The president-elect's choice of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff sparked criticism of "partisanship."

As we slide deeper into a recession, Emanuel had better be partisan if he wants to get anything done as Obama's hit man. Emanuel is a shrewd — though entirely predictable — choice for Obama.

Though I hate to quote party flacks, Paul Begala has the best description. As the New York Post says this morning, Begala has described Emanuel as "cross between a hemorrhoid and a toothache":

At least Emanuel's not a direct-mail, ideological dirty trickster like George W. Bush's deputy chief of staff Karl Rove.

And unlike Bush's putative chiefs of staff (Andy Card and Josh Bolten), Emanuel comes to the job as an experienced and powerful congressman. Think of a Luca Brasi who's also a smart bagman. Think of a hemorrhoid that can also twist your arms.

The criticism from Republicans doesn't mean anything; they're merely the disloyal opposition. Partisanship? It's the Democrats in Congress who have more to fear as Emanuel works to keep them in line with Obama's agenda.

OK, so Don Corleone's Luca Brasi wound up sleeping with the fishes pretty early on. Expect Obama's enforcer to last longer and to produce plenty of sleepless nights among Capitol Hill's Democrats.

Just be glad that you're not cowering in your office dreading that next phone call from Rahm Emanuel. Obama may be as cool as the other side of the pillow, but Emanuel is no comforter.

Assuming the new chief of staff doesn't have your number, you can relax and click . . .

NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

N.Y. Daily News: 'Yanks caught stealin' from taxpayers again' (Juan Gonzalez)

N.Y. Post: 'WHAT A RELIEF! SPITZ GETS OFF'

New York: 'Can The Daily Show Survive the Barack Obama Presidency?'
"It's no secret that plenty of satirical outlets — Saturday Night Live, the Onion, late-night talk shows — have had trouble finding good Obama jokes. But we're not forecasting their doom. The Daily Show is unique, though, in its audience and in its comedic approach, and we're very worried that an Obama presidency might send Jon Stewart's show speedily on the road to obsolescence. . . .

"If President Obama's administration is the love-in that progressives hope it will be, we think it's awfully unlikely Stewart's heart will be in Obama-bashing. The guy teared up at eleven on Election Night! Not that we didn't, but still. . . .

"That the real highlight of Election Night was Stephen Colbert's begging a cockatoo to slit his throat suggests that the balance of power on the Stewart-Colbert axis might have shifted. We can see a future in which The Colbert Report becomes Comedy Central's late-night star, mixing Dadaist whimsy with legitimate critique of the Obama administration."

Register (U.K.): 'US Air Force online ad theme: "Horror Meets Comedy" '
"In a move which you simply couldn't make up, the US Air Force has announced that it will partner with Microsoft to advertise itself on the Xbox under the banner 'Horror Meets Comedy.' The deal will see the USAF sponsoring a series of short films for viewing on the Xbox Live online portal."

Register (U.K.): 'US admiral wants "pain-ray" guns for Gulf fleet'
"A US admiral has called for American warships operating in the Middle East to be equipped with microwave 'pain ray' cannons to avoid using overwhelming lethal force."

Register (U.K.): 'Palin didn't know Africa is a continent, McCain aides say — Needed work on North America too'
"Sarah Palin raised a few eyebrows within the John McCain campaign because she didn't realize that Africa is a continent, according to aides whispering with a shamelessly right-wing news outlet.

"McCain aides told Fox News chief political correspondent Carl Cameron there was "great concern" within the campaign that Palin 'lacked a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, and a heartbeat away from the presidency.'

"Yes, knowledgeability."

Washington Post: 'Emanuel to Be Chief of Staff'
"The selection of the fellow Illinois Democrat, a close Obama friend who embraces a sharp-edged approach to politics, could signal a rapid succession of appointments. Obama is expected to announce in the coming days that he will place two senior campaign aides, David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, in key roles.

"Those early staffing decisions, coupled with reports that a number of prominent and established people are under consideration for Cabinet roles, suggests that Obama is focused more on projecting a reassuring image of continuity and competence than of quickly bringing wholesale change to a nation facing two wars and a severe economic downturn."

Washington Post: 'Iraqis Demand Withdrawal Date'
"Officials insist on departure time for U.S. forces, demand troops be subject to Iraq legal jurisdiction."

