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It used to be that the positions of candidates, their charm, their charisma, their connection to the people, their policy innovation and other substantive matters having real connection with the job function of public office won or lost major campaigns. Not so any longer.

Now it's all in catching the cheaters with their hands in the cookie jars.

It has been repeatedly stated loudly from 2000 onward, and more particularly after the theft of the 2004 Presidential election that the whole game is in how the votes are counted- or not.

Notwithstanding this glaringly obvious truth, all major campaigns and the DNC are still running themselves like nineteenth century popularity contests, as if voting technology had not yet been invented.

Instead, they should be expending huge amounts of resources and energy in engaging software engineers to examine and study all the various voting technologies and create fool proof security measures to meet the challenges of the new technology in preventing wireless hacking, remote breaking and entering of reverse engineered machinery and the like.

Pelosi ... said her greatest concern is over the integrity of the count -- from the reliability of electronic voting machines to her worries that Republicans will try to manipulate the outcome. "That is the only variable in this," Pelosi said. "Will we have an honest count?''

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/11/05/MNG8NM6E…

(don't bother looking in this article for more information on election theft; that's the entire quote on this topic)--but at least the Democratic Party leader is finally on record saying this.

Saddam Hussein has received a death sentence for crimes he committed more than a year before Donald Rumsfeld shook his hand in Baghdad. Let’s reach back into history and extract these facts:

* On Dec. 20, 1983, the Washington Post reported that Rumsfeld “visited Iraq in what U.S. officials said was an attempt to bolster the already improving U.S. relations with that country.”

* Two days later, the New York Times cited a “senior American official” who “said that the United States remained ready to establish full diplomatic relations with Iraq and that it was up to the Iraqis.”

AUSTIN, Texas -- Right to the end, this insane conversation between reality and Not Realty. The president of the United States STILL says we are reducing terrorism by fighting in Iraq; STILL says we are creating democracy; STILL says we're preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and making Israel more secure; and, shoddiest of all, STILL not allowing that our fallen have died in vain.

            The vice president, meanwhile, has announced that, all things considered in Iraq, "if you look at the general, overall situation, (the Iraqi government is) doing remarkably well." And now he's gone off to hunt in South Dakota, thus demonstrating a perfectly balanced sense of reality. South Dakota is so sparsely populated, it's really hard to hit another hunter.

On Election Day 2006, the American people will almost certainly vote to give the Democratic Party one or both houses of Congress.

We will vote to restore at least some of the checks and balances written into the Constitution of the United States. We will vote to end the reign of terror and error imposed on the nation and world since the stolen election of 2000. State by state, governorships and legislatures should return to the opposition party.

All the polls, and all the instincts of credible students of American politics, indicate this will happen. Anyone familiar with the history of the American electorate can be reasonably certain that the issues of war, deficits, economy, environment, scandal, sexual imposition and more will overwhelmingly favor a traditional rejection of the party in power.

But in 2006, the party in power has installed a nationwide system of election theft. And the outcome of Tuesday's election may depend on the ability of the grassroots American citizenry to overcome this infernal machine.

The GOP engine of vote theft is built primarily on two pillars:

Is there meth in Ted Haggard's heaven? Does it rot your teeth? In his 2005 Barbara Walters interview, Haggard says you can eat all the food you want in heaven and never gain weight. Can you shoot all the meth you want and never lose your teeth or grow emaciated? What about unprotected sex with gay prostitutes? Do you get divine protection against AIDS? Or only if you give regular spiritual advice to the President, and help the Republicans blame gays for America's family problems

Now that Haggard has been outed by a gay prostitute for having sex with him and buying meth, and has resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals,

I wonder what it will take for the good people in the pews to call leaders like Haggard, Jerry Fallwell, and James Dobson to account for their mean-spirited hypocrisy. And maybe even to approach the world with more forgiveness and less vindictiveness. I hope they won't just move on to other seductive leaders who similar project their fears and flaws on whoever they chooses to demonize.

Our President is pretending that the Democrats have no plan for Iraq, and the media is repeating that pretense unchallenged.  But a lot depends on which Democrats we look to.  DNC Chair Howard Dean has no more plan than Bush himself.  Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich published a plan in 2003 -- that's THREE YEARS AGO -- that puts Bush, his party, and some of the Democrats to shame.  Here it is, unaltered, from 2003:

The Kucinich Plan to Bring Our Troops Home

Dennis Kucinich:

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Six weeks after a bloodless military coup destroyed Thailand's democracy, squabbling has erupted among supporters of the putsch, amid worries that corrupt politicians are hiding illegal loot while the ruling junta dithers without direction.

"It could all turn into a political farce," warned Campaign for Popular Democracy member Suwit Watnoo, after rifts among the coup's collaborators spilled into the public arena.

"So far, corruption allegations are just that -- unfounded allegations. This makes society uneasy," complained Ongart Klampaiboon, spokesman for the Democrat Party, which benefited from sudden toppling of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's government on Sept. 19.

The popular coup also did not stop Islamist separatists fighting in southern Thailand, where more than 1,700 people have died since January 2004, despite the junta's promise to listen to minority ethnic Malay Muslims' demands for justice, equality, autonomy and multiculturalism.

David Earnhardt's Eternal Vigilance: The Fight to Save Our Election System focuses on the National Election Reform Conference, held in April 2005 in Nashville, which gathered several hundred concerned citizens from 30 states. Since it took place so close on the heels of the November 2004 election, it took on a sort of post-mortem feel. We survived, we're grieving, we're together. Now, what are we going to do?

Something interesting is happening. I keep thinking and writing "we" as opposed to "they." Even though I heard about the conference only afterward it happened, I feel like I was there. It's uncanny, this bond that connects all of us patriots who feel so strongly about the absolute need for fair elections.