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PALM BEACH COUNTY, FL---Our news partners at the Sun Sentinel report: U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, who represents Broward and Palm Beach counties, plans to resign from Congress. He plans to announce his plans at a news conference Wednesday at 10 a.m. in Boca Raton. A Democratic source with knowledge of Wexler's plans said he is likely to take a public policy job that deals with the Middle East. Wexler, a senior member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, has long been involved in issues involving Israel and Turkey.

Wealthy Democratic political gadfly Connie Milstein, who calls herself "an ordinary Park Avenue matron," will now have to change her tune. Sources tells us the heiress to the Milstein real-estate fortune has just gone to contract to buy a Fifth Avenue duplex apartment with a $15.7 million asking price. Milstein made a name for herself in 2000 during the Bush-Gore election when she was caught on camera bribing homeless potential voters with cigarettes in exchange for a vote for Gore. She was eventually fined $5,000 for her spirited activism. Unlike the homeless, Ms. Milstein has signed on to take a...

COMMENTARY GOP Was the Real Victim in Fla. Vote By JOHN R. LOTT Jr. and JAMES K. GLASSMAN John R. Lott Jr. and James K. Glassman are resident fellows at the American Enterprise Institute. Lott has taught statistics and empirical methods at the University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania. November 12 2001 Last week, detailed statistics were released on voting in Florida during the presidential election. The data for the first time include all of the state's precincts, with not just information on race but on party affiliation. At first glance, the numbers confirm the disturbing claims, repeated often ...

Fresh from huffily telling an African student questioner that she, Hillary R. Clinton, was U.S. Secretary of State, not her husband, Clinton continues to set an example of how not to make friends and influence people in foreign lands, following the lead of her boss, President Barack Obama (D). Clemente Lisi of the NY Post reports on her most recent arrogant, defamation of the country she represents while uttering a slanderous lie. Clinton caused another firestorm during her trouble-plagued Africa tour last night by drawing comparisons between political corruption in Nigeria and President Bush's contested election win nine years ago...

NEW YORK - Leonardo DiCaprio is bringing out the big guns to get out the vote. Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Harrison Ford, Will Smith, Steven Spielberg and Justin Timberlake are among the celebrities starring in a new public service announcement produced by the actor, who also appears in the spot. The video shows the stars struggling to grasp the concept of using reverse psychology to get young people into voting booths... Finally, Ford says, “You know what? I can’t do it. It’s not true, I don’t believe it — 537 people decided the 2000 election, and you want me to...

It seems that the HBO fictional film Recount has triggered some horrible memories of vote suppression and fraud perpetrated by the evil Republicans. At least that is the allegation circulating in the leftwing blogosphere. One of the most specific of these allegations comes from the Democratic Underground where a DUer by the screen name of "Lorien" has made some rather shocking charges about betrayal by a high level Democrat campaign official and intimidation of minority voters by a racist cop in the Orlando FL area. Let us join Lorien as she lays out her charges in the DU thread, RECOUNT: My own Florida election day 2000 nightmare (emphasis...

I had intended to do no more than one DUFU edition based on the HBO fiction movie Recount which you can see in yesterday's DUmmie FUnnies EDITION. However, DUmmie Lorien has spun a Florida Recount fiction so egregious in its mendacity that I am not only DUFUing his/her THREAD titled, "RECOUNT: My own Florida election day 2000 nightmare" but I am also calling out DUmmie Lorien as a flat out LIAR. This DUmmie's entire thread post has the odor of fraud hanging all over it but the most blatant indication that it is a LIE is the accusation that...

After George W. Bush won Florida in 2000--O.K., I apologize to my Democrat readers for legitimizing Bush by using the word won. Also, I apologize to the Republicans for delegitimizing Bush by apologizing to the Democrats ... This is what Florida has done to us. Nearly eight years after Bush--um, "became President"? Can we agree on that?--the Florida recount still grips our politics, down to its semantics. To choose a verb is to take sides. Florida is not just a state but a state of mind: the widely held attitude that the game is rigged (by the courts, the media,...

I'm dancing on the top deck with a 71-year-old feminist and psychotherapist whom I've come to think of as the Twirler. We've spent two days attending seminars on The Nation magazine's Alaska cruise; we've talked about the Bush presidency and prison reform and single-payer health care. Now, at almost midnight, my fiercely intelligent and opinionated new friend is putting all the heady political talk behind her by bodily twirling. "If I start to get dizzy, then I twirl in the opposite direction," Charlotte tells me as the live band revs up its throbbing Motown beat. "I won't fall." "Good, please...