N.Y. Times: 'Retailers Report a Sales Collapse'

Market Watch: 'Europe stocks blasted on day of steep rate cuts'

Wall Street Journal: 'Hedge Fund Selling Puts New Stress on Market'

New Yorker: 'Melting into Air: Before the financial system went bust, it went postmodern'
"The story of David Einhorn and Allied Capital is an example of a moneyman who believed, with absolute certainty, that he was in the right, who said so, and who then watched the world fail to react to his inarguable demonstration of his own rightness . . ."

N.Y. Post: 'BATTERING RAHM TO HIT DC: O'S TOP AIDE IS ALL FIGHT'

N.Y. Times: 'Tolerance Over Race Can Spread, Studies Find'

N.Y. Times: 'On Concerns Over Gun Control, Gun Sales Are Up'

N.Y. Times: 'Obama Victory Alters the Tenor of Iraqi Politics'

N.Y. Times: 'Georgia Claims on Russia War Called Into Question'
"TBILISI, Georgia — Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.

"Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.

"The accounts are neither fully conclusive nor broad enough to settle the many lingering disputes over blame in a war that hardened relations between the Kremlin and the West.

"But they raise questions about the accuracy and honesty of Georgia’s insistence that its shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, was a precise operation. Georgia has variously defended the shelling as necessary to stop heavy Ossetian shelling of Georgian villages, bring order to the region or counter a Russian invasion."

Register (U.K.): 'North Korea photoshops stroke from Kim Jong Il: Pixelated communist chief in shadow snafu'
"North Korea has released a new pic of chairman Kim Jong Il, hoping to show the world that the communist despot/self-professed internet expert is alive and well and healthy enough to actually appear in public. But this may be a case of communist photoshopaganda."

If the presidential election next Tuesday results in a fairly close call, expect battalions of lawyers to sweep across the country to lob thousands of court challenges and counter-challenges — particularly if McCain is the loser.

Who has to show IDs? Who doesn't? What kind of IDs? Photo IDs?

How many of the newfangled vote-tally computers will crash? How many blue screens of death will pop up in red states?

How many white males will actually click "ENTER" for a black man?

How many Negroes will the GOP allow to vote?

How successful will the GOP be in assuring that long lines of would-be voters will be even longer so that some of them will give up in frustration because it's a workday and they have to get to their jobs (or find new ones) or go home to take care of their kids because the U.S. foolishly schedules its votes on weekdays instead of weekends, as many other supposedly less-democratic countries do?

How many challenges will there be to the unprecedented flood of mail-in votes in the nation's most populous state? See the Sacramento Bee's report this morning, "Flood of absentees may delay election night results":

How many mail-in votes will be tossed into dumpsters?

Reports of voter woes are already flooding in from all parts of the U.S. — including right here in the nation's most populous city ("VOTE CHAOS: MELTDOWN LOOMS AT CITY'S POLLS," New York Post).

The more confusion, the more opportunities for tricksters like Karl Rove and Hans von Spakovsky (and probably Dick Cheney, as he did in 2000) to do some more monkey-wrenching. They've set the stage by already complaining loudly about "voter fraud."

Don't dismiss that. Yes, Richard Daley's Democratic machine fixed elections years ago in Chicago, but these days top GOP officials are the experts on the subject of voter fraud.

Actually, the GOP was quite active in voter fraud back in the day. You don't even have to go back to the blatant abrogation of Southern blacks' voting rights half a century ago.

Before Arizona lawyer and Republican operative William Rehnquist became Chief Justice of the United States, he personally blocked blacks and Latinos from voting in South Phoenix. That was in 1964, the year of the historic Voting Rights Act, which was supposed to halt that sort of thing.

For details on Rehnquist's supreme insult to democracy, see "Just our Bill," a December 2000 column by Dennis Roddy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Roddy's piece is a must-read every four years. Here's an excerpt:

You think the disputes in 2000 over chads in Florida were frustrating? Wait till you see the fights in '08 over results tallied by the shaky, largely untested computerized vote-tally machinery. And instead of infamous obstacles like the poll tax, we have a poisonous mix of mystifying, widely different voter-ID rules state-by-state, county-by-county to sort through.

