I’m running out so am just posting fast, but if you haven’t seen this, it’s pretty funny.

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Television has never seen a better dramatic series than “The Wire.” Period. The Sopranos gave us one of TV’s greatest characters. But if the Sopranos was grand drama, The Wire gave us great literature. I’m convinced that if Charles Dickens was alive today, he’d have been writing for the The Wire.

And he’d have been in good company. In addition to their own considerable gifts for storytelling, producers David Simon and Ed Burns were smart enough to hire a string of the best crime novelists in America to write for the show, and it showed. Richard Price and George Pelecanos are uniquely talented with inner city argot. Dennis Lehane (author of “Mystic River”) has been moving for years toward a form that combines the traditional detective novel with a kind of tragic sensibility.

Most Hollywood-produced cop shows, no matter how large their stable of “consultants,” usually end up with dialog that sounds like….well…..Hollywood. In contrast, The Wire” was consistently able to capture, not only the sound of street language, but its poetry.

Yet, the great dialog wasn’t the reason we watched. (And are still watching. I’ve just started over with Season One)

We tuned in because David Simon and company gave us weekly commentary on modern urban life with a nuanced authenticity rarely seen elsewhere—all packaged in form that was wildly engaging. And Simon did it using a nearly symphonic pattern of narrative layers and interweaves. We saw the wasteful futility of the war on drugs interwoven with the impossible pressures placed on the cops who are asked to somehow eradicate the drug mess…Into those themes was threaded the hypocrisy and compromise that informs American politics….the absurd and tragic state of the nation’s inner city schools….and finally, the profit-driven shredding of the soul of our country’s newspapers.

Stunning. And all presented through the relentlessly human medium of the show’s remarkable cast of indelible characters.

To me it was season four, about the Baltimore school system and the catastrophic affects of No Child Left Behind, that was the best—and the most emotionally devastating.

But this season was brilliant too.

As a new round of buyouts is announced at the LA Times and the ongoing turf battles at City Hall over gang policy manage to fail all concerned….it’s been somehow steadying to know that we’re not unique with our messes. The Wire got there first.

But what about you? Are you a Wire fan? If so, why does it matter to you?

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And while we’re on the subject of voting, should you have to show a photo ID in order to be able to cast a ballot? On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will be asked to decide.

Wednesday’s Christian Science Monitor has the story:

In 2005, the Indiana state legislature passed a law requiring all voters to show government-issued photo identification before being allowed to cast a ballot.

State officials promoted the measure as protection against voter fraud. Opponents denounced it as a thinly veiled attempt to suppress Democratic voter turnout in Indiana.

On Wednesday, the issue arrives at the US Supreme Court where the justices are being asked to decide whether requiring would-be voters to show photo ID violates the right to vote.

The case is being closely watched because it could establish new constitutional benchmarks in advance of the approaching 2008 general elections….

The McClatchy story on this same issue cites a study estimating that “13 percent of lndiana’s more than 4 million registered voters lack the required ID.”

Democrats and civil rights groups charge that the law is a Republican ploy to prevent thousands of poor, elderly and minority citizens from casting ballots.

Republicans say that it won’t prevent any qualified person from voting. Instead, they say, it guards against vote fraud and heightens public confidence in the integrity of elections.

And yet….

In Georgia, whose initial law was enjoined by a judge and later replaced by a statute offering free IDs for the poor, the state estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 citizens lacked licenses. In Missouri, whose Supreme Court struck down its photo ID law, the estimate was 175,000 to 240,000. Rokita [the Indiana Secretary of State, a Republican] said his office did no such impact analysis before the passage of Indiana’s law.

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Last year, a lot of California residents—myself among them— voted for Debra Bowen for Secretary of State for one central reason, and one reason only: she promised to take a long, hard look at the safety and efficacy of the various kinds of electronic voting machines being used—or slated for use—in California’s counties. These were all the machines that then, Secretary of State, Bruce McPherson had already certified—over the protest of activists who worried about the machines’ security. But McPherson, a likable-seeming and genial fellow, assured us they were fine and dandy and certainly not hackable, God forbid!

Bowen professed not to be so sure. If need be, she said during her campaign, she’d decertify the things.

After Bowen was elected, a lot of us wondered rather cynically if she would really do what she promised. Or was she—as we figured was more likely the case— just blowing a bunch of campaign smoke? (Not that we don’t TRUST the word of public officials or anything.) In other words, when push came to shove, if she found the machines weren’t up to snuff, would she have the backbone to take responsibility for the huge financial hit—and the Tsunami of criticism—that pulling the machines might mean?

This past Friday night, August 3, at exactly nine minutes to midnight, we got our answer.

Miz David, stood up to Goliath.

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