Nader is running. So says MSNBC LIVE

You can thank me (or throw eggs at me), not the miscounting in Florida, for Al Gore not being the president of the United States. You see, Tennessee did not vote for its favorite son in 2000. I was a voter in Tennessee in 2000. Had Gore been able to carry the state that knew him best, there would have been no need for recounts in Florida. Throughout the three weeks of recounting, the media descended upon Florida. No one came to Tennessee to ask us why we had not voted for our own former U.S. Senator. We did not...

As irrefutable evidence mounts that Nobel Laureate Al Gore's climate alarmism is about nothing other than lining his supposedly green pockets with green currency, manmade global warming skeptics around the world wonder when the former vice president's house of cards will collapse. Without question, if Gore were to lose the support of almost universally adoring Hollywoodans, the scam would implode quicker than a Democrat demanding a recount after losing a close election. As such, the following comments by actor and environmentalist Robert Redford, reported by the New Statesman last week, should bring hope to folks not buying the snake oil...

Former U.S./U.N. ambassador John Bolton returned to U.N. headquarters in NYC on Friday to launch his new book "Surrender Is Not An Option" (Threshold Editions- Simon & Schuster - 486 pgs.) The controversial U.S. diplomat quit his U.N. post in November 2006 when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee stalled a vote on his nomination. For the preceding 18 mos. Bolton served as UN ambassador under a temporary Congressional recess appointment that was to expire on January 1, 2007. With a Democratic Congress taking office and a rejected nomination likely, Bolton asked President Bush to withdraw his name rather than face...

Former vice president Al Gore's pronouncement that he is likely to endorse one of the Democratic candidates for president before the primary season is over has set off a slew of speculation about who his choice might be. Truth is, the courting of the "Goreacle" began many months ago. Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Gore huddled in Nashville in December, and Gore has also met with former senator John Edwards (N.C.). Gore and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) conferred as recently as last week. Not surprisingly, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) has not met with Gore. Neither has Sen. Joseph...

Declined rate of death caused by firearms, universal health care, and increased environmental awareness. Now those all sound like significant positives as opposed to unaffordable health care, high mortality rates in instances where guns are involved and a society of environmental incontinence - all three of which we struggle with today. William J. Cromie of the Harvard University Gazette reports that more than 30,000 people are killed, and another 65,000 are injured in incidents involving firearms each year. The number of people killed alone could fill the entire Doyt L. Perry Stadium as well as the Ice Arena here the...

(Get ready for the BIG comedy Webcast starting September 10. No, this doesn't involve ol' PJ talking into a mike. This is a project involving MANY. Get your political humor in digestible chunks twice weekly on the Web.) Perhaps the biggest MISTAKE of the first George Bush was nominating David Souter to the Supreme Court. At the time, everyone said that Souter's views were a complete mystery. Well, he hid them well at the time for a reason. As has been revealed in subsequent years on the Supreme Court, he is an out and out liberal. However, we can...

(Nashville, TN) -- Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander says his longtime associate Fred Thompson's bid for the Republican Presidential nomination is off to a tremendous start. He notes that Thompson is already second and third in most national polls, even though he has yet to officially enter the race. Thompson plans to formally announce his candidacy via webcast on Thursday. He's the fourth Tennessean since 1980 to make a run for the White House. Thompson's mentor, former Senator Howard Baker, sought the GOP nomination in 1980. Alexander and former Vice President Al Gore each ran twice without success. Gore won the...

As I sat by my window and staring out at the wonderful Washington, D.C., landscape, my office announced a phone call from Air Force One. Hmm. Been a while since someone called me from Air Force One or Two. But I knew it could be only one person: Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. Despite our many political and policy differences, I have gotten to know and respect Mr. Rove's political skills. And I have the scars to prove it. My first thought on hearing of the Rove resignation was that this is too good to be true. Mr. Rove...

Democrats have to be worried that when Karl Rive exits the White House in August, he'll take a month off and end up at the virtual elbow of Mayor Giuliani, Governor Romney, or Senator Thompson. They should be worried. Of course that's what he (and Ken Mehlman) will be doing. All-stars whose franchise can't play for the title often show up in the heat of the hunt. Politics is like sports in many ways. And Rove is the Tiger Woods of politics. (That would almost make Bob Shrum Greg Norman, but Norman won two majors. I need a better analogy...

