Huffington (Issue #61)

STRUGGLING WITH ‘SLUTBAG’ | LISTEN UP, MEN | JEFF BEZOS & THE HOLY GRAIL

THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE

How Mitch McConnell Has (Mis)Ruled the Bluegrass State

AUGUST 11, 2013

KENTUCKY’S KING

By Zach Carter and Jason Cherkis

08.11.13 #61 CONTENTS

Enter POINTERS: Americans Flee Yemen... A-Rod Fights Suspension JASON LINKINS: Looking Forward in Angst

ON THE COVER: JIM LO SCALZO/EPA/CORBIS; THIS PAGE FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE; STEVE COLE/GETTY IMAGES

DATA: Gun vs. Abortion Waiting Periods Q&A: Chris Colfer on Cory Monteith’s Death HEADLINES MOVING IMAGE

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ELEPHANT MAN Behold: the human embodiment of the GOP for the last 30 years.

BY JASON CHERKIS AND ZACH CARTER

PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH: How Christianity Became Cool Again PETER S. GOODMAN: In Search of the Holy Grail QUOTED

Exit 25Q: Is Elysium As Good As District 9?

STRESS LESS: 7 Reasons for Men to Unwind EAT THIS: Win Hearts With This Crepe Cake

THE LONG GAME “The future of retirement is uncertain... being active is my way to invest.”

BY GREGORY BEYER AND CATHERINE PEARSON

TFU FROM THE EDITOR: The Working Life

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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The Working Life N THIS WEEK’S issue, Zach Carter and Jason Cherkis look at the 30year tenure of Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, particularly his legacy in his home state.

Zach and Jason take us inside the small Western Kentucky city of Paducah — or “The Atomic City,” so named for the nuclear power plant that has been a major

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source of local jobs since the years following World War II. And we meet the Buckleys, a family whose history is tied to the plant, going back to when Fred Buckley, now 85, commuted three hours a day to work there as a security guard for $1.46 per hour.

Three generations later, the Buckleys are still working at the plant. And McConnell, who has been a senator since 1984, has been the plant’s defender for nearly as long, displaying a loyalty that

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

has earned him the respect of local workers, including Fred Buckley. As Zach and Jason put it, in Paducah, McConnell is not the “sour-faced person of Washington gridlock. He is an honorary union man.”

But as Zach and Jason show, that’s only one small part of McConnell’s legacy, and they trace some of the state’s biggest problems to McConnell’s refusal to put his “indefatigable talents” toward desperately needed reforms. “He may be ruling, but he’s ruling over a commonwealth with the lowest median income in the country, where too many counties have infant mortality rates comparable to those of the Third World.”

Elsewhere in the issue, Gregory Beyer and Catherine Pearson examine how the rising average retirement age is prompting more and more individuals and companies to prioritize well-being.

The fact that 36 percent of workers now expect to work past age 65 — as opposed to 11 percent in 1991 — has opened up a new conversation about long-term sustainability, as Americans try to live and work more sustainably with an eye toward working later

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In Paducah, McConnell is not the ‘sour-faced person of Washington gridlock. He is an honorary union man.’” into life. As Greg and Catherine write, more companies are joining the “growing movement to push back against difficult economic realities by redefining the way we think about work — as less of a rat race and more of a marathon, with rest and recharging opportunities along the way.”

Finally, as part of our ongoing focus on stress, Carolyn Gregoire looks at the lasting effects of stress on one particular demographic: men.

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1 The Washington Post shocked its staff and the media world with an announcement this week that the paper would be sold to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million. The family of Washington Post Company CEO Donald Graham has owned the paper for generations, but Graham said they decided to sell because of economic struggles. The company’s newspaper division lost $49.3 million in the first half of 2013. “I, along with Katharine Weymouth and our board of directors, decided to sell only after years of familiar newspaper-industry challenges made us wonder if there might be another owner who would be better for the Post,” Graham said. Bezos, who is personally worth $25.2 billion, also bought other newspaper titles owned by the company, including The Gazette Newspapers, Fairfax County Times and Southern Maryland Newspapers.