Even if the presidential election isn't close, many of the Congressional contests will be, with powerful Republicans like Kentucky's Mitch McConnell in danger of being tossed down Capitol Hill — and lawyers trying to regurgitate them back up.

Is there a lawyer in the House? Oh, there will be plenty for that chamber's ousted incumbents.

The only hope for the GOP is to immediately pay off all our mortgages. Doubtful.

Meanwhile . . .

NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

Scotsman: 'How will US vote? Much of it has.'

Daily Star (Beirut): 'Public losing confidence in Afghanistan's future -- survey'
"Afghans are increasingly pessimistic about their country, with security, unemployment and high prices dominating concerns, according to an annual mood survey released Tuesday. The proportion of people who said they were more prosperous today than under the 1996-2001 Taliban government had also 'decreased significantly,' said the Asia Foundation poll."

AP: 'Authors, publishers settle suit against Google'

Global Network Initiative: 'Diverse Coalition Launches New Effort to Respond to Government Censorship and Threats to Privacy'

CircleID: 'The Global Network Initiative'

Dallas Morning News: 'Early voters report obstacles at polls'

Herald (Scotland): 'Financial crisis: Parents in Scotland struggling to pay bills'
"Almost three-quarters of parents are finding it harder to pay their bills than a year ago, a survey today revealed."

Herald (Scotland): 'Oil giant BP reveals massive 150 percent rise in profits'

ReliefWeb: 'Haiti: Tropical Storm Hanna, Gustav, Ike OCHA Situation Report No. 26'
"Urgent action is required to respond to the 'worst disaster in the last 100 years' to strike Haiti, said the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, John Holmes, warning that aid agencies remain far short of the millions they need to help the country recover from four hurricanes.
"Mr. Holmes described the situation in Gonaives as 'dramatic and grim' Water had receded from most of the city, but people still had to deal with large amounts of mud. The main streets had been cleared, but thousands of people were still in shelters, mainly schools. The conditions in those shelters were not good. People were returning to the city, but could not live in their houses."

The Age (Australia): 'Barack's a BMW, McCain's a Ford'
"If presidential candidate Barack Obama was a car he would be a BMW while John McCain would be a Ford, a survey of American voters has found.
"Vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin would be a Budweiser, while her opponent Joe Biden would be a Samuel Adams."

China Digital Times: 'Who Owns Tibet?'

Caijing (China): 'Advice for the Next U.S. President'

China Digital Times: 'Chinese Media Censorship'
"Ying Chan, director of Hong Kong University’s journalism program, presents a recently published collection of fifteen essays from some of China’s top journalists. The essays touch on many issues ranging from classic censorship to the rise of blogs."

Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, Mississippi): 'Details unclear on voter ID rules'

N.Y. Times: 'Consumers Feel the Next Crisis: It’s Credit Cards'

Washington Post: 'U.S. Markets Surge As Credit Starts to Thaw'

L.A. Times: 'Hollywood may not be recession-proof this time'

Washington Post: 'Accuracy Of Polls a Question In Itself'

L.A. Times: 'Iraq's blast walls become canvases'

N.Y. Daily News: 'Big meltdown in N.Y. pension funds'

N.Y. Review of Books: 'The Glories of Yiddish' (Harold Bloom)

Dawn (Pakistan): 'Islamabad and Kabul agree on contacts with militants'

Publishers Weekly: 'Authors, Publishers, Google Embrace Settlement'

In the final countdown to the presidential election, many Americans may actually hit zero, thanks to predicted failures of new voting machinery and rules.

This just leaves the curtain of the voting booth open for the machinations of GOP operative Hans von Spakovsky and his ilk.

Not only anti-Democratic but also anti-democratic, Von Spakovsky used to be on the Federal Election Commission, but he kept pissing in the voter pool and was finally forced out.

That doesn't mean he's not actively practicing voter fraud while railing against it. See Rolling Stone's new piece by Bobby Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, "Block the Vote."

For more Hans brinkmanship, see my late 2007 stories "The GOP's Hounding of Voters" and "Hans Off Our Elections!"

And don't forget fixer Karl Rove, who's now larval in the Fox News cocoon. Tell me he's not about to weave some webs to trap voters.

