Anyone naive enough to say that the Republicans have a monopoly on dirty politics is seriously out of touch, freightdawg! ;-)

I think this 2008 campaign will go down as the dirtiest one ever.

Note that MSNBC had originally set a condition that the 4 Democratic candidates with the highest public support would be allowed to appear in the recent Nevada debate...they expected that to be Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and Richardson. Then Richardson dropped out...BINGO! And Kucinich was now among the 4 Democratic candidates with the highest public support, so they had to include him! Not what they wanted at all.

So after a couple of days they arbitrarily decided to change their own stated rules...and make it open to only the 3 Democratic candidates with the highest public support! Thus eliminating Kucinich.

How transparent.

So then Kucinich took it to court and got an injunction against them that would shut down the show if he wasn't allowed to participate.

So then MSNBC (which is owned by General Electric) rushed to the Supreme Court of Nevada, called an emergency session in the last 24 hours, and one hour before the televised debate got a ruling that overruled the Superior Court ruling and AGAIN refused to allow Kucinich to participate in the debate! MSNBC claimed to be the "injured party"!!!!!!!!

Why? Because Kucinich's policies are very different from those of Clinton, Obama, and Edwards...and totally put them to shame, frankly. And because General Electric, a major defence contractor, does NOT want anyone to hear Dennis Kucinich's policies if they can possibly prevent it. They prevented it by keeping him out of the debate. They apparently have enough pull to buy the Nevada Supreme Court. That's quite a lot of pull, wouldn't you say?

That's blatant corruption of the political process by a major corporation through its control of a surrogate major media outlet AND its control of the courts.

That's corruption on a grand scale. You won't hear a peep from Clinton or Edwards about it...and you won't hear much from Obama about it either, although he did have the decency to very briefly allude to the fact that Kucinich wasn't appearing in the debate.

When you have this kind of unofficial shadow corporate control of the media it is virtually impossible to have an honest election process. It all becomes a charade, controlled by those who control the major media outlets, and it is accomplished through payoffs and favors...through graft.

Kucinich wants to change the system in future so that all the political campaigns are funded from a common public fund. That change would, in a single stroke, eliminate the kind of gross corruption and cronyism which has basically ruined the democratic process in North America in the last 100 years or so, and turned it simply into a lobbyist's game which can only be played by the richest and most powerful people in the society.