Uncle Albert responding to a post of mine in this thread: Most polls showed a pretty easy Bush win in 2000 up until the final weekend when (a) the ancient Bush DUI story was magicaly rediscovered (talk about political dirty tricks and press complicty!) and (b) Gore went on a major campaign swing while Bush got complacent and stopped campaigning.

Let's hold up a mirror to Uncle Albert and untangle this web of deceit. On Election Eve, 2000, the exit polls shows that Al Gore had won Florida and therefore the election. Gore had been closing a small gap for a long time. During the weeks before the election, many states polled were within the margin of error, and the trends were in Gore's favor up to the election.

During the campaign, Bush lied about his drunken driving record. Let me repeat that: Bush lied. The story was discovered (not REdiscovered) when a Fox News reporter was tipped off by a local cop. A reporter at a local affiliate, of course. The Fox News anchors in New York and Washington did their best to dismiss the story. Salon.com's Eric Boehler writes about this at http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/07/23/fox_dui/index.html .

Lastly, as usual, the GOP pulled out all the stops during the last week of the campaign. To say that Bush "got complacent and stopped campaigning" is a lie, pure and simple.

Further, the NAACP sued Florida over voting irregularities for minorities and won (technically, they settled out of court). There's no question that more people in Florida (and much of the rest of the country) wanted to vote for Gore, but either were prevented from doing so or their votes were lost. Exit polling is only a small part of the massive voter fraud perpetrated by and for Republicans and the radical right. The US Constitution guarantees the right to vote for citizens, and we've known for a long time that Republicans don't give a damn about the Constitution. Currently, Bush signs a law and then simply says he doesn't have to follow it. This is an impeachable offense. One among many.

I suppose that's an interesting debate: Can you impeach someone holding the office of the President if they never were legally elected to the position?

Judging by the letters published here so far, Tom nailed it. The profane and scatological right wingers offer nothing but spew... while the rest of us just laugh at them.

Too bad the issue is so serious. The conservative spin is so unAmerican, Bill O'Reilly has to lie like Joe McCarthy (see http://journals.democraticunderground.com/top10/246 , Top 10 Conservative Idiots #7.)

I predict the 2006 elections will bring even more hate speech from sphincter conservatives. They have nothing else.

Back in the 1960s, a president from Texas lied about the reasons to go to war, and the mainstream news media did a lousy job of covering issues that mattered to people. Underground Newspapers were born. Scatological, rude and often amateurish, they were also scathingly ironic, hysterically funny and sometimes covered local news better than the newspapers of record. They were born not of frustration with Vietnam, but of frustration with the news media.

What we would now call political blogging arose in the late 1990s because the World Wide Web made it possible for almost anyone with a minimum of equipment and training to have as great a presence as billion dollar corporations. The first ones were on the hard right: Matt Drudge gave up trying to sling mud at Hollywood so he could sling mud at Bill Clinton. Freepers lowered the standards of message boards everywhere. Right wingers felt that the news media wasn't covering the stories that mattered to them. As it turned out, they were tools of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove and the stories that the conservatives claimed were important turned out to lies. Starting in the early 90s (if not earlier) the mainstream media's hard shift to the right destroyed the credibility of tv news and newspapers. Bloggers, of any political persuasion, came in to fill the credibility gap. Just like Underground Newspapers, political blogs came about because the mainstream media is not doing its job.

The conservative news media doesn't practice "journalism" in any meaningful sense of the word. Most bloggers don't either, but then few claim journalistic standards, being happy to be accurate and tenacious.

I don't read many blogs outside The War Room. I have my own radio program, Shockwave Radio Theater, science fiction humor at its best, on a non-profit radio station. I get my political licks in, but mainly I poke fun at everything. www.romm.org . But I come from a journalism background, and know good reporting when I see it. I don't see it... and would rather get my news from reliable sources like The Daily Show and from places that link to primary source material. Sometimes, I even read the right-leaning blogs, but they manage to be scatological, rude and amateurish without being funny or accurate. At least the left-leaning blogs are funny, strive for accuracy, tenaciously report a story where the mainstream is afraid to and are, for the most part, polite.

Mission accomplished.

The right wingers can whine all they want, but the fact remains that far too many on the ultra-right are all gosh-wow about war but are dreadfully uncomfortable when it's their ass on the line. Wearing a uniform is a new experience for too many warmongers.

The vast majority of violence against arabs comes from other arabs. How do the airports in Egypt or Lebanon guard against terrorists? Obviously racial profiling won't help. Does Quaddafi keep a list of his old comrades to watch out for at the Tripoli airport?