COLUMBUS -- The Ohio presidential recount was officially terminated Tuesday, December 28.

But the end comes amidst bitter dispute over official certification of impossible voter turnout numbers, over the refusal of Ohio's Republican Supreme Court Chief Justice to recuse himself from crucial court challenges involving his own re-election campaign, over the Republican Secretary of State's refusal to show up for a noticed deposition, over apparent tampering with tabulation machines, over more than 100,000 provisional and machine-rejected ballots left uncounted, over major discrepancies in certified vote counts and turnout ratios, and over a wide range of unresolved disputes that continue to leave the true outcome of Ohio's presidential vote in serious doubt.

"That can't be what they really call them!" I exclaimed in amusement. But Lowell Finley, legal counsel for the Green/Libertarian recount effort in New Mexico, assured me that 'phantom vote' was indeed the common legal term for the puzzling phenomenon I had uncovered in looking at the state's canvass report. A phantom vote occurs when the number of votes recorded exceeds the number of ballots cast. Mathematically, phantom votes are merely the inverse of undervotes. Undervotes, which show up when there are less votes than ballots cast, can be accounted for more or less persuasively in one way or another but I have yet to come up with any acceptable explanation for phantoms. Much less, 2,087 of them statewide in New Mexico, just about one third of the margin of victory that determined the selection of that state's presidential electors.

There are scripts that qualify as national treasures, and Mel Brooks's THE PRODUCERS is high on the A-list.  It is the ultimate, over the top, gleefully politically incorrect, good-hearted, goof-ball, completely nutso musical tour de force that defies description.  Like a great moment in history, you just have to be there.

The version presented by the Broadway Series at the Ohio Theater---itself a national treasure---does this jewel justice.  The staging is beautiful, the acoustics fine, the cast a delight, the  costumes and sets all they should be.  In short, it's a wonderful evening in a setting that can't be beat. 

If you don't know the story, don't worry, there's not much to tell.  A down-on-his luck producer named Bialystock hooks up with a liberated accountant named Bloom to scam a show funded by horny old women.  They want it to fail, and wind up with a bomb called SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER that turns into a blitzkreig.  What more can be said?

AUSTIN, Texas -- Oh 2004, 2004, bird thou never wert. Was it really that horrible a year, or does it only seem that way?

Abu Ghraib, the endless trials anent Kobe Bryant and Scott Peterson, war in Iraq looking worse every day, Howard Dean eliminated over a whoop and a presidential race so devoid of joy that the high point was when the president claimed God speaks through him -- leaving us to contemplate the news that God doesn't know how to pronounce nuclear and has yet to master subject-verb agreement. "Performance enhancing drugs" in baseball. Ray Charles died. Karl Rove is Man of the Year. We're all overweight. Swift Boat Liars win the presidential race for Bush. Then just to round things off nicely, a terrible natural disaster. What a bummer.

But, look at it this way ... the Boston Red Sox won the championship. Eliot Spitzer is scaring the spit out of the insurance industry (check out those year-end bonuses on Wall Street, El). The Greek Olympics went well. Maybe we could end the payola by just having them in Greece every time. Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France for a record sixth time, a symbolic victory for cancer patients everywhere.

Ohio-based journalist Harvey Wasserman reviews the ongoing controversy surrounding the presidential vote in Ohio. Representative John Conyers - the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee - has called on The Associated Press and the five broadcast networks to turn over raw exit poll data collected on Election Day in order to investigate any discrepancies between the data and the certified election results. [includes rush transcript]

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