OK, yes, Farhad seems like he's done a bit more homework on this. There is no incontrovertable proof of a conspiracy, and people are considered innocent until they're proven guilty - not just murderers, but even Republicans election officials in Ohio!

So the real question is, where do we go from here? How can we keep these issues from being a permanent fixture of American politics?

Here's my answer: Oregon's vote-by-mail system. No long lines. Pperfect election security (your voting envelope's signature is checked against your registration). If your signature changed or there's any other problem, you get a call BEFORE the election from the staff. Votes coming in for several weeks make last second smears an extremely hard to use tactic. Oh, and did I mention extremely high turnout?

Forward thinking innovation. It's the way we need to go.

Having been involved in Democratic politics for quite some time, I can describe exactly "What the hell happened". The author describes it herself in the very first paragraph.

Rallies are fun, feel-good events, but they don't move the public. The only way someone in Tulsa even knows about a massive pro-choice rally "that shook Washington", is if they happen to see it on the news. But the news isn't ours - it's owned by moderate to conservative Republicans. So what they can't distort (by focusing on a handful of rioters), they'll ignore. Remember the overwhelming anti-Iraq War rallies of 300,000+ erupting in major cities worldwide that were called "almost a thousand protesters in a few cities"? Kind of like that.

Despite all the liberal self-flagellation, this is hardly new. Hell, Mark Twain remarked on it. What liberals have forgotten is the classic counter to plutocrats owning nearly all means of popular communication: their ground game.

Had those million feminists from around the nation that went to this massive rally in the hopes that a few seconds of biased coverage would persuade their neighbors to support pro-choice candidates, actually talked to their neighbors directly, we'd have a lot more Democrats, and no problems with a pro-choice direction in this country. But they didn't, so their views continue to be ignored.

Fortunately for pro-choice women everywhere, Howard Dean is as smart as this rally's organizers are dumb. His 50-State Strategy was pulled directly from the old Democratic playbook. He's got people in every single State, working with the real grass-roots to rebuild the party and get our message out directly.

I would suggest that if you want to win, you go down to your local Democratic party and pitch in. Sure, knocking on strangers' doorsteps, handing out literature, manning phone banks, putting up lawn-signs, is a hell of a lot less fun than going on a "protest vacation" with people that already agree with you. But it actually works, and that's a real plus.