As Our Fearless Leader framed the issue at the Urban League: Do the Democrats "own" your vote?

Let's drop down into the real world for a moment and ask: Do you really want to give your vote to these people? (You might want to ask yourself the same question about Mr. Nader, who now believes that all the dirty politics in the country are on the Democratic side of the aisle)

R.L. Stevenson was bundled into a recliner, a bowl of prescription medicine bottles at his elbow. At 79, he no longer can work his farm in Oktibbeha County, about 150 miles northeast of Jackson.

He is a black farmer who toiled for decades at near-subsistence levels -- buying used equipment and dairy cows past their prime -- with little of the government support that white farmers in the area received.

"I've been farming now for 70-some years," he said. "And I didn't do too much progress in that time."

Stevenson expected to benefit from the landmark 1999 class-action settlement with the Department of Agriculture (USDA), which acknowledged decades of "indifference and blatant discrimination" against blacks in the department's lending programs. When the settlement was approved, the judge hailed it as the biggest civil-rights award in U.S. history, estimating that $2 billion would be paid out to black farmers.

The claims process was to be swift and "virtually automatic," wrote the judge, Paul Friedman of U.S. District Court in Washington. Most claimants were to receive $50,000 each and $12,500 for taxes on that amount.

Five of Stevenson's sons received the money on the grounds that they had been rebuffed by the USDA in the 1980s. But Stevenson, like the vast majority of those who submitted claims, was rejected.

His case illustrates the failures of a claims process that even the judge said had fallen far short of what he envisioned. Thousands of claims have been denied for a tangle of reasons including tight deadlines and late submissions, lawyers' bungling and, perhaps most significantly, the resistance of the USDA, which critics say has used technicalities to deny farmers a hard-won remedy.

For those rejected, the only hope for restitution is an act of Congress.

To date, the department has paid $814 million to 13,445 of the 94,000 farmers Ñ about 14 percent Ñ who applied for relief. Almost all the rest were rejected, most because they missed the October 1999 deadline. Many say they did not learn of the settlement until too late; the department has insisted that the deadlines be strictly enforced.

A study by the Environmental Working Group and the Black Farmers Association concluded that the department had spent millions fighting the approximately 22,000 claims that were filed on time. Lawyers for the plaintiffs say the agency has filed objections to each application.

USDA spokesman Ed Loyd said it was not objecting to each claim, but simply fulfilling its mandate "to provide information to the court-appointed operator." The settlement gives the agency the option of supplying such information but does not require it.

Stevenson's claim, filed on time, was denied because records showed he had received government loans, he said. Yet, according to agency and court documents, even when blacks received such loans, they received less than requested, were forced to provide excessive collateral and had their applications processed too late in the planting season to do any good -- ensuring that black farmers would be in debt without benefiting from the money.

As I mentioned last week (and two years ago), this administration has been spending your money to fight in court so that african-american family farms won't have access to the same treatment that farms owned by white families or agribusinesses get as a matter of course from the USDA.

They're not required to fight. As a matter of fact, the judge's order says that farmers who apply for money on track one of the settlement should get $50,000 automatically.

Forty percent of those farmers have been rejected.

Of course, that's forty percent of the people who applied. The USDA apparently didn't notify a great number of the eligible people that the money was available, and 72,000 applications were rejected unread for coming late.

You own your vote (well, maybe outside of Florida).

Whose side are you on?

but we can't really fight fight the war, because there are those conflicting interests

the rotting undead corpse of irony drops a few more bits in Texas

Hydrilla -- the aquatic version of kudzu -- is back and choking Lake Bastrop near Austin. Several years ago, then-governor George W. Bush boarded a hydrilla harvester, steered it across the water and declared victory over the weed.

Last year, when President Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared the end of major combat in Iraq, John Wedig was taken back to 1998.

"I had flashbacks to Lake Bastrop and the whole photo op thing, and I thought about all the work that was done behind the scenes to make that happen," said Wedig, a senior aquatic scientist with the Lower Colorado River Authority. "We went from science to political science in a blink of an eye."

Back then, the hydrilla was multiplying exponentially, raising the pH of the lake and crowding out recreational boaters and skiers.

The LCRA, which built Lake Bastrop in 1964, decided to use an aquatic herbicide. But after complaints from bass fishermen, Bush stopped the herbicide and got the Tennessee Valley Authority to lend a harvester for a demonstration and photo op. The LCRA then bought its own machine. The hydrilla did not abound in subsequent summers.

But now it's back, growing into hundreds of acres and up to the lake surface. The LCRA uses its harvester, which only eats an acre or two of hydrilla daily. Most boaters, skiers and wakeboarders are staying away, but not the bass fishermen. "The fringes and shoreline area is filled up with hydrilla, and that's where they are," Wedig said.