According to a CQ analysis of Senate votes on issues President Bush expressed “an explicit, stated opinion,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) voted with President Bush 100 percent of the time in 2008 and 95 percent of the time in 2007. Despite his record, McCain’s supporters try to deny that a McCain presidency would be a third Bush term in terms of pushing similar policies. Recently, the campaign has gone to great lengths to avoid being seen with Bush.
In an explosive new memoir, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes that the Bush administration engaged in a “political propaganda campaign” to sell the Iraq war and that it misled him on the Valerie Plame scandal. Today, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino slammed McClellan today as a “disgruntled” employee; former press secretary Ari Fleischer said he was “heartbroken.”
Other former White House officials started the smear campaign last night. Karl Rove, interviewed on Hannity and Colmes, asserted that McClellan sounded more like “a left-wing blogger” than himself. Former Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend, interviewed on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, called McClellan “self-serving” and “disingenuous.”
Watch it:
McClellan is experiencing the same automatic smear response the White House deploys against former allies who dare to criticize the administration, including former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan or former head of faith-based initiatives John DiIulio. Some other lowlights:
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill
WROTE: Bush planned in invade Iraq before 9/11 and was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people” during Cabinet meetings.
SMEAR: “We didn’t listen to [O’Neill’s] wacky ideas when he was in the White House, why should we start listening to him now?” — A senior official who informed Bush of O’Neill’s comments, 1/12/04
Former Campaign Chief Strategist Matthew Dowd
SAID: Bush has “become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in”; that “our leaders have to understand what they [the American public] want. They’re saying, ‘Get out of Iraq.’”
SMEAR: “He[base ']Äôs going through a lot of personal turmoil but also he has a son who is soon to be deployed to Iraq. That could only impact a parents[base ']Äô mind as they think through these issues.” — Dan Bartlett, 4/1/07
Former Counter-Terrorism Chief Richard Clarke
WROTE: Bush “ignored terrorism for months”; sought to tie 9/11 to Iraq immediately.
SMEAR: “He wanted to be the deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department after it was created. … He did not get that position, someone else was appointed to it. … His best friend is Rand Beers, who is the principal advisor to the Kerry campaign.” — Scott McClellan, while serving as press secretary, 3/22/04
According to the Politico, a “former colleague” said of McClellan: “It looks like a fairly pathetic attempt to restore his reputation by junking the only positive attribute people saw in him — loyalty.”
MILWAUKEE — Love it, hate it or laugh at it _ at least it's inexpensive.
Sales of Spam _ that much maligned meat _ are rising as consumers are turning more to lunch meats and other lower-cost foods to extend their already stretched food budgets.
What was once cheeky, silly and the subject of a musical (as Monty Python mocked the meat in a can), is now back on the table as people turn to the once-snubbed meat as costs rise, analysts say.
Food prices are increasing faster than they've risen since 1990, at 4 percent in the U.S. last year, according to the Agriculture Department. Many staples are rising even faster, with white bread up 13 percent last year, bacon up 7 percent and peanut butter up 9 percent.
There's no sign of a slowdown. Food inflation is running at an annualized rate of 6.1 percent as of April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The price of Spam is up too, with the average 12 oz. can costing about $2.62. That's an increase of 17 cents, or nearly 7 percent, from the same time last year. But it's not stopping sales, as the pork meat in a can seems like a good alternative to consumers.
Kimberly Quan, a stay-at-home mom of three who lives just outside San Francisco, has been feeding her family more Spam in the last six months as she tries to make her food budget go further.
She cooks meals like Spam fried rice and Spam sandwiches two or three times a month, up from once a month previously.
Pulling Spam from the shelf prevents last-minute grocery store trips and overspending, said Quan, 38, of Pleasanton, Calif.
"It's canned meat and it's in the cupboard and if everything else is gone from the fridge, it's there," she said.
Spam's maker, Hormel Foods Corp., reported last week that it saw strong sales of Spam in the second quarter, helping push up its profits 14 percent. According to sales information coming from Hormel, provided by The Nielsen Co., Spam sales were up 10.6 percent in the 12-week period ending May 3, compared to last year. In the last 24 weeks, sales were up nearly 9 percent.