Karl Rove, a political adviser to President George W. Bush and a lightning rod for anger among Democrats, will leave the White House at the end of this month, Rove told the Wall Street Journal. "I just think it's time," Rove said in an interview with the newspaper published on Monday. "There's always something that can keep you here, and as much as I'd like to be here, I've got to do this for the sake of my family."

"Impeach or else!" That was the headline that one liberal Web site ran over a recent interview with the antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, who has been demanding that President Bush and Vice President Cheney be chucked out of office. But the Bush administration isn't her only target. Sheehan is so frustrated with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- who declared impeachment "off the table" even before the Democrats took control of Congress -- that she is threatening to run against her. The speaker may think impeachment is off the table, but the I-word is being tossed about pretty freely in some...

Al Gore maintains that he won't seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 -- but his actions seem to belie his words. Gore has kept himself very much in the public eye as the White House races kicked into gear, providing plenty of evidence that he's eying another run for president: His award-winning global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" brought him back into the limelight last year. His new book "An Assault on Reason" is a best seller, and when he launched his national book tour in May, one observer said the event seemed "more like a campaign stop...

On the 23 of June, I had the opportunity to attend the Friends of Trees Conference in Barcelona. It has taken me a few weeks to digest all the information, which I, together with about 900 other people managed to inhale: The fumes of change, the organic revolution, the climate crisis, the need for solidarity and action. It was a most overwhelming task: and Al Gore's redundant joke of: "I used to be the next president of the United States," has hardly helped ease the intensity of the situation. The crowds clapped at every comment made by the speakers, who...

With Al Gore in the news for battling global warming and Al Gore 3rd in the news for getting toasted, my favorite NYPD detective recalled a story that helps explain how father and son each became a particular kind of loser. The story was told to the detective by a Secret Service agent some years back as they worked security for a dignitary visiting New York. Such details largely consist of just standing there for as long as 12 hours and the talk turned to a day when the Secret Service agent was assigned to then-Vice President Gore. The detective...

That Al Gore's 2000 presidential candidacy was treated unconscionably by most members of the mainstream media is not really arguable by sentient beings. The very idea that a candidate like George W. Bush — extremist, incompetent, unprepared for office, addicted to cronyism and incapable of admitting even the simplest human error — could have been held by so many reporters to be a better choice for President than the two-time Vice President, Senator, Representative and environment and nuclear weapons expert, to say nothing of his central role in the Clinton Administration's successful two-term presidency, would be laughable were its consequences...

Consumer advocate and 2000/2004 presidential candidate Ralph Nader has not ruled out another run in 2008, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Thursday it’s too early for him to make a decision. The man who many blame as spoiling the election for Al Gore in 2000 also said a potential third party candidacy by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg would not affect his decision to run. Earlier this week, Bloomberg, a lifelong Democrat until he ran for mayor in 2001, dropped his affiliation with the GOP — a move that increased speculation he is considering an independent presidential bid. Nader also...

John McCain and his Republican allies challenged the president on his own turf—and won. Now that the senator has gained momentum, can he really make the GOP grand again? My party has gone astray," John McCain says, busily signing books at Warwick's, a bookshop in La Jolla, California, late last year. Hundreds of people are lined up around the block to get a glimpse of the GOP's in-house reformer. He is hawking his fourth best-seller, Character Is Destiny, an anecdote-rich guide to idealism for young readers, and the senator teases the store clerk about books that aren't in proper piles,...

Former Vice President Al Gore is acting in a very "Nixonian" way, a top political expert says. Appearing Thursday night on CNN's "Glenn Beck" show, savvy Republican political pro Roger Stone told guest host Michael Smerconish that Gore carefully parses his words when he ducks the question about running for the presidency. "He's preserving his political options: 'I'm not planning to run; I have no plans to run; it is highly unlikely that I would run,'" Stone said. "Nowhere does he say, 'if nominated I won't run; if elected I won't serve.' And I don't think he's going to say...

As a man who long endured more than his share of nasty, unwarranted abuse from journalists, the philosophical Al Gore must be amused by the happy transformation of his clippings. The same press corps that once snarled for his blood is now smooching his boots -- an implicit apology that might be gratifying to the former future president, if only he were still naive enough to value their esteem. The sudden fashion for favorable comment won't influence any thoughtful American's opinion of Gore, but it should remind us of the dismal media performance that did such a terrible disservice to...

WASHINGTON - Three of the five Supreme Court justices who handed the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000 say they had no choice but to intervene in the Florida recount. Comments from Justice Anthony Kennedy and retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor are in a new book that was published this week. Justice Antonin Scalia made his remarks Tuesday at Iona College in New York. Scalia, answering questions after a speech, also said that critics of the 5-4 ruling in Bush v. Gore need to move on six years after the electoral drama of December 2000, when it seemed the...

