Josh Marshall has been banging on about this for ages, to the point, I must confess, that my eyes have glazed over from time to time. But today's NYT story does a lot to buttress his claims that a great deal of voter-fraud investigation - aggressively pursued by the Ashcroft and Gonzales Justice Department - is better understood as a form of voter purging and intimidation of Democratic voters by partisan Republican U.S. Attorneys, selected principally not to uphold justice in any neutral form, but to deepen and strengthen one party's grip on power. One wonders what kind of country we'd be living in if the war had not gone so badly. Rove's project represented an attempt at complete control of American democracy by one party under "God." Cheney's project was to create an executive branch immune from any constitutional challenge, empowered to detain "enemy combatants" at will, and to imprison them indefinitely without charges, and full habeas corpus protections. This is what Republicanism has become in power. It's one good reason to expel it for a while.