The Austin, Minn.-based company, also known for the Jennie-O Turkey Store, has embarked on its first national advertising campaign for the 71-year-old brand in several years. They've credited the sales increase to that, along with new products like individually packaged "Spam Singles" slices. Also helping sales, executives said in an earnings conference call, was the fact that people looking to save money are skipping restaurant meals and eating more at home.
Spam sales are reaching across all spectrums, young and old and rich and poor, said Swen Neufeldt, Hormel's group product manager for the area that includes Spam. Many of the eaters are new to Spam, which was created in 1937 and gained fame as the meat that fed Allied troops during World War II.
"We have significantly increased our household penetration," Neufeldt said. "I think it's a lot of folks that are coming into the brand perhaps for the first time and coming back to the brand."
Hormel began its national advertising campaign, including print and television, for Spam in January. Neufeldt said such campaigns are planned in advance and it wasn't tied to perceived weakness in the economy.
Consumers are quick to realize that meats like Spam and other processed foods can be substituted for costlier cuts as a way of controlling costs, said Marcia Mogelonsky, senior research analyst with Mintel International in Chicago.
These products have protein and decent nutritional value, and they provide some variety to consumers who may be bored because they're eating more at home, she said.
"They might not have Spam at every single meal, but they might supplement a couple of meals," she said.
Consumers are also using more coupons and paying more attention to sales, doing anything they can to save money, she said. You may be able to cut back on your driving due to high gas prices, but you're not going to stop eating because of high food prices, she said.
Quan just bought a couple more cans of Spam on sale and some ramen, the instant noodle dish long a staple on college campuses. Her food and gas budgets are together, so she's had to cut back on food spending while the cost of gas increases. Her favorite Spam meal? Spam and macaroni and cheese. She doesn't skimp on nutrition, though. Quan serves her husband and three children _ ranging in age from 4 to 11 _ organic vegetables like salads, broccoli and carrots.
"It balances out," she said.
Other companies are seeing similar boosts in their lunch meats. Kraft Foods Inc. reported last month that subsidiary Oscar Mayer, which makes hot dogs, bacon and cold cuts, saw double-digit revenue growth in the previous quarter in its Deli Fresh cold cuts. The company, based in Madison, Wis., has recently introduced new products including family sized deli-meat packs and deli carved, which offers thicker slices of meat.
April Smith has been changing the way she feeds her family in Broken Arrow, Okla., to keep up with rising costs. This summer the 33-year-old administrative assistant will feed her two boys, ages 11 and 8, more ramen for lunch. Normally they eat the noodle soup on Saturdays, but since ramen costs about a dime per pack, they'll get it twice a week. Smith says she'll throw in some leftover frozen vegetables to make it more nutritious.
"Since it's cheap and easy, I figure why not let them eat it twice a week instead of once a week," Smith said.
In What Happened, Scott McClellan offers withering portraits of George Bush, Karl Rove, Condi Rice, and Scooter Libby, confirms that we went to war in Iraq under false pretenses, and that we were serially lied to about the outing of Valerie Plame.
Interesting stuff, Scott. But about five years too late.
McClellan told the Washington Post that he wrote the book to "provide an open and honest look at how things went off course and what can be learned from it." And he told Cox News Service, "My job was to advocate and defend [Bush's] policies and speak on his behalf. This is an opportunity for me now to share my own views and perspective on things."
Great. We need all the openness and honesty we can get. But it would have been a lot more helpful if he had taken the "opportunity" when it really mattered -- say before the 2004 election, when it could have potentially saved thousands of lives.
What Happened is page-turning reading. What Didn't Happen -- namely McClellan telling the truth in service to his country rather than in service to his book sales -- is a stomach-turning disappointment.
Take Two: The Rationale for Iraq is Even Worse Than We Thought
McClellan really lets it rip on Iraq. He says that Bush led a sophisticated "political propaganda campaign" to sell the war, was not "open and forthright on Iraq," managed the runup to war "in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option," "largely ignored or simply disregarded" contradictory intelligence on the war, and as the war went poorly responded by "never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising."
McClellan's scathing conclusion: "History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact. What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary."
Perhaps the most damning revelation regarding Iraq is McClellan's assertion that the real reason Bush wanted to invade Iraq was the "opportunity to create a legacy of greatness" by transforming the Middle East into a land of peace and brotherhood. Over 4,000 dead U.S. soldiers sacrificed for a neo-con wet dream of democratic dominoes across the region. How chilling is that?