WORST JOB IN THE WORLD Which circle of Hell would this be, exactly? For one's sins, one spends eternity as a Democratic spokesman with the duty of finding a rationale for why everything is terrible: According to one Democratic operative, the Dow's record close is "not an achievement but a failure." Robert Weiner, a Democratic strategist and former member of the Clinton administration, said people should remember it's taken nearly seven years for the Dow to break its previous record close, which happened on Jan. 14, 2000 - near the end of Bill Clinton's presidency... He said Tuesday's stock market...

If there's one thing Donovan Riley apparently learned during his time in Chicago, it was "Vote early and often." Riley, 69, the former CEO of the University of Illinois Medical Center and a former law professor at Loyola University, is running for a state senate seat in Milwaukee. On Nov. 7, 2000, the day of the big election between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Riley appeared at the polling place in Oconomowac, Wis., where he had registered to vote just the day before, voting records show. His ex-wife owned a home there. "Then he drove...

Single-issue people. They're out there... on every thread. No matter what the topic, they try to link it to their pet issue in some way, shape, or form. They are... The Thread Hijackersâ„¢. While little can be done to stop them, and it is probably best to ignore them, I find it much, much more fun to mock them. Sure, being passionate about an issue you care about is a good thing, but thread hijacking is annoying and, to be honest, turns off people who might otherwise agree with you. So, on to the mocking. I'd like to coin the...

Five years after the controversial 2000 presidential election, ex-President Jimmy Carter now says he's certain Al Gore defeated George W. Bush. "Well I would say that in the year 2000, the country failed abysmally in the presidential election process," Carter told a panel Monday at American University in Washington, D.C. "There's no doubt in my mind that Al Gore was elected president."

The 2000 election is still an open sore on the body politic. That was clear from the outraged reaction to my mention last week of what would have happened with a full statewide manual recount of Florida. This reaction seems to confuse three questions. One is what would have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court hadn't intervened; the answer is that unless the judge overseeing the recount had revised his order (which is a possibility), George W. Bush would still have been declared the winner. The second is what would have happened if there had been a full, statewide manual...

Thoughtful Democrats — the rarest birds on the endangered species list — might want to ponder this: "Another hanging chad has dropped. His name is John G. Roberts Jr., and he undoubtedly will turn out to be opposed to abortion rights, affirmative action, an expansive view of federal powers and a reading of the Constitution that takes a properly suspicious view of the state's embrace of religion. You hang enough chads, and you get to change the Supreme Court." That's not moveon.org, or the wilder shores of the Internet. That's Richard Cohen, big-time columnist in that bastion of mainstream media,...

<p>We know Bush won again because eight major news organizations pooled their resources to find out what would have happened if the Supreme Court had not intervened and stopped an ill-conceived statewide recount of presidential votes in Florida last December. I say ill-conceived because the Florida Supreme Court ordered the recount, while inviting abuse and discord by refusing to set counting criteria -- even after Palm Beach County election officials had changed their definition of a valid vote three times.</p>

Dateline, Election 2000 "Pre-season" WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Political analysts inside the Beltway remain unimpressed with a potential presidential run by Texas Governor George W. Bush. The younger Bush, son of former President George Bush, remains popular in Texas but is seen as unlikely to maintain a serious, larger campaign throughout the country. A potential race by Governor Bush against Vice President Al Gore is seen as a severe mismatch. Gore's strengths lie in the domestic issues that are the primary concern of American voters. "The Vice President carries all of the policy strengths of Bill Clinton, but none of the...

Someone with better access to Florida's election data that I am can now settle a question leftover from the 2000 Election. As you'll recall, the tv networks called Florida for Gore before the polls had even closed in the Central Time Zone part of the state, depressing the amount of votes Bush likely would have received. Now that the 2004 Election is over, it's possible to extrapolate how much that early call may have cost Bush. 1. Take the Florida counties that are in the Central Time Zone. Count the total number of votes cast in the presidential elections in...

Sometimes a decision made in the heat of partisan battle has reverberations for years to come. One such decision was the one of Al Gore's campaign to selectively challenge the results of the 2000 election in Florida by demanding hand counts of votes cast in three counties -- Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. The latter two produce huge majorities for Democratic candidates, and the election officials in charge of the hand counts were Democrats. In other words, Gore sought new counts only in areas where he was likely to gain votes and would not take the risk of a statewide...

