Blogging Truth To Power

Now this is the sort of action we hope for when we blog.

Kennedy, meanwhile, is preparing to up the ante on those he believes abetted the GOP's electoral theft. In July, the outspoken attorney plans to file "whistle-blower" lawsuits against two leading manufacturers of electronic voting machines. According to Kennedy, company insiders are prepared to testify that the firms knowingly made false claims when they sold their voting systems to the government -- misrepresenting the accuracy, reliability and security of machines that will be used by 72 million voters this November.

And just what prompted this? I'd like to think bloggers had a lot to do with keeping this story alive and influencing Kennedy.

The debate began online, where the story set off a firestorm. More than 700,000 people logged on to rollingstone.com to read the story, and thousands of bloggers posted heated entries about Kennedy's report.

The online furor caught the attention of some in the mainstream press, which has long downplayed the evidence of vote tampering. In The New York Times, Bob Herbert devoted an entire column to our investigation, concluding that John Kerry "almost certainly would have won Ohio" if Republicans had not blocked so many of his supporters from casting ballots. And The Seattle Post-Intelligencer blasted the media for its "deafening" silence on Kennedy's report. "In terms of bad news judgment," the paper observed, "this could turn out to be the 2006 equivalent of the infamous Downing Street memo" -- evidence that the Bush administration falsified intelligence on WMDs to justify invading Iraq -- "that was initially greeted by the U.S. media with a collective yawn."

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