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A-ROD FIGHTS SUSPENSION

Major League Baseball this week suspended 13 players for doping violations. All of the players said they would begin serving out their punishments right away — except for three-time American League MVP Alex Rodriguez, who was suspended for 211 games through the 2014 season. “I am disappointed with the penalty and intend to appeal and fight this through the process,” he said in a statement. His suspension will not begin until his appeal is complete. The other 12 players face 50-game suspensions.

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An al Qaeda threat prompted the State Department to call for non-emergency personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Yemen to leave the country on Tuesday. The move came two days after the department closed 19 diplomatic posts for nearly a week because of an intercepted message about a planned terror attack. The department said U.S. citizens living in Yemen should “depart immediately,” adding, its “ability to assist U.S. citizens in an emergency... remains limited.”

ONLY 90 YEARS

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning now faces a sentence of up to 90 years in prison, after a military judge reduced his previous maximum sentence of 136 years. Manning, who gave hundreds of thousands of classified government documents to WikiLeaks, was convicted of 19 of 21 charges last week. The judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, said that some of the charges refer to the same actions, so they don’t all apply for the purposes of sentencing.

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BUSH HOSPITALIZED

Former President George W. Bush was hospitalized Tuesday after undergoing a procedure to open a blocked artery in his heart.

The 67-year-old had a stent inserted into the artery after a yearly physical exam revealed the blockage, his office said. “[Bush] is grateful to the skilled medical professionals who have cared for him,” the office said in a statement. “He thanks his family, friends, and fellow citizens for their prayers and well wishes. And he encourages us all to get our regular check-ups.”

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‘PARALLEL TO EMMETT TILL’

THAT’S VIRAL CHRIS BROWN CALLING IT QUITS?!

Oprah Winfrey spoke out publicly this week on Trayvon Martin, the unarmed Florida teenager who was killed earlier this year by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman who said he shot Martin in self-defense. Zimmerman was recently acquitted by a jury, but Oprah compared the killing to that of Emmett Till, whose 1955 murder helped catalyze the civil rights movement. “Trayvon Martin, parallel to Emmett Till,” she told The Grio’s Chris Witherspoon. “Let me just tell you, in my mind, same thing. But you can get stuck in that and not allow yourself to move forward and to see how far we’ve come.”

A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories.

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‘IMPOSSIBLE’ MATERIAL BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN CREATED

PIECE OF JESUS’ CROSS FOUND?

RAVEN SYMONE COMES OUT ON TWITTER

THE HAPPIEST STATES IN AMERICA

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LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST

JASON LINKINS

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WARTS AND ALL: NEWS ORGANIZATIONS STRUGGLE WITH THE WORD ‘SLUTBAG’ AST WEEK, the exemplar of politesse that is the Anthony Weiner mayoral campaign took a turn that we should have perhaps expected, when his communications director, Barbara Morgan, blasted one-time Weiner internturned-scoop purveyor Olivia

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Nuzzi with a litany of eye-popping obscenities. Morgan made these remarks to TPM reporter Hunter Walker, after Nuzzi’s insider-look at the Weiner campaign made the cover of the New York Daily News.

As often is the case when a string of newsmaking vulgarities come stumbling into our lives, newspapers covering the story were faced with the challenge of presenting the remarks to their readerships

New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner admitted last month to sending lewd texts and photographs to a woman after resigning from Congress.

Enter of ostensible adults. Some of the terms deployed by Morgan (such as “twat” and “cunt”) were words whose usage in print have long been governed by the vagaries of internal style guides. But Morgan, momentarily confusing the person under whom she works with a person she supervised, also referred to Nuzzi as a “slutbag.”

This was a new challenge, because “slutbag” is not an obscenity per se (though it is really mean).

Talking Points Memo obviously gave its story the “warts and all” treatment. In relating that story, we did the same, under the assumption that you could handle it.

Gawker put “slutbag” in its headline (along with many other choice terms) and Gothamist did the same, though it opted to render “fucking” as “f--king.” The word “slutbag” is the only word the New York Post didn’t shy away from censoring in its headline and copy. The New York Daily News did the same in the body of its article, while referring to the incident as a “profanity-laced rant” in its headline.

