Thank you for your service ahusser! 

It gets 4 stars partly because it's Liberal movie critics who scored it that way.  Also, after it won Oscars it was destined to forever be highly rated.  Of course, it won Oscars because Liberal Hollywood voted for it to begin with.  At some point the whole thing becomes circular logic.

RRAM Tough! 

Just curious, were you a law student of Bill Clinton's, just like Susan Webber Wright?

While it may be true that neither Clinton or Gore did not press claims, that's because Clinton wasn't running in 2000.

However, it is a well known reality that one of Gore's Florida lawyers, Mark Herron, sent out a 5 page memo advocating challenging military ballots.

I'll let someone else finish the story:

"Gore’s atttempt to invalidate the votes of America’s servicemen and women was part of a strategy outlined in a memo that fell into the hands of GOP lawyers. The memo outlined the steps Gore’s lawyers were to take in challenging absentee military ballots.

One of Bush’s lawyers was a Panhandle attorney named Ed Fleming. He had been recruited to join the small army of legal experts to help stave off Gore’s attempt to reverse the election results. "There was a rumor that there was going to be concerted, organized opposition to try to keep out the military votes, and so they asked me if I would monitor the situation here in northwest Florida," Fleming told Sammon. "I knew the county attorneys around here, so I called Tom Dannheisser, who´s the county attorney in Santa Rosa County."

Dannheisser told Flemming that he had gotten his hands on a five-page memo from a Democrat lawyer dated that day that spelled out the Gore team’s shoddy game plan to disqualify military ballots. It was written by Mark Herron, a lawyer working for Gore in the postelection battle.

"Herron distributed what obviously was intended to be a confidential memo to their lawyers, to give them reasons to challenge the ballots," Fleming told Sammon. "But one of the attorneys that they hired locally to do that said, 'Well, gee, this seems good. I´ll just send it to the county attorney in advance, so he´ll know what points I´m going to make at the canvassing board meeting.´

"So he sent it to the county attorney of Santa Rosa. It was one of the dumber lawyers that had been retained by the Florida Democratic Party," Fleming said.

After having determined that the memo was a public record by virtue of having been sent to Dannheisser’s in his capacity as county attorney, Flemming carefully read what he realized was the Gore team’s "smoking gun."

The memo instructed Democrat lawyers to make "pettifogging objections” to military ballots, especially those not postmarked.

"I sent the memo up to Tallahassee that afternoon, and it all started from there," Fleming recalls with a chuckle. Upon receiving the Herron memo, the Bush command center in Tallahassee faxed it to Republican lawyers in all 67 Florida counties, Sammon wrote. The military ballots were to be publicly tallied the next day by canvassing boards across the state.

The main battlegound was Duval County, home to more military families than any other county in Florida. Duval had more absentee ballots from overseas than any other county - 618 of 3,500 cast statewide. Five Gore lawyers showed up at the elections office at 9 a.m. Friday to disqualify as many of those ballots as possible.

Tom Bishop, one of the Republican lawyers, was incensed as he watched the Democrats, armed with the smoking-gun memo, blatantly go about disqualify large numbers of military ballots.

"They had their little cheat sheet they were using, and they objected on every single possible ground they could, no matter how spurious," Bishop told Sammon. "It was so bad that there was rolling of the eyes by even some of the Democrats there who were watching their lawyers work."

Before Nov. 17, the Duval supervisor of elections compared signatures on ballot envelopes against signature cards on file. He could find only two absentee ballots that could not be included because the signatures did not match.

"But now the Democrats insisted that they be allowed to compare all signatures, one by one. For seven tedious hours, they bitterly argued that signatures on more than 100 envelopes did not precisely match the signature cards - although some envelopes had been signed by sailors on rolling seas in hostile situations,” Sammon wrote.

"You could clearly tell it was the same person´s signature, but they would object because it didn´t have a certain curlicue or didn´t have a certain twist or it was smaller," Bishop told him.

The Democrat lawyers sought to disqualify military ballots that had no overseas postmark on the grounds that some voters might have marked their ballots a day or two after the election and then mailed them in.

"But the Gore lawyers took this argument to absurd lengths by actually disqualifying ballots received before Nov. 7. One belonged to a sailor named John Russell, whose vote was unceremoniously thrown out.”

"Our goal was to challenge every vote that didn´t appear legitimate," says Mike Langton, Gore campaign chairman for northeast Florida.

