INTERNET IS PROVING BEST OF FACTUAL ELECTION COVERAGE

This column will refrain for now from commenting on the brazen, ongoing attempts in Florida to steal the presidential election. Suffice it to say that with the single exception of Fox News, you aren't getting the whole story from the broadcast media, and too often you aren't getting it from the great broadsheet newspapers of our country.

This partly serves to explain why more and more Americans are turning to the Internet for factual coverage and pungent commentary that help illuminate these historic developments. In this space we have previously commended to you The Wall Street Journal's indispensable new Web site:

OpinionJournal.com.

There you will find, among much other fine stuff, the incomparable columns of Peggy Noonan. Last week on Monday Night Football, amazingly, a fleeting reference was made by announcers to Noonan's work. Lead play-by-play man Al Michaels waxed eloquent, saying twice that Noonan's writing on the Journal's editorial page and Web site "just gives me goosebumps!"

Other Web sites you should bookmark on your computer for up-to-the-minute coverage and commentary include Realclearpolitics.com, Nationalreview.com, Newsmax.com and FreeRepublic.com. Don't forget the indispensable Drudge Report at drudgereport.com. And then there's RushLimbaugh.com, the terrific new entry that Nielsen reports is drawing more hits than the CBS, ABC and NBC Web sites put together, threatening to blow away all the old media standbys.

As Mao Tse Tung used to say, in a markedly different context, "Let a thousand flowers bloom!"

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Let's have the judge read the law: Judge Bill Hopkins of Marble Hill took me to task last week in a letter to the editor for my comment, in an offhand statement to a press inquiry, that I couldn't see a basis in the Constitution for the early appointment of Lt. Gov.-elect Joe Maxwell to that post prior to his scheduled Jan. 3 swearing-in. Judge Hopkins cited us to the familiar constitutional provision granting to the governor the general appointment power to fill vacancies.

In a sense I certainly did misspeak. What I should have relied on, and what I now commend to the good judge, isn't the Constitution, but rather Section 105.030 of the Revised Statutes of Missouri. There you find not a general statement, but an explicit one making clear that our laws specifically omit the lieutenant governor from the lists of offices for which vacancies are to be filled by gubernatorial appointment. Had the judge read the statute, here is what he would have found, in pertinent part:

105.030. Vacancies, how filled. Whenever any vacancy, caused in any manner or by any means whatsoever, occurs or exists in any state or county office originally filled by election of the people, other than in the offices of lieutenant governor, state senator or state representative, sheriff, or recorder of deeds in the city of St. Louis, shall be filled by appointment by the governor ... .

Read it again, carefully, judge. Looks like an express statutory prohibition to me. The law says the governor generally does have the appointment power to fill vacancies, except in the cases listed, first among which is the post to which Maxwell has been appointed. The appointment of former Senator Maxwell to the post of lieutenant governor is unlawful.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.