During the first presidential debate, CNN showed some shots of the President's back. By the way, the 32-page debate agreement said that the camera in the back must only be used to cover the moderator, so that was in violation of the agreement. In the back shots, the President has a strange rectangular bulge between his shoulder blades. This was originally shown and discussed in the online magazine Salon. But now, the New York Times also has an article about it. The NYT article says that Internet rumors were that it was a radio receiver getting signals from an offstage counselor.

My first reaction was: HOGWASH! But after thinking about if for awhile, I've changed my mind and decided it might very well be what was rumored. It could be that Bush actually has a cochlear implant for surreptitiously communicating with him during his many speeches and other activities. That would actually make a lot of sense. And I wouldn't put it past Karl Rove to use something like that to take unfair advantage of Kerry. I can't find anything in the debate agreement that they couldn't actually do that, but I admit I didn't read all 32 pages in detail.

I could see that anything implanted in the President's head would be necessarily very small and not have much range, so they might need to increase the range/sensitivity, thus the need for the back pack. But why not put it lower on the back where it would be better hidden?



While I'm talking about older debates, the web site mentioned by Cheney during the VP debate, factcheck.com, has been restored. It no longer redirects to georgesoros.com.

Go check it out and click on the header at the top where it says "The facts about factcheck.com" for a pop-up with an explanation of who they are and why they did what they did. Basically it was to save their servers and their own bandwidth. They also say they didn't redirected to factcheck.org in order to save factcheck.org from crippling loads. That was thoughtful of them.