Join the Summer Blog Book Club's discussion of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" by Greg Palast at 6:45 P.M. ET at http://blog. deanforamerica.com. But read this first:

WHO GIVES A SHIT?

You read the papers and you watch television, so you know the kind of spider-brained, commercially poisoned piece-of-crap reporting you get in America.

You could call my book, What You Didn't Read in the New York Times or What You Can't See on CBS. For example:

Five months before the November 2000 election, Governor Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris of Florida moved to purge 57,700 citizens from the voter rolls, supposedly criminals not allowed to vote. Most were innocent of crimes, but the majority were guilty only of VWB: Voting While Black.

That's from the intro to 'The Best Democracy Money Can Buy,' based on my reports for BBC Television and the Guardian papers of Britain, the nasty facts of Bush-ocracy banned from the US airwaves and print.

Since first publication in the USA, these investigative reports have snuck around the electronic Berlin Wall through Michael Moore's film, Democracy Now and a few samizdat publications.

But nothing's changed. And it ain't just Fox that's filling the news with fairy tales.

For example, the fake 'felon' purge is back. In 2000, no US TV outlet would touch my story of the wipe-out of Black registrants, but this year, CNN (after a personal appeal/threat by Jesse Jackson) ran a story picked up by others that Jeb Bush was purging yet another 47,000 this year. More legal voters got the axe - four Democrats for every Republican.

First Brother Jeb reacted to the reports in the honorable manner: his Secretary of State announced she would not use the list. And that's what the Washington Post ran on July 11, a story with the headline, "FLORIDA FELON LIST IDEA IS DUMPED." But that's just not true. I know you'll find this hard to believe, but The Washington Post is wrong and Jeb Bush is lying. Just ask county elections officials in Florida if they've been told to stop using the list. They haven't.

That's just one example of all the news that's fixed in print.

Here's another story you won't read: in the year 2000, 1.9 million votes were cast but not counted. "Spoiled" is the official term. And of those, one million were cast by African American voters.

These are from the official figures of the US Civil Rights Commission. We have an apartheid voting system in America, friends, and Howard Dean, bless him, is one of the few people willing to talk about it. (OK, John Kerry mentioned it at the NAACP convention in July -- encouraged by Dean, Jackson and John Edwards.)

Black votes don't 'spoil' because they're left out of the 'fridge. Black counties and precincts in America get the worst schools, the worst hospitals, and the worst voting machines. It's programmatic: the powers that be (in both parties, sorry to say) know damn well when Black precincts are getting crap voting machines.

This week I was in Jacksonville, Florida with Congresswoman Corinne Brown. We dropped in (with our cameras rolling) on the County elections supervisor to ask exactly how it was in 2000 that 27,000 -- 27,000! -- votes got "spoiled" and voided -- the vast majority in just a couple of all-Black precincts.

The Republican official admitted that 5,000 ballots were simply BLANK -- which he attributed to a strange influx of voters with no interest in choosing a president. I feared Congresswoman Brown, the first Black person elected to Congress from Florida since Reconstruction, would jump the counter and put his lights out (or on).

He then admitted that every time he'd run the "blank" ballots through the counting machine, more votes would suddenly appear: 200 for Gore, 100 for Bush. So he stopped running the ballots through the machine, on Harris' orders.

"In other words," I asked him, "If you kept running the cards through the machine, more votes would tally more votes for Gore -- and we'd have had a different President."

"That's correct," he said and grinned like the cat who's swallowed your pet canary.

And now, with computers, they're taking Jim Crow into Cyberspace.

Tonight, we can talk about voting in America -- a topic covered two of the chapters in my book. Or we can chat about about what's in the other eight chapters -- for example, the Bush Administration's killing off the investigation of the bin Laden family in the USA. You got a whiff of that in Moore's film, but it's worth looking at the hard evidence, the FBI documents in the book shown on my BBC Television reports.

I'm quite thrilled -- truly honored -- to speak with Democracy for America members. This month, when I met Dr. Dean, he said he'd read my book -- which I took as polite politician talk. But then he began quoting from it -- at which point I knew he stood little chance of success in American electoral politics. The man knows too much.

But he gives a shit. And that's rare in a time of dangerous cynicism. Most important, he and the members of DFA get it: election day is just one 24-hour skirmish in the war to save democracy.

Iraq has an interim government of limited sovereignty not chosen by it's own citizens. So does the USA. Can we change that? I don't know, but at least we can tell our kids that we didn't stand around with our hands in our pockets whistling at our shoes when they took our country away.

- Greg