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BILL MOYERS:
When you say they fought you, help us understand what actually happens. What do they do?

SENATOR DICK DURBIN:
Some won't even sit at the table. The American Bankers Association walked away. The Community Bankers walked away. Some credit unions would take no part in this conversation. They wouldn't even discuss the possibility of what we could do to deal with this mortgage foreclosure crisis.

Others participated initially, and when the time came, turned and walked away as well. I was left standing, having basically accepted many of their changes. Meanwhile, they were working feverishly in the halls of the Senate, going office to office, trying to convince people to vote against Durbin's bill. And I knew that I had an uphill battle. They're pretty convincing. They're pretty powerful.

And I have to say that the group I was trying to help, the people facing mortgage foreclosure, don't have that kind of political clout. By and large, these are people who are on the skids. They're running into trouble and voting is perhaps, you know, a sacrifice for some of them. Being involved in lobbying is beyond anything that they'd ever done or could consider doing. So I really was trying to speak for some of those people against some pretty powerful political forces.

SENATOR DICK DURBIN ON THE SENATE FLOOR:
Why is it in this country, in America, that we can find hundreds of billions of taxpayers' dollars from hard-working people all over the United States to come to the rescue of bad banking decisions, rotten investments, mortgages that were fraudulent on their face, but can't summon the political will to do something about 8 million families in America who are going to face foreclosure? That is where we are.

Which seemed more unlikely a few decades ago: that you would be the most famous graduate of 1960s radicalism in America or that you would appear on "Good Morning America" along with a segment about a pregnant man?

I really wanted a segment about the two-headed monkey to follow. That's exactly how I think of most of the mainstream media. It's amazing when you think about that this broad and amazingly diverse and committed and passionate antiwar movement of 40 years ago gets reduced in the narrative put up by the Republican campaign to a single organization which was tiny and on the margins [the Weather Underground] and a single individual who was co-founder of that and a single sentence that individual said. The parallel to that is that the powerful black freedom movement gets reduced to a single preacher in a single church and a single phrase.

Martin Luther King?

No, I'm talking about the reduction of the civil rights movement to Jeremiah Wright. So the civil rights movement becomes Jeremiah Wright and the antiwar movement becomes me. It all seems entirely preposterous to me -- and I think that we should reject that.

It's true -- the way that the U.S. is portrayed on Al Jazeera matters, and we take that responsibility very seriously. We followed up the initial piece by sending the reporter to get reaction from African-American Obama supporters. We gave the last word in this saga to the owner of a PR firm in Atlanta:

"They are not America. They don't reflect America, they don't represent the America that I live in and am a part of, and they don't reflect the majority of Americans."

We will have to wait until November 4 -- or the early hours of November 5 -- to know who Americans will choose to be their next President. But there are certain things we do know now.

After the dark and gloomy years of recent times, this race has electrified the world. It's a U.S. election that has more international resonance that perhaps any in our lifetime.

And all of these issues have been debated and explored in hundreds of hours of coverage on Al Jazeera English, an award-winning channel that is broadcast in more than 100 countries.

Except for most of the United States. Political and financial interests have pressured American cable companies from carrying Al Jazeera English.

In a country that regards itself as the world's leading democracy, that is regrettable because Al Jazeera's coverage has been fair, comprehensive and respectful of different points of view. And a window on the world.

As the world welcomes this new and exciting U.S. era, isn't it time for Americans -- when it comes to being able to see Al Jazeera - to actually be allowed to make their own judgment?

Police say there are inconsistencies in the story of a McCain campaign staffer who told them she was mugged in Bloomfield on Wednesday night by a man who etched a "B" on her cheek when he saw a McCain sticker on her car.

Ashley Todd, 20, of College Station, Texas, spent five hours with robbery detectives last night at police headquarters, where she took a polygraph test. She told police that a man robbed her as she tried to take money from an ATM machine at Pearl Street and Liberty Avenue around 9 p.m. Wednesday.

