How many lawyers does it take to screw in the next President? From hanging chads to a hanging judge, the Bush-Gore ballot battle in Florida is now a courtroom drama with the nation and the world on jury duty. At last count there are nine separate lawsuits and hundreds of wingtip shoes pounding the pavement in the Sunshine state. Democratic and Republican dream teams are squaring off over practices and procedures in Florida’s peculiar election statutes, and indignant citizens are getting into the game with high-priced talent of their own.

The Gore campaign’s fleet of legal eagles now includes David Boies, the anti-trust powerhouse who successfully argued the Microsoft monopoly case for the government. He’s on board to bust the Bush family trust in Florida, and close the narrow vote gap through litigation, if necessary. Will lawyers be the ultimate arbiters of this election? We’re looking for order in the court this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jeffrey Rosen, Georgetown University Law Professor

Alan Dershowitz, Harvard University Law Professor

Einer Elhauge, Harvard Law Professor

and Viet Dinh, Georgetown Law Professor

Ken Goldberg’s Tele-Garden in Linz, Austria is a community flower bed bursting with Marigolds, Petunias and Phlox. It’s the shared project of thousands of tele-gardeners around the world who’ve never seen their handiwork except on the Tele-Garden web page. It’s a robot, in fact, that planted and watered the seeds in this particular garden; and it’s a souped-up web-cam that projects the results back to the gardeners, who dutifully check in to count their blossoms and squirt water on them with just the click of a mouse.

It’s not a virtual garden since the flowers are real; it’s a tele-present garden, physically remote but real by proxy. It’s a philosophical project that helps Ken Goldberg think about what is, or isn’t authentic in web world: what we know, and what we’re responsible for, how if at all we’re related to other tele-gardeners we choose to chat with about how our garden grow. Ken Goldberg and his “Robot in the Garden” are this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ken Goldberg, Engineer, Artist, Philosopher, and Professor of Engineering at University of California Berkeley.

Add now to the Florida election mystery – beyond the butterfly ballots and the chad comedy in Palm Beach County, beyond the FBI investigation into reports of pre-punched George Bush ballots in black and Jewish sections of Miami, beyond the stories of black voters’ names being disappeared from the electoral rolls and accounts of missing ballot boxes and pre-cooked absentee ballots, add to all this Sunshine state politics.

This is the state, after all, that brought us the Elian drama. From Cuban Miami to the Gold Coast, from citrus country and Disneyland to the Deep South Panhandle and the Redneck Riviera, Florida has a history now of racial and ethnic tension and election fraud earned through voters like Manual Yip. Mr. Yip died in 1993 at age 75; he was buried in a paupers’ grave, but still managed somehow to vote in Miami’s mayoral election three years ago. Getting to know Florida is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Lance Dehaven-Smith, professor of Public Policy at Florida State University and co-author of the Almanac of Florida Politics 2000

Lucy Morgan, reporter for the St. Petersburg Times

Tom Fiedler, Editorial page Editor of the Miami Herald

Edna Buchanan, crime reporter for the Miami Herald.

As the map of Europe was redrawn in the 1990s bewteen Paris and St. Petersburg, Timothy Garton Ash came to think of himself as a kind of historian of the present. Which is to say he’s a journalist with an eye for the old threads of Europe’s past in its unruly politics today. Timothy Garton Ash’s Europe is not just a physical place with more than 50 languages and 35 states; it’s an idea and ideal, obsessed with its own meaning.

Ash has chronicled the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the Brussels bureaucrats fixated on monetary union, the expansion of NATO, and America’s uneasy involvement in European affairs. A decade of unnecessary violence in Eastern Europe, he says, killed more people than the Cold War, but the trauma of that time could just lead to the construction of a stronger Europe. A living history of Europe is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Timothy Garton Ash, Author.

The post-campaign campaign is a fight over whose controlling legal authority — Al Gore’s or George W. Bush’s — will win the Florida ballot battle. After tweaking the Gore campaign last week about starting lawsuits over voting irregularities in Florida, the Bush camp yesterday sued to stop a manual recount of the Palm Beach county ballots. Former Secretary of State James Baker, Bush’s man on the Florida case, insists on the “precision machinery” of the automated recount, but he’ll take a new manual recount that will give Bush a four vote lead in New Mexico.

And votes in other close states like Iowa, Wisconsin and Oregon could be contested now too. Meanwhile, George W. Bush is holed up in the oval office of the Texas Governor’s mansion and Al Gore is in leisure mode, but their lawyers have hit the Florida beach running. The continuing story of the ballot bungle of 2000 is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Steve Stark, NPR commentator

Akhil-Amar, Professor of Constitutional law at Yale University

John Fund, reporter for the Wall Street Journal

and Kevin Phillips, political writer and author of “The Cousins’ War”.