McClellan also tosses in a pinch of Oedipal subtext: "The president had promised himself that he would accomplish what his father had failed to do by winning a second term in office. And that meant operating continually in campaign mode: never explaining, never apologizing, never retreating."
Such is the stuff foreign policy nightmares are made of.
"The national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. ... In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."
Great point, Scotty. We and many others made it back in 2003.
It's such a great point, it caused Karl Rove to act like something nefarious has happened to McClellan, transforming him from the lie-spouting sock puppet he has "known for a long time" into somebody who "sounds like a left-wing blogger." Have anyone specific in mind, Karl?
Take Four: Rove More Turd Blossom Than Boy Genius
Speaking of Rove, McClellan's tome continues the obliteration of the Rove mystique, reminding us what an out-and-out liar Rove was and is -- more than willing to assure McClellan that he wasn't involved in the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity when, in fact, he was up to his Turd Blossom in the sordid affair, having discussed Plame with Matt Cooper and Bob Novak in an effort to discredit Joe Wilson.
McClellan also makes it clear that the indelible, says-all-you-need-to-know-about-this-administration photo of Bush looking out the window of Air Force One during his too-busy-to-stop flyover of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina was a Rove special: "Karl was convinced we needed to do it -- and the president agreed."
Take Five: Truthiness in Government
Stephen Colbert satirized the Bush approach when he coined the concept of "truthiness": the truth we want, in our gut, to exist, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.
McClellan reveals how much the joke matched the reality, saying that Bush's "leadership style is based more on instinct than deep intellectual debate." Citing Bush's assertion that he honestly couldn't remember if he'd ever done cocaine, McClellan says he felt he "was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true."
But who needs reality when you have faith? Who needs truth when you have truthiness? As George Costanza put it on Seinfeld: "Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it."
A fantastic philosophy for a sit-com character. A disastrous philosophy for a sitting president.
Take Six: Truth in Government
According to McClellan, the Secret Service code name for the White House press secretary was "Matrix."
As any Keanu Reaves fan will tell you, the Matrix is a simulated reality used to pacify and subdue the human population in a dystopian future.
Who knew Secret Service agents have such an arch sense of humor?
Take Seven: Heckuva Job, Scotty!
On the day McClellan resigned as press secretary, Bush pictured a time down the road when he and his former aide would "be rocking on chairs in Texas, talking about the good old days and his time as the press secretary. And I can assure you, I will feel the same way then that I feel now, that I can say to Scott, 'Job well done.'"
Maybe not. Although, since, according to McClellan, Bush "has a way of falling back on the hazy memory to protect himself from potential political embarrassment," who knows?
I can already see the blurb on the back of the paperback edition of What Happened: "Heckuva job, Scotty!" - George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States
A retelling of Florida's 2000 election debacle condenses 36 days of aborted democracy into 2 hours of taught, heartbreaking political suspense, yet almost all lessons continue to be ignored...
I don't mind admitting it. For an Election Integrity journalist, HBO's Recount is pure pornography. Anticipation for Sunday's Memorial Day premiere showing was at the top of last weekend's holiday agenda. And the excitement grew still more late Friday when the good folks of PDA Florida made my week (my month? my year? my last four eight years?) by sending me an actual Palm Beach County "CES Votomatic III" voting booth, one which they tell me was among the 24 used in HBO's film itself.
Since I have a very difficult time paying the bills around here -- contrary to popular opinion, election integrity blogging isn't the windfall it might otherwise appear -- perhaps I'll consider the kind gift a reward for my too-many years on this beat. Though perhaps my consolation prize would be a better way to look at it.
When I first opened it, actual chads (HBO's film advises the plural of "chad" is actually "chad") from the 2000 election spilled out of the machine all over the office floor. The gods of democracy and the goddess of the butterfly ballot were taunting me. I rather enjoyed it. I learned long ago that I'd have little choice.
So it was with great anticipation that I sat down on Sunday night to watch the film as it premiered, along with the "Diebold Document Whistleblower" (and my new colleague at VelvetRevolution.us) Steven Heller and his wife, and Robert Carillo Cohen, one of the filmmakers of HBO's landmark documentary, the Emmy-nominated Hacking Democracy which enjoyed a re-airing earlier in the day, as the cable net set the stage for its newest democracy thriller/heart-breaker, Recount.
