Nationally syndicated conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham is the Tampa Bay area today to broadcast her radio program live from the TradeWinds Resort from 9 a.m. to 12 noon today (Ingraham can be heard locally on WWBA 820 AM).  Afterwards, from 12:30 to 2:30, she will be autographing copies of her new book, The Obama Diaries.

The 47-year-old commentator will no doubt continue to weigh in on the topic du jour for talk radio this week, the Shirley Sherrod affair.  Last night on Fox News' O'Reilly Factor (where she will guest host next week), Ingraham, never one to resist blasting Barack Obama whether it's justified or not, quoted a column by conservative National Review writer Victor Davis Hanson called The New Racial Mess , which essentially said that racial relations have been "set back a generation," under the Obama administration.

However, after reading Hanson throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, in which on several occasions he wrote that Obama had no chance of ever being elected, quoting from him on anything, particularly when it comes to racial matters,  hardly appears to be reaching for clarity from such an avowed partisan (you can also include commentator Dick Morris in that category, who throughout '08 said that Obama was finished, and since early 2009 has concluded that his presidency is doomed).

Ingraham also criticized Obama Thursday night by saying that with all of the things going on in the country, it was absurd that his administration had wasted 3 1/2 days on the Sherrod affair.  Actually, they haven't, but the media, via talk radio, cable news and blogs certainly have.

And though it is yet to be determined how much involvement the White House had in seeing Sherrod get fired on Monday (Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has said it was done all on his watch, and he takes the blame for the too quick trigger), the last thing that President Obama wanted to be involved with this week was anything to do with race.

As has been commented on this week, it was a year ago that all hell broke loose on the race front leading to the "Beer summit."  That happened after Obama concluded an hour long prime time news conference devoted almost exclusively to questions regarding health care reform to weighing in on the arrest of black Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates in his own home by a white Cambridge police officer.  That really didn't work out too well for the President.

This article appears in Jul 22-28, 2010.