We’re living through an age of massive media paradox, Robert McChesney warns us. On one hand, Internet technology puts customized information, vast research engines, in the hands of any user; the machinery is here to make every man, woman and child a broadcaster to the whole world. On the other hand, sitting atop this golden web, is a shorter and shorter list of unimaginably rich global media empires-like AOL/Time-Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation and AT&T–delivering a less and less diversified menu of news and entertainment to the peoples of the world.

It’s that big media that’s winning, McChesney says, and that any sane citizen has to worry about: the giantism and hypercommercialism and then the denigration of journalism and public service. Concentration of media, in his equation, is a poison pill for Democracy. Robert McChesney’s alarm bell for the Information Age is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Robert McChesney, author of “Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times.”

How about calling in UN Observers to monitor the Florida election recount? In any other country in the world you’d call it a coup when the popular choice is undone by the rejection of nineteen thousand mysterious ballots. Not to mention that it happened in his opponent’s brother’s state. Here we call it a representative democracy and the way our electoral system works. But what’s the true test of authenticity and legitimacy in an election like this one where the next president could govern with a permanent asterisk, and when he may not be empowered to do anything more than give Rose garden tours and attend state funerals?

Maybe an illegitimate president is the natural sequel to an unnatural sex scandal in the Oval office, and maybe the price we’ll have to pay is harassment and ridicule from talk radio shock jocks and a nation of nation of angry voters. The curiouser and curiouser election of 2000 is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jeffrey Rosen, writer on legal affairs for the New Yorker and the New Republic and author of “The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America”

Ralph Nader, Green Party Presidential Candidate

Walter Dean Burnham.

Toots Thielemans sticks out in the jazz crowd–and not just because his principal instrument is the harmonica, which belongs to folk and country music and is as rare as bagpipes in jazz. He’s a Belgian man who grew up on French tunes of the 1930’s; he’s an accidental musician who had planned to be a math teacher until he heard Louis Armstrong in 1942 and worked up his own sound playing for American GIs in Europe.

The postwar jazz innovators–Charlie Parker, Bill Evans, Miles Davis, George Shearing–embraced Toots Thielemans’ bop-friendly lyricism, but he was and remained a star from another galaxy: he’s a whistler on his biggest hit, the jazz waltz “Bluesette”; he’s as familiar to Sesame Street kids as to jazz buffs; and a musician of a certain unjazzy melancholy, “between a smile and a tear,” as he says, “who goes for the heart,” Quincy Jones says, “and makes you cry.” Toots Thielesman is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Toots Thielemans, musician

Is it too early to ask: did both Al Gore and George W. Bush lose Election 2000? While the country is in pause-mode awaiting the Florida recount and maybe the unraveling of the Great Ballot Mystery in Palm Beach County, it is tempting to pose the civics class question: when no one has won a clear majority or when one guy wins the popular vote and the other guy wins the electoral vote, has anyone really won anything? Campaign strategists on both sides will tell you that their candidate overcame primary insurgencies, spending emergencies and damaging legacies and generally played their cards just right.

But the armchair hacks and consultants out there might tell you that a Vice President with the best economy in human history shouldn’t have had this much trouble against an upstart governor. Nor should anyone with a last name like Bush and an impeachment-tarnished opponent. Votus Interruptus is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Lou DeNatale, McCormack Institute, Umass Boston

Tom Patterson, Kennedy School of Government

Ron Rosenbaum, columnist for the “New York Observer”

What does it mean that the planetary leader flipped a coin about its new directions yesterday–and the darned thing landed on its edge. And it’s still spinning there today. It was Gore on the exit polls, it was Bush at 2:30 this morning. The networks called it Bush; so did the New York Times before stopping the presses. The Vice President himself called to congratulate the governor of Texas, and then the Bush surge in Florida boiled down next to nothing.

And here we are in a gridlock that’s partisan, regional, generational and visceral with racial, maybe spiritual, and surely emotional dimensions down to the right and left sides of millions of voters’ brains. So what does it mean for prescription drugs, estate taxes, school reform, oil drilling in Alaska, abortion choice, the Supreme Court in general, the new economy and the financial markets underway this morning that hate uncertainty above all. What it all means-whatever ‘it’ is–is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Alan Wolfe, professor of Sociology at Boston College, author of “One Nation, After All”

Anna Deavere Smith, playwright, activist, professor at NYU, and author of “Talk to Me”

Edmund Morris, author of “Dutch”

William F. Buckley, Editor of National Review

George Lakoff, Professor of Linguistics at Berkeley and author of “Moral Politics.”