None of us, including Heller, who anticipated hating the fictionalized re-telling of America's crushing democratic abortion of 2000, would be disappointed.
As it turns out, HBO seems to have gotten just about all of it right from a factual standpoint. At least from the perspective of someone who followed those extraordinary 36 days incredibly closely both during and since, as the country hung in limbo as if, yes, dangling by a chad. There was quite a bit of nuance packed in to the two fast-paced hours, even down to the dirty machinations of Florida's corrupt and soulless Rep. Tom Feeney who played a minor, but key role in both the film and the stolen election.
Getting it right, or close to it, is apparently no small feat, since even the New York Times, the "paper of record", was unable to do so even in their review of the film, seven years after they covered the actual events, and six years after they correctly wrote, "If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards...Mr. Gore would have won."
Never mind history though, now for the Times it's the revisionistic: "Mr. Bush would have come out slightly ahead, even if all the votes counted throughout the state had been re-tallied." (For the record, the Times was right six years ago, here's the evidence [PDF], and wrong last week.)
While time has done few favors for the Times, the historical distance, and time-compression of the two hour film, managed to capture the thrilling, exhausting and disappointing back and forth, up and down roller coaster of the original saga -- while identifying the players who deserve much of the thanks for the failure to count every vote accurately, as per the voters' intent, or even at all -- in what was finally democracy lost.
Among the players targeted for failing to ensure the proper administration of democracy: then-Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Joe Lieberman, who the film identifies as having almost single-handedly allowed hundreds of military ballots to be counted for George W. Bush despite any evidence whatsoever that any of them were actually cast prior to the close of polls on November 7th, 2000.
While I had been aware of the Gore campaign foolishly rolling over to the cynical and opportunistic GOP attempts to bully them, by painting them as anti-troop -- based on their eventually-abandoned premise that all counted ballots should actually be legal ones -- I hadn't drawn a direct bead on Lieberman for blowing that call.
If the filmmakers were accurate in that depiction, then it looks like one of John McCain's biggest supporters in 2008 had been undermining Democratic White House ambitions long ago.
Given the film's familiar outcome, no small amount of credit is due the filmmakers who were able to succeed in having a room of jaded (understatement) election buffs still rooting for the good guys to pull it out this time around. (Without giving too much away, they didn't. Gore was still named the loser, despite having received more votes in Florida in 2000 than Bush [PDF], even after tens of thousands of legal minority voters were excluded from voting at all, merely because their names sounded something like others who had purportedly been convicted of a felony at one time or another.)
The result: a taught, often hilarious, consistently engaging, still-maddening and sick-making political thriller. History would thank you for watching it. Again and again.
While the cast was largely superb, and the casting spot-on, there was one character who we were glad to see named, but who was slightly miscast.
That would be our old friend, the entirely corrupt, then-boss of the FL House, Tom Feeney who was, as history, documentation and polygraph test tell us, just finishing up with an attempt at having a piece of vote-rigging software created by a South Florida computer firm where he worked as general counsel and registered lobbyist, even while serving as speaker of Florida's Legislature. And, oh yes, he had previously served as Jeb Bush's running-mate during his first attempt to become the Sunshine State's governor. So Feeney has been a long time Friend of the Bush's, and he was in the front lines to award the state, voters be damned, to his Bush pals come hell, high-water or even results showing Bush received fewer votes in the state.
The infamous sleaze of the man -- he's portrayed cahooting with the Bush campaign and steamrolling the Florida House into legislation that would seat Bush's electors no matter the decisions of either the FL or US Supreme Courts -- comes through in thuggish spades. He's shown doing what he does best (lying to the media), even if the actor who portrays him (Antoni Corone) is a large, burly fellow rather than the puny, pathetic little figure/tool of a man that Feeney actually is.
But that's rather small potatoes, as we appreciated the filmmakers having pulled out the accurate, if oft-overlooked, illustration of a man and a party willing to put power and politics far before country.
The rest of the cast was largely spot on. Laura Dern, in our opinion, actually underplayed the role of walking caricature, FL SoS Katherine Harris, who's seen awaking into her dream role as the ultimate GOP power broker able to hand the "victory" to Bush in Florida, while advised by the ever-present Republican lobbyist J.M. "Mac the Knife" Stipanovich (Bruce McGill), who somehow was able to obtain direct access to the inner-sanctum office of the SoS/Co-chair of Bush's Florida campaign.
