron bankrupted a lot of old people in the savings and loan scandal."

I look forward to the last debate. I wish there were more of them. But we need a format that breaks away from sound bites from stump speeches and digs for details. That's the strength of the moderator model.

What do you think?

-- Jim Sweeney

The state Legislature adopted a budget less than a month ago, and it's already may have turned upside down. If it hasn't, there's little doubt that it will soon. The budget was intended to push the mess into next year and onto the next Legislature. In that sense, it only may succeed because the election is coming up fast.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger meets Wednesday with the party leaders from the state Senate and Assembly. The Big Five didn't make much progress on the budget this summer, and there are plenty of lawmakers angry that their bills were vetoed. Schwarzenegger set a record by vetoing about 35 percent of the legislation passed this year, in many cases saying the late budget didn't give him time to review bills in detail.

The next food fight may start sooner than we think.

We will editorialize on the budget in Wednesday's paper. But the best description I've seen yet was in a column today by Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee. He included this quote from an as-yet-unpublished commentary by Al Checchi, the mega-investor who ran for governor in 1990 and lost the Democratic primary to Gray Davis:

"The self-delusion manifested in the manner that California 'balanced' the current fiscal year budget, the myopia involved in ignoring the magnitude of future year shortfalls, and the abdication of fiscal responsibility in failing to provide a feasible basis for funding the long-term pension and health care obligations promised California's public employees, make Wall Street executives, by comparison, paragons of fiscal responsibility."

Ouch.

-- Jim Sweeney

North Coast congressman changes vote, saying "we can't afford to wait for the perfect piece of legislation."

A divided nation awaits to see what, if anything, the House decides to do.

Both did well. No knockdowns. But score this one for Joe Biden on content points

Who is winning this debate?