By 7 p.m., the Democrats protested against 147 absentee ballots. The canvassing board agreed to hear formal arguments from the Gore and Bush camps.

A full 19 hours after it began, the nightmarish battle over Duval´s military ballots came to an end. When the canvassing board announced that the ballots of 149 soldiers, sailors and airmen had been disqualified, a pair of jubilant Gore lawyers actually exchanged high-fives for their victory against America’s service personnel.

"A Republican, visibly shaken by this sight, demanded to know how they could celebrate the disenfranchisement of U.S. military personnel risking their lives around the world. One of the Gore lawyers glibly replied: ‘A win´s a win.’" Statewide, Gore’s henchmen had been able to disqualify 1,420 ballots statewide - or more than 40 percent of the 3,500 cast.

Want more?

"Democratic attorneys were operating under the instruction of Mark Herron, a Tallahassee lawyer retained by the Democrats the -night of the election.

Bob Sweat, the elections supervisor in Manatee County, described the scene at the canvassing board meeting that Friday. "We had some hotshot Democrat attorney from out of the state. He protested everything, it didn't matter. He almost protested-our breathing."

St. Petersburg resident Ronald Ray, a soldier in Vietnam, and one of the 151 living recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor, decried this concerted effort. Ray, who was born Dec. 7, 1941, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, entered the Army in 1966. He received the Medal of Honor for organizing a reaction force to a Vietcong assault, directing his troops to safety, under heavy fire, while sustaining serious wounds.

Ray twice provided cover for soldiers and medics who were under assault by throwing grenades at the enemy. When an enemy grenade landed near two of his soldiers, Ray dove in front of it, using.his body to shield his men. After the grenade tore up his legs and feet, Ray was shot in his legs.

Still, he led his men to safety before allowing medics to attend to him.

In an interview with HUMAN EVENTS, Ray said that Vice President Gore "is doing everything he can to get elected right now," and that includes a systematic effort to reject military votes. "Politics is okay up to a point, but when you start not counting military overseas votes, that's when you step in my court. and that's where I will definitely come down hard against it."

Ray watched the absentee ballot. canvassing in Manatee County, where, he said, Democratic attorneys "were fighting every one of those ballots." He said that a number of the ballots were postmarked from Hampton Roads, Va. "Now everyone with one eye and half a brain knows, those are votes that come off a ship."

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"Herron's memo included the various grounds for rejecting overseas ballots, but did not cite,,a conflicting federal law. Rep. Steve Buyer (R.-- Ind.) a Vietnam veteran who is chairman of the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, has sent out a "Dear Colleagues" letter suggesting that Florida might be disenfranchising overseas and military voters in violation of federal law.

In an interview with HUMAN EVENTS, Buyer said that Herron's memo misrepresented the law and "confused the boards with regard to the law." Buyer argued that the 1965 Voting Rights Act subordinated state election law to federal laws, and that the 1986 Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) eliminates the requirement for an overseas postmark.

Federal law does not require a postmark for military mail and specifies that no postage is needed for military absentee ballots. Accordingly, much military mail does not receive a postmark until it reaches the United States, and some is never postmarked at all. Buyer argues that a strict interpretation of the relevant laws would require counties to accept military ballots with domestic or missing postmarks.

Gore surrogates originally claimed that Herron was an independent lawyer. The St. Petersburg Times, however, reported on November 17, that the DNC called Herron to hire him at 4 a.m. Wednesday, November 8.

Herron's former law firm-Akermann, Senterfitt-- officially holds that Herron resigned on November 7, and the forwarding number they gave HUMAN EVENTS was a Democratic headquarters in Florida. A Democratic spokesman confirmed that "the Democratic Party has retained Mark Herron."

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"Democrats nonetheless foreswore Herron's efforts, and Sen. Joe Lieberman said on Sunday, November 19: "Vice President Gore and I would never authorize and not tolerate a strategy that was aimed at disqualifying military ballots. In fact, we think that the ballots, both the absentee ballots and the ones that are being hand counted in the three counties in South Florida now, deserve the benefit of the doubt. The whole idea here is to let the people express their will when they vote."

Buyer and former Sen. Bob Dole challenged Lieberman and Gore to act on their words and to encourage the canvassing boards to accept many of the disputed ballots. Ray says that, instead, Democratic lawyers continued to challenge absentee ballots all day Sunday in Manatee County."

we must remember that there are many people trained in the 'Clinton triangulation scheme' which allows for being on boths sides of every issue.

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