I am not complaining. I figured out what was going on and will adapt accordingly. I haven't managed to find this behavior in any apple application yet.  I can't say have haved tried everything by any means, but Pages, Numbers, and Neo Office focus themselves when I attempt to drag anything. 

I have to disagree slightly with your premise though. If you click in an application to drag something and then drop it in another application the focus should change according to the drop location. Whichever app received the drop should probably get focus. I can see times where this might not be preferable. If the drop is within the same application (in this case I dragged from textMate to textMate), the drop location is textMate and should make textMate the focus. I am having difficulty envisioning a time when dragging something in one application should result in the previously focussed app keeping focus unless that app receives the drop OR the drop results in a message to the focussed app (which at this time is NOT the app that is being manipulated). 

As I said in my first post, I was doing it the backward way anyway. 

I suspect that most people using textMate are keyboard maniacs and wouldn't resort to something as crude as a mouse drag (especially doing the extremely crude 1984 type debugging that I was doing -- resorting to log statements followed by DIE to find out how I had managed to cut my own throat, which I had.)

Have a great day. I love textMate.  I can't get my boss to understand why textMate is better than DreamWeaver (but that is his problem and not yours, and results from his graphics background).