Gonna vote today, eh? Be a shame if somethin' happened to your family while you were at the polls....

Is the press finally awakening from the long post-Clinton coma that's allowed them to give the administration a free pass to loot America and the world? One can only hope. I'll save the enthusiasm for the day when Coingate hits the national headlines, complete with its links to everyone from Scwarzenegger to the president. Anyway....

WASHINGTON - Despite a zero-tolerance policy on tampering with voters, the Republican Party has quietly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide private defense lawyers for a former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to keep Democrats from voting in New Hampshire.

James Tobin, the president's 2004 campaign chairman for New England, is charged in New Hampshire federal court with four felonies accusing him of conspiring with a state GOP official and a GOP consultant in Virginia to jam Democratic and labor union get-out-the-vote phone banks in November 2002.

A telephone firm was paid to make repeated hang-up phone calls to overwhelm the phone banks in New Hampshire and prevent them from getting Democratic voters to the polls on Election Day 2002, prosecutors allege. Republican John Sununu won a close race that day to be New Hampshire's newest senator.

At the time, Tobin was the RNC's New England regional director, before moving to President Bush's 2004 re-election campaign.

Note the first sentence. Not "allegedly," not "accused of," but DID. It's certainly a step in the right direction. And consider that last sentence-- Bush took on a campaign staffer who actively participated in stifling voters' rights.