US election diary

* The man has nerve. Karl Rove, the man who gave us George Bush not once but twice, appeared at a mortgage bankers conference and blamed the Democrats for the financial mess, saying they were the ones behind the irresponsible deregulation. "The deregulators, the anti-regulators, the let-them-do-anything-they-want crowd were all Democrats," he said. It was all too much for Janine Noneparth, who abruptly strode on to the stage, whipped out a pair of handcuffs and tried to execute a citizen's arrest of Mr Rove. He flapped his elbows about and she was removed by security. Ah well, the trial might have been fun.

* Colin Powell has been bombarded by emails excoriating him for endorsing Barack Obama, many taking issue with his saying that the Democrat is a Christian not a Muslim. What Mr Powell also said in his NBC appearance was that there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim in America and that he was moved to say so out loud by an image of a mother at the gravestone of her Muslim son, killed while serving the US in Iraq. He must be heartened then that not all the mail has been bad. According to Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, he received a note this week from Feroze Khan, the father of the dead soldier, thanking him for saying that Muslim-Americans are still American.