It began at around 11:18 p.m., when Fox News called the election and posted its gaudy graphic: “Barack Obama Re-elected President.” Brit Hume, Megyn Kelly and a host of pundits offered up brief postmortems. Even the house organ of the Republican Party had conceded.

But then, abruptly, at 11:25, the narrative changed dramatically. “I have great respect for our decision desk,” said Fox’s Chris Wallace, “and I can see that they’re very happy [at Obama headquarters] in Chicago, but I have to tell you that the Romney camp has real doubts by the call that has been made by us and by other networks.”

Enter Karl Rove — Machiavellian GOP party boss, master numbers cruncher, and Fox News analyst — to challenge the verdict that everyone had anxiously awaited. Wallace got right to the point and asked Rove if he thought Ohio was locked up for Obama.

“No, I don’t,” Rove said.

“We’ve got a quarter of the vote,” he explained. “Now remember, here is the thing about Ohio. A third of the vote or more is cast early and is won overwhelmingly by the Democrats.”

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At least 344 people in 18 states have been infected by the growing public health crisis and 25 have died so far.

But the epidemic may also play a role in the presidential campaign, now that state records reveal that a Massachusetts regulatory agency found that the New England Compounding Co., the pharmaceutical company tied to the epidemic, repeatedly failed to meet accepted standards in 2004 — but a reprimand was withdrawn by the Romney administration in apparent deference to the company’s business interests.

“It goes all the way up to Mitt Romney,” said Alyson Oliver, a Michigan attorney representing victims of the outbreak. According to Oliver, on at least six occasions, NECC was cited by authorities for failure to meet regulatory standards and almost subjected to a three-year probation. “It goes directly to the heart of what Romney says about regulation, ‘Hands off. Let the companies do their thing.’”

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As I report in "Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove’s Secret Kingdom of Power,"  in 2004 the presidential race ultimately came down to Ohio. Today, with the election neck and neck once again, observers are asking whether the election will rest on a variety of unusual tactics used by the GOP to game the system in favor of the Republicans.

Among the GOP techniques used in 2004, Democrats complained about the unequal distribution of voting machines, which resulted in students at liberal Kenyon College waiting in line for as long as 11 hours while conservative voters at evangelical schools zipped through with no lines at all. There were “caging” tactics to challenge the voter registrations of college students, African-Americans and others who vote heavily Democratic. Republican volunteers known as the Mighty Texas Task Force were widely accused of intimidating would-be Democrat voters.

And there were numerous anomalies that some attributed to a computerized “Man-in-the-Middle” attack made possible by the fact that Secretary of State’s office in Ohio used a firm with strong GOP ties, SmarTech, as the “fail-over” site to handle returns on election night.

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Reports of Hart Intercivic’s ties to Romney first surfaced in late September, in a blog post by Gerry Bello and Bob Fitrakis in the Free Press, an Ohio website that reported that a key investor in Hart was HIG Capital, seven of whose directors were former employees of Bain & Co., a consulting company of which Mitt Romney was once CEO. (Romney left the company in 1984 to co-found a spinoff company, Bain Capital.) HIG Capital announced its investment in Hart on July 6, 2011, just one month after Romney formally announced the launch of his presidential campaign.

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The ad, “Act of Terror,” which started airing on October 18, is being heralded by some on the right as a stinging rebuke to President Obama’s foreign policy because it insinuates that Obama intentionally misled the American people in the wake of the assassination of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Libya in September.

It is based on one of the most dramatic moments of the second Obama-Romney debate in which Mitt Romney suggests that Obama purposefully put forth a false narrative to bolster the impression that he has been successful in fighting terror. It is artfully edited to omit the fact that moderator Candy Crowley stopped Romney in midstream during the debate and confirmed that President Obama did in fact use the phrase “act of terror” in a speech on September 12, the day after the tragedy.

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The letter, coming less than a month before the upcoming presidential election, comes at a time when increasing attention is being given to the issue of voter suppression, a technique that played a key role in Karl Rove’s victorious 2004 campaign that reelected George Bush.

This time the operative in question is Nathan Sproul, who, with his company, Strategic Allied Consulting, has been accused of electoral misconduct and voter registration fraud. Sproul’s company allegedly collected fraudulent voter registration forms, some of which had the addresses of existing Democratic voters changed so that the validity of their registration might be challenged on Election Day. His company has been hired by the Republicans to work in seven battleground states—Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Ohio. In some states, he also appears to be working under the name Issue Advocacy Partners.

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After his devastatingly weak debate performance against Mitt Romney, Barack Obama got a bit of a reprieve when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released figures showing that 873, 000 more people had jobs in America than the previous month—the most jobs created since 1983—and that the unemployment rate had declined to 7.8 percent.