Even without those two goniffs, big problems loom for the quadrennial attempt at democracy. It's so scary that even the British are on the side of the colonists. They're running around our countryside with warnings of none if by land, zero if by sea. Today's Guardian (U.K.) plays it up big, in "Ballot debacle predicted for November 4":

Extracted from the report (PDF) at Pew's electionline.org, here's a lengthy passage — lengthy because it's important:

Nevertheless, vote early and vote often. And all you college grads out there: You might as well go to the polls because the job of democracy may be the only one available. From this morning's Wall Street Journal:

Wi-Fi it. Go ahead and order another triple-shot frappucino, go back to your table, and see if anything clicks . . .

NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

AP: 'US airstrike kills 9 Afghan soldiers at checkpoint'

N.Y. Daily News: 'RNC spends thousands on dresses, make-up for Sarah Palin & family'

N.Y. Post: 'GOP'S SHOCK "TERROR" ATTACK: MAILING TARGETS OBAMA'

Guardian (U.K.): 'Pound tumbles as Bank head cries recession'

Wall Street Journal: 'Joe the Plumber and GOP "Authenticity": It's hard to reach out to workers while cracking down on unions' (Thomas Frank)

N.Y. Times: 'Some Cut Back on Prescription Drugs in Sour Economy'

Guardian (U.K.): 'Cyber-attack theory as al-Qaida websites close'

Wall Street Journal: 'Gay Marriage in Peril in California'

Wall Street Journal: 'U.S. to Ask Analysts if Lehman Misled'

Wall Street Journal: 'Recession Fears Pummel Futures'

Wall Street Journal: 'Obama Opens Double-Digit Lead: New Poll Shows McCain Ceding Ground on Taxes, Values; Palin Loses Shine'

Wall Street Journal: 'Iran, Qatar, Russia Form Gas Alliance'

Wall Street Journal: 'McClatchy's Advertising Woes Mount'

Wall Street Journal: 'Network Audience Keeps Eroding: Upswing in Delayed Viewing on DVRs Isn't Likely to Offset Prime-Time Declines'

Running down the press:

As expected, Bristol mire was highly profitable this morning:

Daily News: 'Bristol Palin's pregnancy was an open secret back home'

Good adjectival application, except for the usual fuckin' bowdlerizing:

Der Spiegel: 'McCain's Bush-Style Campaign Worries the Center'

Before you settle in for yet another day of Jerry Springer-style Palin family drama, go to Germany for some other news about the Republicans:

And the German site doesn't neglect der kinder mutter; it simply treats it as political news:

Straight shooting from the Germans that cuts through the bullshit over here: "poorly disguised gambit to get the religious right behind McCain."

Yes, the Palin choice smells like a Rovian maneuver. Wonder if we'll ever find out whether he was the one behind it.

Daily News: 'Killer smiled as he bragged to dad about chilling student murder'

The morning's best creepshow stuff:

Nope, no problem, Jeromie. Listen, have a good day. Gotta run now.

Times: 'City Feels the Economic Pinch, but It’s Only a Pinch, So Far'

Doing its best to attach a smiley face to the situation, the paper dispatched Patrick McGeehan to find people who don't think the economy is rapidly sinking. In a city this big, you're bound to find some, and in a story that smacks of small-town reporting, he did:

Vague bullshit that's mostly stiff-upper-lip quotes from merchants and which includes zero from, say, the tens of thousands of people who have been laid off or fired. "To a surprising degree"? Not backed up.

The problem for readers: If you just read the headline, you're being misled. But then if you go on and read the story, you're wasting your time with boring misinformation. Misled or bored — you decide.

For a more realistic look at the economy — even for those of us who don't dine at hoity-toity restaurants — turn to the food section for Frank Bruni's 'As Belts Tighten, Lobsters Shrink and Bar Menus Grow.' That's a real story with real information about how we're being fricasseed.

Daily News: 'Online bookies taking bets on whether Sarah Palin will get dumped'

Already tired of the Republicans and their catering to the Good Book evangelicals? Go to Ireland:

I wrote about Intrade's political market in May 2007 ("Wolfie's Stock Soars"). Now you can keep track of Palin here.

By the way, as the story doesn't note, Obama appears to be the favorite over McCain, according to the Irish site's punters.

Post: 'THIS IS NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY: GOPERS STAND UP FOR SARAH'

Tired old headline style, not to mention the mixed-metaphoric lede:

Fred Thompson's name makes the first paragraph of your Palin story, you gotta problem.