That Dern actually underplayed the role -- despite having brought so much camp, the only thing missing was a tent, a sleeping bag and a flashlight -- is a point made strikingly clear during the film's closing credits as shots of the actual historical players, just portrayed in the film, flash by in dreadful reminder that what we just saw was, sadly, all too real. The actual Harris, far more camped-out and tramped-out then anyone could possibly play "credibly", is seen, on horseback, celebrating her rich post-election theft reward as a new U.S. Congresswoman (only to fall in disgrace just one Congressional session later), out-camping Dern hands down and breasts up.
While Steve Heller was unable to watch much of the film without it driving him crazy (yes, he and his wife would pay a great personal price for this administration's anti-democratic electioneering some years later, as he was forced to fend off felony charges for having been instrumental in revealing that Diebold Inc.'s powerful Republican law firm, Jones Day was instructing the voting machine company on how they might avoid their own criminal charges for lying to the state of California about having secretly and illegally installed uncertified hardware and software in 2004), his wife Michelle was enthralled by the breathless ups and downs of the contest as it played out in the film.
An election junkie herself during the ensuing years, given her husband's key role in successfully taking on the giants of Diebold and Jones Day in 2004, if only temporarily, she hadn't followed those infamous 36 days quite as closely when they actually played out. She had no idea, until watching the film, that it had been as insane as all of that. It was.
Yes, the very real back and forths and ups and downs in the real life saga were as impossibly stunning when they occurred in real time, perhaps even more so, as they come across during the two hour depiction. I can imagine no Indiana Jones film with as many gasp-inducing twists and turns as this story when it actually played out back in 2000, and even during its HBO re-telling. But remember, this is pornography to guys like me.
(Another Election Integrity junkie, Utah's Barbara Bellows TerraNova is a bit more critical, and not without reason, for a few important points the film either didn't get exactly right, or otherwise omitted entirely. Read her less laudatory take on Recount here.)
Hacking Democracy's Rob Cohen seemed similarly impressed after we watched it together. He was justifiably pleased that his all-to-real documentary film, which begins with the scuttled 2000 recount, may have helped pave the way at HBO for the Recount theatrical film.
Both films cover the -16,022 votes (that's negative 16,022 votes) that were discovered as tallied for (actually against) Al Gore on optical-scan voting systems in Volusia County, Florida. That negative number would lead to Gore's original concession on Election Night, followed by his infamous un-concession an hour or so later after the "error" was discovered.
More on that machine, and Volusia's continuing use of them, even still in 2008, was published by M.C. Moewe at Daytona News-Journal over the weekend. Moewe has been diligently trying to get to the bottom of that failure in Diebold's op-scan system for years. She writes in her article this weekend, which used Recount to help further the largely untold and almost wholly un-investigated story of those negatives votes in Volusia:
In Volusia County, the same "crazy" optical scan machines that delivered Gore's negative vote total are still in use.
The negative votes in 2000 could have been caused by four problems according to internal e-mails written by the machine's manufacturer, then called Global Election Systems. A corrupt memory card, an invalid read from a good card, corruption of memory or a card from an "un-authorized source."
Students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania won a court battle to keep the e-mails public.
If it was a memory card failure problem, those issues still plague elections here.
...
The agency charged by law to act as a clearinghouse for information on voting systems nationwide, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, said in November that it could not tell local election officials about the potential problem because a state or local agency had not yet told them.
They still have not been informed, said Commission spokesman Bryan Whitener.
"There is not the slightest bit of authority that this agency has to get information," Whitener said.
Whitener's comments, of course, are nonsense. There is nothing in the EAC's mandate from the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) -- which created the agency, in part, to serve as a clearinghouse for voting system problems -- that would disallow them from informing states about problems, such as the one that still remains on Diebold op-scan systems littered across the country.
Moewe further informs us, chillingly...
To figure out what happened [back in Volusia in 2000], the "second" memory card must be found, according to an e-mail dated Jan. 18, 2001, addressed from Talbot Iredale, who is still with Diebold. "I do know that there were two uploads from two different memory cards," according to the e-mail. "The second one is the one I believe caused the problem. They were uploaded on the same port aprox. 1 hour apart."
