Why did Salon choose to question Mr. Kennedy's methods and biases in this particular article, when the same methods and biases were present in their much touted Kennedy article on autism? Does it have anything to do with this article being published only in Rolling Stone, while the autism article was also co-published here in Salon? Mr. Kennedy cherry-picked his data and showed an obvious agenda in his autism article, and it went unquestioned by Salon. Why are his uses of the same techniques being questioned now?

The inherent hypocrisy highlighted by the differing responses to these two articles by Mr. Kennedy is symptomatic of the overall decline in quality here at Salon. After subscribing since the inception of memberships, I have allowed mine to lapse and I won't be renewing it.

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?

The concept that you can't have a conspiracy of a certain size because people talk sounds good on its face. Until you realize the magnitude of the conspiracy of silence, sleight of hand, lies and obfuscation that led us to war with Iraq, for example. A few people on the periphery speak out, but have you heard Perle or Wolfowitz or Condi Rice acknowledging, "yeah, we were full of shit but we wanted to take out Saddam so we lied"?

It's not unreasonable to believe that the chief architects of this fraud are few, and are true believers who will never admit their complicity.

But beyond discussing whether the election was "stolen" and arguing about statistics is the fundamental question: Do we ALL have the right to a fair, above board, and transparent election process?

Yes.

And just as in most other areas, even the perception of conflict of interest should be frowned upon. And we should always be able to go back and check our math.

So arguing about who has the tin foil hats avoids the real issue. The election process is under attack.

Here's what we have:

Secretaries of State who are party operatives and who issue directives that are blatantly partisan and often illegal, but always "err" on the side of limiting voting.

People who were discouraged from voting because there weren't enough machines, although there were warehouses full of them that weren't deployed.

People caught jamming get out the vote phone lines.

People caught pasting over one candidate's "dots" and filling in for another candidate

People caught altering other people's absentee ballots

People caught shredding other people's registration cards

People caught avoiding the legally mandated recount by pre-counting districts instead of random samples

etc.

And we have an influx of voting machines that don't allow us to recount at all. HAVA mandated the ability to recount, and we find later that Diebold machines, for example, have printers already installed - that they didn't tell anyone about!! And then they discourage anyone from buy peripheral printers. Now explain to me why any company would hide features of their product and then discourage the purchase of other products they carry?

In the meantime, Florida has now, in direct violation of HAVA, declared it illegal to try to recount votes on DVMs. Why? And how do they get away with it?

Can't we, at a minimum, agree that our rights as voters should not be abridged, and we should be able to verify the vote counts?

It's as if Manjoo's saying that it's okay to mess with elections as long as you muddy it up enough that we can't "prove" the other guy won. But if we can't recount, and we discredit exit polls, we can never prove anything. So are our elections doomed?

Others have said it before me. It doesn't matter whether the election was "stolen", and RFK Jr. doesn't say it was. He says there were too many discrepancies, too much manipulation, too little transparency, and we deserve more.

We deserve more.

And this sort of bs "analysis", this demand that we "prove" Kerry actually won or simply allow this behavior to go on, is frightening in its cynicism and naivete.