Imagine a country where during a major national election the voting machines counted backwards, counted more votes than people who showed up to vote, switched the votes so that they "hopped" from one candidate to the opponent, had no paper trail verification by design, and the voting machines were allowed to be either altered or kept from inspection after the election. Imagine if the people responsible for all this just refused to show up at a proper judicially noticed court proceeding to discuss any facts of this. Imagine if everyone in power were in on the game- or at least the majority of those in power- so no real investigations with any kind of force of subpoena power would ever take place. No one would ever know. Imagine it. Then get yourself a cup of coffee and wake up, because that is exactly what happened in the US Presidential election of 2004.

In three days George Bush and Richard Cheney, will be sworn in- baring Act of God- as President and the Vice President of the United States- again. Don't you believe it.

When reading the crime and punishment section of my local newspaper (the business pages), I’m continually reminded of the gross inequities inherent in our criminal justice system.

Virtually every day there are reports of CEOs and directors of major corporations who are charged with malfeasance, misappropriation of funds and grand larceny -- on a grand scale.

More often than not, those charged with such offenses end up making a settlement or plea agreement. Usually, those agreements result in fines and/or monetary settlement of lawsuits that don’t even begin to compensate victims of their crimes. Moreover, having agreed to huge multi-million-dollar settlements, there is usually a denial that there was any wrongdoing. To add further insult to injury, few are ever incarcerated.

In the shadow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., America's electoral crisis continues.

King marched across the south and the nation to guarantee all Americans, black and white, the right to vote. But in 2000 and again in 2004, that right was denied.

Now in the wake of another bitterly contested vote count, is the electoral situation improving in the spirit of Dr. King?

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, when briefing the Senate Democratic leadership on the day before the historic challenge to the Ohio electors, told them that in the 40 years since the Voting Rights Act, the people opposed to voting rights have simply changed parties -- from "Dixiecrats" to Republicans -- while still doing "everything in their power to suppress the voting rights of [the] poor and minorities." Jackson also told Senators Reid, Durbin and Stabenow that after President Lyndon Johnson refused Martin Luther King, Jr.'s pitch for voting rights in 1964 at a ceremony commemorating King's Nobel Prize award, it was a "remnant of the civil rights movement that went down to Selma" that was beaten and bloodied in a struggle that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In the days and few weeks immediately following the election last year, the media pronounced gloom and doom for the Democratic Party and its constituents, such as gay rights advocates. Journalists and media outlets of the left and the right, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and Newsweek, among most others, announced that the Democrats were down and out, and that the evangelical Christians and the Republicans were the rising power. They divided the country into red states and blue states, and offered up glossy maps to show that most states were red and therefore Republican strongholds.

The New York Times, in a special news analysis, announced that “President Bush’s re-election is the clearest confirmation yet that America is a center-right country.” Newsweek was even bolder, reporting not only that the “GOP may be the majority party for the foreseeable future,” but that “red-state Democrats are a diminishing breed.” The media even succeeded in encouraging the venerable Democratic strategist James Carville to say, in an interview only forty-eight hours after the election, “We are an opposition party and not a particularly