Moewe's husband, Rogers Cadenhead, a computer programmer who blogged quickly about his wife's article this weekend, states the obvious: "As a programmer, I've never understood how Diebold's voting software accepted negative votes and lowered a candidate's total. You'd think the logical impossibility would've caused the input to be rejected before it altered the course of American history."
"Logic" had little to do with anything in Florida 2000, of course. And that failure in Florida would, apparently, recommend those voting machines made by Global Election Systems (GES) to Diebold, Inc., who is similarly less than concerned about "logic" or security, it seems.
Hacking Democracy goes on to explain that Diebold, shortly after the 2000 election, would acquire GES, the company whose voting system "failed" that night in Volusia. Neither film is able to definitively explain exactly what happened to cause the miscount, which became the basis for Bush's cousin at Fox "News" calling the state for Dubya late on Election Night, followed quickly by Gore's "concession", and later, the argument made to the Supreme Court that Bush would be "irreparably harmed" if votes were allowed to be counted since the media had already declared him the "winner".
The documentary film proceeds to reveal that our system is just as vulnerable to hacking and/or error today -- and this coming November -- as it was back then. It also offers some rather startling evidence for what may have caused that 2000 "anomaly" which has, as Moewe detailed, never been explained by the state of Florida, Diebold, or anybody else.
So what will horrify you about the election system as seen in Recount, is only multiplied when Hacking Democracy informs you that little has changed...other than things becoming arguably much worse now than they were back then.
Machines similar or identical to the ones that failed on Election Night in Florida, and the ones that Tom Feeney (who is now a U.S. Congressman) allegedly attempted to arrange vote-stealing software for, would be deployed across the entire country thanks to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, legislation created by felonious Republican Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio and other jailed cronies, in purported reaction to the 2000 debacle.
Hacking Democracy's Cohen pointed out to me that when they first went to HBO with their documentary, they were told the cable behemoth stayed away from political films. But that was, perhaps, 20 or 30 Bush approval points ago.
While we're tens of thousands of dead bodies later, there will never be the apologies due from the Republicans (including those on the U.S. Supreme Court) who tragically put party and power over country in Florida in 2000, and the Democrats who allowed it to happen.
As Kevin Spacey's character Ron Klain, who headed the recount for Gore's team, says tearily into the phone near the end of Recount -- the actor, clearly informed by the 7 years of carnage that have occurred since then -- he "just couldn't get 'em counted, Mr. Vice President."
HBO could not have picked a more tragically appropriate day, Memorial Day, to premiere their new film. It will be airing constantly over the next several days and via OnDemand. Please try to see it, and share it with as many folks, Right, Left and Center, that you possibly can. You owe it to both history and the future. We all do.
Brad Friedman is an investigative journalist who covers a great deal of issues concerning Election Integrity. He is also the creator/editor of The BRAD BLOG.
Yes, women are born with the ability to belch with the best of them, as is regularly proved by little sisters the world over. But as any good sitcom writer (or older brother) can tell you, such behavior is rarely amusing to anyone other than the burper herself--and it gets less amusing the older she gets. Also not funny: When a woman lets one rip. Or hocks a loogie.
It takes but a brief stroll through the pages of Us Weekly to find evidence that we're on the verge of some kind of neo-cavewoman epidemic. There's comedian Sarah Silverman--essentially famous for being a female version of Andrew Dice Clay--pretending to crap her pants in a farting competition on her Comedy Central sitcom.
I never thought I'd see the day when the Holocaust would be used as a tool for "gotcha" politics. But over the last two days, we have seen John McCain's supporters at the Republican National Committee and at Fox News launch tasteless attacks on Barack Obama. In their attempt to score a few political points, they have diminished the experience of those who suffered and died at Buchenwald, and disrespected the service of the heroic American troops who liberated them.
It started yesterday when the RNC put out a statement slamming Obama for referring to Auschwitz as he related a family story on Memorial Day. Instead of merely asking for clarification, the RNC smeared Obama's "dubious claim," and suggested -- tongue in cheek -- that perhaps Obama's uncle "was serving in the Red Army." They went on to say that the story raised questions "about his judgment and his readiness to lead as commander in chief."
It turns out that Obama's great uncle -- the brother of the grandmother who largely raised him -- served in the 89th Infantry Division of the United States Army, which liberated Ohrdruf, part of Buchenwald. But astonishingly, that only served to fan the flames for those on the right who saw an attempt to use the heroic service of Obama's uncle against him. In their breathless attempt to damage Obama, Fox News has stooped to a level that is truly depressing.