Post: 'LINGERIE IS TOTALLY HOT: COPS'

Great head, supported by a cute lede:

L.A. Times: 'Palin hubbub leads Republican delegates to target "liberal media" '

James Rainey, the paper's "On the Media" reporter, paints a dramatic picture:

Then he continues with what has to be the worst idea for a lede in the history of political-convention coverage:

Huh? He's interviewing one of his colleagues? About something that happened 20 years ago? Rainey continues:

Yes, it could have, but it didn't.

In fact, another mediocre West Coast paper snared an anecdote that really did happen in St. Paul. Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times trolled the convention floor asking about George W. Bush and came up with this:

Times (U.K.): 'Obama support hits 50 per cent as Republicans look to Palin speech'

Rupert Murdoch's London paper is your better choice than Murdoch's New York City paper — or any other NYC paper — if you want political news. If you want to put the Palin news in perspective, here's part of how the Brit paper's Hannah Strange portrays it:

Yo, bitch, you ain't all that. "Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!"

New York mag's new clump of articles, under the rubric "Race: The Impossible Conversation (But Here Goes . . .)," finally drags the elephant in the living room into full view.

I wrote last Friday, referring to the press's tap dance around the issue, that "it's the race, stupid," but John Heilemann doesn't dance around in the lead piece, "The Color-Coded Campaign: Why isn't Obama doing better in the polls? The answer no one wants to hear."

Here's a morsel:

Heilemann adds:

Part of the package is Patricia J. Williams's fluent "Talking About Not Talking About Race." I'd quibble with this "post-racial" thing that she and Heilemann bandy about. But that's not an egregious fault. Williams uses sociology (though not, thankfully, the worst of sociologists' jargon) to write about the "race card," particularly the unspoken one:

For a magazine that's been particularly ditzy and lame lately, this is a good package — just about as good as the one that fearful white males probably think Obama has.

Running down the papers:

Post: 'DRAG 'NET: NYPD WELCOMES CRIME WEB VIDEO'

Terrific hed, and so's the story:

Only problem is that you send video to the NYPD, the cops open a file on you.

This is a clever P.R. move by the cops because the footage is going to be shot anyway, and maybe those who shoot it will hand it over to the cops first and won't immediately run with it to the press or post it themselves, thus reducing the risk to the NYPD of uncontrolled bad publicity and giving Kelly time to craft the right response to incriminating videos.

Times: 'McCain Tries to Define Obama as Out of Touch'

Call that "news"? It's effective propaganda by the McCain campaign, at very little cost. The McCain/Bush "veterans" now don't have to do this at all, because the Times has already embedded the phrase "negative narrative about Barack Obama" in voters' brains.

Post: 'BARACK THE BIMBO': MAC ATTACK AD PAINTS OBAMA WITH BLOND BRUSH

Carl Campanile and the paper's headline writers show the Times how it's done:

Sources tell me that the word "bimbo" is not in the New York Times style guide.

Times: 'A New Generation of Republicans in Alaska'

William Yardley's below-average piece, inexplicably promoted as a "top story":

So friggin' what? Ted Stevens's scandalous stuff with an oil industry exec is interesting. But does this "new generation of Republicans in Alaska" have any impact on whether Alaska's wilderness will be further plundered by the oil industry? Not a peep about that issue in this story.

Straining on the toilet of non-news news, the Post dumps this hed on us, after two straight days of brilliance about the "Rockefooler." Clever but forced, and it's based on this lede, which admittedly is pretty damn good on a relatively insubstantial piece of news:

Fresh angle, but flimsy. Yeah, this guy's an ersatz Rockefeller. Nelson Rockefeller showed what it takes: Word after his 1979 death at age 70 was that he died in the saddle with a 26-year-old chickie, though that's never been absolutely proven.

Now that was a real superman. This phony guy on the lam is just a Clark Went.

Daily News: 'Depressed during holidays, Clark Rockefeller spoke of kidnapping'

The Daily News shows the Post how not to do it:

Here's a grin, though. Above the hed, there's this line:

Post: '$25M SUIT: HO-LOVIN' HUBBY GAVE ME STDS'

Dareh Gregorian's lede:

Such an eloquent oral report.