Ms. Todd told police she then began walking to her car, which had McCain stickers on it. She told police that although the robber had moved away from her, he became agitated when he saw her car, punched her in the back of the head, pushed her to the ground and carved the letter into her face. Yesterday, she said the man sexually assaulted her, a detail that police said she didn't mention in the initial report.

Police today said that security camera footage from the Citizens Bank doesn't show the incident, but it could have happened outside the camera's range. Police also said they have found no witnesses to the attack.

Phantom Voters

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now,
or ACORN, has a nasty habit of hiring day workers who register
thousands of phantom voters, often in swing states. ACORN denies
responsibility, insisting it culls for bogus names, fires whoever
turned them in and flags any irregularities to authorities.

If you doubt ACORN's story and worry that fake registrations
can lead to false voting, I don't blame you. But you will
probably strike out if you try to find phony votes that were
actually cast. Officials verify registrations before accepting
them.

Whatever you make of ACORN, don't let its misdeeds blind you
to the rest of the picture.

Consider Nathan Sproul, former Republican Party chief for
Arizona, who ran a multistate voter drive in 2004. Some of his
former employees have told reporters that his group destroyed
registration forms filled out by Democrats, fired canvassers who
turned them in and submitted to state authorities only the
registrations of those who said they were Republicans. Sproul
denied the allegations.

Oregon Probe

An Oregon investigation into Sproul's 2004 operation there
confirmed ``instances of wrongdoing'' but found insufficient
evidence to prosecute, according to the state's Justice
Department.

Bad as it is to submit fake registrations, no harm is done
unless one of those made-up registrants gets approved by the
state and then shows up at the polls and votes.

``Keep in mind with these stories about potentially bad
registrations, they don't equal bad votes,'' says Terri Enns, a
senior fellow at Election Law @ Moritz, out of Ohio State
University.

But if you register voters and then shred their registration
forms because they support the wrong candidate, you rob
legitimate voters of their ballots in an attempt to tilt the
election result.

Ancient history, you say? This year Sproul has a new group
which the Republican Party and the McCain campaign have hired for
voter drives.

For years, the Republican response to the rising number of non-white voters in particular has been: If you can't win their vote, suppress it. So the GOP has propagated the myth that large numbers of people are voting who shouldn't be, that voter registration groups such as ACORN, which the Republican ticket regularly attacks, are, like the big-city machines of yore, casting ballots in the name of the dead and stealing elections.

Ferreting out these nefarious activities became a central focus of the Justice Department under John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales at the direction of the Bush White House. The department instructed all U.S. attorneys that the prosecution and conviction of voter-fraud perpetrators was, in Gonzales's words, a "top priority." Extensive investigations were undertaken across the nation. Yet, by 2005, as Art Levine reported in the American Prospect this April, only two people had been charged with falsifying or fabricating voter registration forms, and nobody had been charged with impersonating another voter.

But the current attacks on ACORN provide the pretext for attempts to turn black voters and college students away from their polling places. In Ohio, the Republican war on voting has already begun. Hamilton County (that's Cincinnati) prosecutor Joseph Deters, who is also the Southwest Ohio regional chair of the McCain campaign, subpoenaed the records of 266 new voters who have cast absentee ballots because he suspected their addresses might not comport to other public records. A GOP fundraiser in the state is asking the Ohio Supreme Court to deny 200,000 recent registrants the right to vote because their addresses on their registration forms don't match those on their driver's licenses, a discrepancy that suggests that the voters have moved or that the addresses were entered incorrectly by the registrar's offices.

If you can't find the crime here, you're not alone. A number of the U.S attorneys fired by Gonzales got the ax for failing to uncover such crimes, though they conducted far-reaching investigations. David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney for New Mexico, told Levine that voter fraud "is like the boogeymen parents use to scare their children. It's very frightening, and it doesn't exist."

But it's still a quite serviceable myth if Republicans can invoke it to block many thousands of new registrants from voting. It's serviceable even if McCain is defeated, as the right can then claim that the election was stolen and that Barack Obama isn't a legitimate president. On such racist garbage as African Americans voting fraudulently so they can collect welfare checks again is McCain staking his claim for the presidency.