This morning on the program Fox and Friends, one of the hosts said: "It wasn't Auschwitz. It was a labor camp called Buchenwald." Just in case the point was missed, she repeated. "It wasn't Auschwitz, it was a labor camp. You would think you would want to be as specific as possible if you are telling one of these anecdotes." Meanwhile, a news "crawl" at the bottom of the screen reinforced, in bold letters, that this was "a work camp, rather than an extermination camp."
Here are some facts about Buchenwald, which is one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps. At this "work camp," prisoners were often worked, starved, tortured, or beaten to death. Sometimes they were simply murdered. Roughly 250,000 people were imprisoned there between 1937 and 1945, many of them Jews. Over 50,000 people lost their lives.
At Nuremberg, the world was shocked to learn that some of Buchenwald's victims were skinned, and the human skin was then used to make lampshades, book covers, and other keepsakes. Buchenwald was also a site for the infamous Nazi "medical experiments" on prisoners, which were often nothing more than crude and horrific forms of torture.
To take just one anecdote about the "work" done at Buchenwald, prisoners had to build the camp road, and camp guards used to shoot those who were not carrying stones that were heavy enough. In the final days before liberation, some 10,000 prisoners from Auschwitz and Gross-Rossen were marched to Buchenwald, adding to the horrific scene that awaited American troops.
On April 4, 1945, Ohrdruf became the first Nazi concentration camp to be liberated by American forces. U.S. troops -- including the 89th Infantry Division -- found a scene that was vividly describe by the Eisenhower Memorial Commission: "The scene was an indescribable horror even to the combat-hardened troops who captured the camp. Bodies were piled throughout the camp. There was evidence everywhere of systematic butchery. Many of the mounds of dead bodies were still smoldering from failed attempts by the departing SS guards to burn them."
Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley would tour the camp in the days ahead. Eisenhower was so moved by the atrocities at this "work camp," that he wrote to his wife Mamie that it was "beyond the American mind of comprehend." He made both his own men and all of the citizens of the German town of Gotha tour the camp. He wanted the Americans to know the evil that they were fighting. He wanted German citizens to see what had been done in their name. After this tour, the Mayor of Gotha and his wife hanged themselves.
Many of the terrible photographs and videos that we have seen of the Holocaust come from these days. Eisenhower said that he wanted, "to give first-hand evidence if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'" The carefully documents atrocities at Buchenwald are thus part of the record that we use to confront anyone who would deny the horror of the Holocaust.
The men who liberated Buchenwald were heroes, plain and simple. That includes Barack Obama's great uncle. In their march across Europe, the 89th Infantry Division suffered over 1,000 casualties, with over 300 men killed. In their liberation of Buchenwald, they put an end to one of the most horrible concentration camps of the 20th century. We must honor them, just as we must remember each and every victim of the criminal Nazi regime.
To those who continue to use this story to damage Barack Obama, I have a simple question: have you no shame? You attempts to diminish his uncle's service for your own political gain says a lot more about you than it does about Barack Obama.
I don't mind admitting it. For an Election Integrity journalist, HBO's 
While the cast was largely superb, and the casting spot-on, there was one character who we were glad to see named, but who was slightly miscast.
The rest of the cast was largely spot on. Laura Dern, in our opinion, actually underplayed the role of walking caricature, FL SoS Katherine Harris, who's seen awaking into her dream role as the ultimate GOP power broker able to hand the "victory" to Bush in Florida, while advised by the ever-present Republican lobbyist J.M. "Mac the Knife" Stipanovich (Bruce McGill), who somehow was able to obtain direct access to the inner-sanctum office of the SoS/Co-chair of Bush's Florida campaign.
Hacking Democracy goes on to explain that Diebold, shortly after the 2000 election, would acquire GES, the company whose voting system "failed" that night in Volusia. Neither film is able to definitively explain exactly what happened to cause the miscount, which became the basis for Bush's cousin at Fox "News" calling the state for Dubya late on Election Night, followed quickly by Gore's "concession", and later, the argument made to the Supreme Court that Bush would be "irreparably harmed" if votes were allowed to be counted since the media had already declared him the "winner".