Times: 'Democrats Call for Contempt Charges Against Rove'

Grossly understated headline. It implies some sort of press conference. No, it was an actual, formal vote by a powerful House committee:

It doesn't matter that it was strictly along party lines. That's a big step for the ordinarily lily-livered top Demo leadership to move beyond press conference whining to an actual vote.

On the other hand, what's kept them? I've been holding Rove in contempt for several years, and so have many others.

Rehnquist is dead, but his spirit lives. The Supreme Court and Rove's man at the FEC pump life into "voter fraud" scheme.

A snapshot of current American electoral politics is one of the ugliest pictures of the year, now that the increasingly conservative Supreme Court has decided to hear a major voter-fraud/national photo ID case before next year's elections.

The GOP-engineered presidential-vote debacle in 2000 has developed into what may become a major scandal involving the use of photo IDs, which the GOP has been trying to engineer in time for next year.

"Voter fraud" — a purported invasion of polling places by illegitimate voters — is the battle cry of Republican officials hoping to stem turnout by likely Democratic voters in battleground states.

And "voter fraud" is right: The requirement that voters present photo IDs is their scheme, and Hans von Spakovsky is their standard-bearer at the Federal Election Commission. That uncomfortable sensation felt by small-d democrats is their cherished poll being shoved up a place where the sun don't shine.

Who said Karl Rove left the building? Coupled with the appointment of Michael Mukasey to oversee the Justice Department and its Civil Rights Division, the GOP is setting itself up well for '08, fighting a winnable war against U.S. voters while it fights an impossible war overseas. Rove's fingerprints are all over this, whether or not he's still using his White House keyboard.

Iraq has left the Republicans flaccid, but their "voter fraud" canard and accompanying strategy threaten to give the GOP yet another election.

Shades of Bill Rehnquist! Before he was chief justice of the U.S., Rehnquist personally blocked black people from voting in Phoenix in 1964, using "voter fraud" as his excuse. I wrote about that in September 2005 ("Rehnquist Death Gives Bush Chance to Deepen American Crisis"), recalling Dennis Roddy's riveting column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that itself recalled Rehnquist's totalitarian behavior in Arizona as a GOP operative.

Rehnquist died in September 2005, but that didn't help because John Roberts, who favors corporate citizens over human citizens, took his place. An event that may turn out to be equally vital to the GOP occurred three months later, when Bush made a recess appointment to the FEC of von Spakovsky, a former Republican county chairman in Georgia. Before his FEC appointment, von Spakovsky was the chief civil-rights violator in the Justice Department's civil-rights division, leading the move to suppress minority and poor voters.

Von Spakovsky is up for confirmation to another FEC term. And the Roberts Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will hear the issue involving national photo IDs and voting — just in time for next year's election. This is dangerous, because it will likely bollix up '08 voting in key states.

There's plenty to read on this topic. From Paul Kiel at Talking Points Memo this past June:

Kiel refers to a 2004 piece by Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker whose headline says it all: "Poll Position: Is the Justice Department poised to stop voter fraud — or to keep voters from voting?"

See Lou Dubose's 2006 account of how von Spakovsky collaborated with Rove to scheme Tom Delay's crooked redistricting in Texas earlier this century. More to the current point, Dubose noted at the time:

Dahlia Lithwick's piece two days ago in Slate is also vital for understanding the back story on von Spakovsky.

Legal beagles can parse Bob Bauer's analysis yesterday of the politics swirling around the vote case the Supreme Court has now agreed to hear.

For a very recent story hinting at the bad smell emanating from the Justice Department, see "The Stooge," by David Martin of Kansas City's The Pitch.

As for following this issue, though, nothing beats wonk lawyer Rick Hasen's Election Law site, though Hasen is perhaps too hopeful that the high court will protect the rights of voters.

As I've pointed out before, in a September 2004 piece about dubious electronic-voting machines, Hasen is always a captivating and current legal-news live wire.

Those who can't live without the New York Times can learn some things from an April 12 story, "In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud," co-bylined by Ian Urbina, whose copy I used to have the pleasure of editing.

But you must keep clicking on the excellent McClatchy home page (formerly the Knight-Ridder D.C. Bureau), and definitely read Greg Gordon's story last April, "Administration pursued aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout." Gordon noted:

Next year those of you who can vote might want to vote early and vote often.