On January 9, in asuit brought by Democratic politiciansand advocacy groups like the Indianapolis NAACP, the Supreme Court heard opening arguments on the constitutionality of Indiana’s voter ID law, one of the most restrictive in the country. There are twenty-seven states with stricter identification requirements than mandated by the 2002 Help America Vote Act

. Indiana and two other states–Florida and Georgia–require voters to show a photo ID at the polls or else cast a provisional ballot that will be counted only if they can produce ID later. Similar laws were proposed in twenty-seven state legislatures last year.

As few as 1.2 percent and as many as10 percent of eligible voters lack a photo ID. One study found that one in eight registered voters did not have the identification necessary to vote in Indiana. The groups affected all trend Democratic: poor, minority, elderly, young and first-time voters are less likely to have valid IDs. Even the more conservative figure, 1.2 percent, would mean that about 2 million voters nationwide don’t have photo IDs, more than enough to paint a few statehouses red or swing a close national election.

CHILE’S TRUTH-TELLER:

The world of investigative journalism lost one of its most respected and effective figures January 13, when Patricia Verdugo

died at age 61 aftera long struggle with cancer. Verdugo dedicated her prolific and fearless careerto exposing massive human rights violations in Chile, which included the kidnapping, torture and murder of her father, a centrist union leader, in 1976. One of her many books, Los Zarpazos del Puma–publishedin English as Chile, Pinochet and the Caravan of Death–was a landmark bestseller in Chile. “I don’t offend,” Verdugo said when Pinochet’s officers interrogated her about another book she wrote, Burned Alive, on the murder by fire of Rodrigo Rojas, a teenage protester who had grown up in exile in Washington. “I report the factsas they happened.”   PETER KORNBLUH AND JOHN DINGES

AMERICA’S LIARS:

That the Bush Administration lied on the road to Iraq is an established fact. But just how frequently and outrageously it did so is now, finally,a matter of public record–thanks to the researchers at the Center for Public Integrity

, who have assembled a database of 935 false statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld et al. in the two years following 9/11. The database, available at www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard, is fully searchable. Yellowcake uranium? Judith Miller

? Niger documents? It’s all there,along with ample evidence that the truthwas out there too. As such, The War Card

is an indictment not just of the Bush Administration but also of the media that bought the lies–hook, line and sinker.