As everybody now knows, Jack Welch, the former chairman General Electric instantly tweeted, “Unbelievable jobs numbers...these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers.”  Welch has 1.3 million followers on Twitter, and, as Media Matters reported later in the day, Welch’s unsubstantiated charges were echoed by Rush Limbaugh at least seven conservative reporters on Fox News and elsewhere.

So why was one of the most iconic CEOs in American history alleging that the Obama administration had conspired to falsify the numbers just before the election?

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The source, who has firsthand knowledge of private, high-level conversations in the Romney camp that took place in Washington, D.C., last week, said that at various times the GOP strategists referred to their new operation as the Jimmy Carter Strategy or the October Surprise.

He added that they planned to release what they hoped would be “a bombshell” that would make Libya and Obama’s foreign policy a major issue in the campaign. “My understanding is that they have come up with evidence that the Obama administration had positive intelligence that there was going to be a terrorist attack on the intelligence.”

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That became obvious earlier this week, on Sept. 25, when Missouri senatorial candidate Todd Akin reaffirmed that he was staying in the race in defiance of Rove, who had demanded Akin’s withdrawal and yanked American Crossroads' millions from his campaign after Akin touted the prophylactic character of “legitimate rape.”

When pulling the super PAC dough didn’t faze the stubborn Missouri Tea Partyer, Rove went ballistic. “We should sink Todd Akin,” he declared, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. “If he’s found mysteriously murdered, don’t look for my whereabouts!”

Rove’s remarks did more than just reopen the schism between the GOP establishment he embodies and the Tea Party, which has begun to see him as a ruthless party boss. It also showed that the Republicans have another serious problem in addition to Mitt Romney’s disastrous candidacy: Karl Christian Rove.

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As a result, on December 16, 2000, three days after Al Gore conceded defeat, Colin Powell was flown to Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, where the president-elect announced his first cabinet appointment: Colin Powell as secretary of state. "He is a tower of strength and common sense," said Bush. "You find somebody like that, you have to hang on to them. I have found such a man."

Tears filled Bush's eyes. "I so admire Colin Powell," he later explained. "I love his story."

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The next morning, Bush and Graham went for a walk along the rugged Maine shore, past the Boony Wild Pool where Bush had skinny-dipped as a child. "I knew I was in the presence of a great man ..." Bush wrote. "He was like a magnet; I felt drawn to seek something different. He didn't lecture or admonish; he shared warmth and concern. Billy Graham didn't make you feel guilty; he made you feel loved."

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Right. It is highly unlikely, of course, that Moore's new movie will ever be shown in the repressive Saudi kingdom that is the guardian of Wahhabi Islam, but Tuesday a serious question arose as to exactly when and if it will be shown in the United States after the Walt Disney Co. announced that it was blocking distribution of Moore's film.

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The document that raises that question is dated Sept. 29, 1972, and notes that 1st Lt. George W. Bush was suspended from flying because of his "failure to accomplish [his] annual medical examination." Since he had just received hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of training as a jet fighter pilot, the fact that Bush let his medical certification lapse raises a troubling matter. Why did he allow himself to become ineligible to fly when he still had two years of service left? Given that random drug testing by the military had just started, some have suggested that Bush had not yet given up his partying ways and may have begged off because he had a substance abuse problem.

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The relationship between Baker and the elder Bush had been frayed as a result of the failed reelection campaign of 1992, but the two longtime friends had patched things up as the presidency of George W. Bush became increasingly probable. When he arrived in Austin, Texas, on Election Day, Baker went to Dick and Lynne Cheney's hotel suite to listen to the results. However, by the next morning, Wednesday, Nov. 8, Al Gore was contesting the Florida vote, so Baker was enlisted to lead the legal battle to win the presidency for Bush. As a result, both he and Cheney skipped the European hunting trip.

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But Al-Arian had unusual credentials for a Bush campaigner. Since 1995, as the founder and chairman of the board of World and Islam Enterprise (WISE), a Muslim think tank, Al-Arian had been under investigation by the FBI for his associations with Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian terrorist group. Al-Arian brought in Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, the No. 2 leader in Islamic Jihad, to be the director of WISE. A strong advocate of suicide bombings against Israel, Shallah was allegedly responsible for killing scores of Israelis in such attacks.

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By Craig Unger

March 12, 2004  |  If the Saudis had been happy with the presidency of George H.W. Bush -- and they were -- they must have been truly ecstatic, in the summer of 2000, that his son was the Republican candidate for president. Indeed, the relationship between the two dynasties had come a long way since the seventies when Saudi banking billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz and Salem bin Laden had flown halfway around the world to Texas to see James Bath, George W. Bush's old friend from decades before. Even bin Mahfouz's subsequent financing of the Houston skyscraper for James Baker's family bank or the Saudi bailout of Harken Energy that helped George W. Bush make his fortune were small potatoes compared with what had happened since.

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By Craig Unger

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