"My friends, this is not a time to pretend. We're here to celebrate the life of a man who, if he were here today, would make it clear to us what our agenda is.  And nothing," Kerry said, his voice rising in anger, "would he make more clear on that agenda than, in a nation that is willing to spend several hundred million dollars in Iraq to bring them democracy we cannot tolerate that, here in America, too many people are denied that democracy."

Kerry did not explain how any money spent on the democratic infrastructure of Iraq could overcome the hundreds of billions spent on war, occupation, and repression and the violent opposition to all this, but he made some important points about the United States:

"In Democratic districts, it took people four, five, 11 hours to vote, while Republicans [went] through in 10 minutes. Same voting machines, same process, our America," Kerry said.

Kerry did not specify what action would back up his important words, but his aides strongly suggested their belief in better late than never.

Without offering details, Kerry aides said yesterday that the senator plans to file legislation to correct some of the election problems that occurred in 2000 and 2004. Aides also said that a political action committee he started after the election -- a committee that could lay the groundwork for a second presidential campaign in 2008 -- would also be dedicated to preventing disenfranchisement.

The Republican governor of Massachusetts did not directly oppose voting rights on the celebration of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday.

After listening to Kerry's remarks, Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, said that "there are many improvements to be made in our electoral process."  Romney said no eligible voter should be denied the right to vote, but like many Republicans he is at least as concerned about allowing ineligible voters to cast ballots.

"Either voter fraud or voter suppression -- either or both is wrong," he said.

Scott S. Greenberger, the Boston Globe reporter, did not ask Romney if Karl Rove decreed that implying Democratic fraud be a Republican talking point.  Nor did Greenberger ask Romney why any significant number of people should be ineligible to vote in a democracy.

P.S.

Russ Baker got trashed in the letters at TomPaine.com (does GNN have any decent – connected to the article – readers' forum?  Does any place have co-publisher opportunities to comment immediately below the article, or to publish their own article, like the NarcoSphere?).  More important, long before Baker or I published, John Kenneth Galbraith had an article in the Nation on November 29, "Abolish Election Day," that criticized some cries of fraud (and unfairly discounted failures to count the vote) but also estimated that voter suppression through voting machine misallocation stole the election.  And, though I haven't read the whole thing yet, the title makes it clear that he gets at the institutional suppression of working people's votes.