The most famous woman in Palm Beach County drives a big, fancy 2004 Lincoln Town Car. But not because she's flashy. In almost every way, Theresa LePore is the opposite of flashy. She speaks softly, deliberately, and rarely about herself. She never wears red. She dutifully works, works, works, in a job that's about as glamorous as an old Honda, for 100-plus hours a week, seven days a week. Her demeanor, her wardrobe, her shy smile — all those outward signs say: Don't notice me. But, of course, people do notice her. All around the world, people know her face....

Anti-American attitudes are a daily fact of life in Great White NorthBy NORA JACOBSON I moved to Canada after the 2000 election. Although I did it mainly for career reasons — I got a job whose description read as though it had been written precisely for my rather quirky background and interests — at the time I found it gratifying to joke that I was leaving the United States because of George W. Bush. It felt fine to think of myself as someone who was actually going to make good on the standard election-year threat to leave the country. Also,...

Sam Rayburn, the great 20th-century Democratic speaker of the House, was noted for a line he used on the more obtuse members of his party who failed to learn the lesson of a political setback. "There's no education in the second kick of a mule," he would say. Wise as that advice might have been for individual legislators, the opposite is true when it comes to Mr. Rayburn's party. Democrats begin to learn their lessons only after they have been beaten twice.

Every election year we are told that this is the most important election in our lifetime. Usually this can be laughed off as political hyperbole, but sometimes it is true. The election of 1860 certainly comes to mind as an election of monumental impact on this Nation. The election of Woodrow Wilson saw the end of American isolationism, while the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 brought the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Now we are facing an election of unprecedented importance; the future of the United States as a world leader and the survival of Western...

John F. Kerry has a long history of opposing the use of American military force to defend our vital interests. But the presidential campaign has so far virtually ignored his shameful behavior in the 1980s, when President Reagan was defeating Communism not only in Europe, but also much closer to home. President Reagan took office in January, 1981. The release of the American hostages by Iran resolved only one of the many problems he inherited from the Carter Administration. Soviet troops had invaded Afghanistan. Marxist rebels had seized the nation of Angola in Africa. In Central America, Marxist guerrillas were...

Bush Wins Election--If Kerry Doesn't Cheat Written by Isaiah Sterrett Thursday, October 28, 2004 Next Tuesday, when millions of Americans make a choice that will forever affect America and the world, George W. Bush will be reelected--assuming that Sen. Kerry and his thugs don’t attempt to rip off the people by cheating. This is not the worry of an alarmist partisan looking for excuses; this is the worry of someone who was alive four years ago. The Supreme Court can be a pretty loopy bunch, especially since Clinton added Ginsburg. But in 2000, the justices broke precedent and did their...

ALBERT GORE III and John Forbes Kerry, two of America’s most blue-blooded and buttoned-up white politicians, swayed awkwardly to gospel music and preached a message of black revenge in churches across Florida yesterday, imploring African-Americans to turn out in their droves on election day and defeat President Bush. Mr Gore, returning to the state that destroyed his presidential hopes four years ago after its bitterly disputed 36-day recount drama, delivered a gospel of civil rights and anger, acutely aware that without a massive turnout from African-American voters on November 2, Mr Kerry has virtually no chance of defeating President Bush....

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — He was introduced as the president-elect, or more simply the president. He sat stoically as he was described as the man who would be in the White House today had the Republicans not "spit on the graves'' of African American civil rights leaders. But in a potential hothouse of anger, Al Gore yesterday stood before the congregation at the Abyssinia Missionary Baptist Church and told angry black voters to channel their frustration constructively so they will never be disenfranchised again. "Love thy neighbour,'' said Gore, during a highly symbolic swing through Florida nine days before the...

At the very end of some of those wonderful old Sci-fi films of the fifties, just when you expected to read "The End" on the screen, the words "The Beginning" would eerily appear instead and you'd get the distinct impression that the scary nightmare you'd been watching for the last ninety minutes was not yet over. Well, our presidential elections are sort of like that now. You think it's almost over, you think it's the end .. But it's only the beginning. Ooooo!

A sharp-eyed Kerry Spot reader notices that MSNBC is stating the polls close in Florida at 7 pm, EST. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. The polls in eastern Florida close then. The polls in the panhandle are open another hour. Of course, GOP officials say this is what cost Bush a big lead in Florida in 2000. West Florida Kerry Spot readers, you must, must, must do everything possible to make sure your friends and neighbors, no matter who they are voting for, know when the polls actually close. I have no faith in the "good intentions" of the networks....