At the New York Observer, where there’s “nothing sacred but the truth,” Politicker reporter Jill Colvin used the word “slutbag.” The New York Times, where “all the

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news that’s fit to print” gets printed, opted out of the “slutbag” game entirely, referring its readers only to a “barrage of expletives that would be unusual even in an off-the-record conversation.”

Had Morgan astutely decided to use the actual words ‘fame-seeking underachiever’ … this story would not be nearly as newsworthy as it is.”

Of Morgan’s rant, the closest The New York Times gets to a precise quote is this: Ms. Morgan said that Ms. Nuzzi was a fame-seeking underachiever who “sucked” at her job.

Ms. Morgan threatened to sue Ms. Nuzzi for claiming that Ms. Morgan had a thin résumé.

Ms. Morgan also referred to Ms. Nuzzi with several vulgar and sexist terms.

Morgan did use the word “sucked” in conversation with Walker. Funny enough, The Times, in reporting that Morgan referred to Nuzzi as a “fame-seeking un-

Enter derachiever,” accurately describes what Morgan had hoped to convey. Had Morgan astutely decided to use the actual words “fameseeking underachiever” in conversation with Walker, this story would not be nearly as newsworthy as it is. This decision to make Morgan sound more professional actually lessens the impact of the story. (The Times does include a link to Talking Points Memo so its readers can go and get the actual story, which is nice.)

Elsewhere, news organizations were even more pearl-clutchy.

NBC News tells its readers that Morgan went on “an expletivelaced tirade,” containing “several disparaging names for the female anatomy.” They offer up “f------” at one point, but refrain from using “slutbag” entirely.

The Wall Street Journal describes “a series of harsh expletives,” but only quotes Morgan as having said: “Man, see if you ever get a job in this town again.”

The Wall Street Journal says that this is “one of Ms. Morgan’s more tame quotations,” but that’s giving it too much credit. The “you’ll never ___________ in this town again” is so cliched that it’s more euthanized than tame.

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Fox News, for reasons I cannot fathom, decided that the word “slutbag” was an important part of the story but nevertheless felt it needed minor censoring.

It has presented its readers with “sl**bag” as an alternative.

Lord only knows what Daily Mail readers were thinking as they read last night that Morgan used the word “s*****g” in its copy. What’s that supposed to be? “Sagging?”

“Salting?” “Sapling?” The Mail really sandbagged its readers. Hey, “sandbag” would work as well.

The Mail has since lessened the confusion by updating this to “s***bag,” so now their readers might merely think that that Morgan called Nuzzi a “shitbag,” which is ironically a more vulgar choice of expletive.

At any rate, the one unknown here is whether Morgan meant to suggest that Nuzzi was a “slut” of such magnitude that she can gather and contain objects, much like a bag, or if she was an anthropomorphic sack, in which sluts might be conveniently discovered within. This is a question that shall probably be left unanswered, if not unasked.

Ryan J. Reilly contributed reporting.

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DATA

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26 STATES

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STATES

STATES WITH ABORTION WAIT

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13

STATES

11

STATES

STATES WITH ABORTION AND GUN WAIT

STATES WITH GUN WAIT

SOURCES: GUTTMACHER INSTITUTE, SMARTGUNLAWS.ORG

Get in Line for an Abortion.

Step Right Up for a Gun. In many states, it takes longer to get an abortion than it does to purchase a gun. Twenty-six states require women to wait for an abortion, usually 24 hours after an initial counseling session — making the procedure more drawn out for everyone and less accessible to people who live in rural areas or have to take time off of work. Several of these states do not waive the waiting period in cases of rape. And in all but two of the states that mandate waiting periods for abortions, there is no wait at all to purchase a firearm.

The federal government protects both the right to bear arms and the right to have an abortion, but barriers to exercising these rights often depend on whether a state is controlled by

STATES WITH NO WAIT

Democrats or Republicans.

Studies have shown that waiting periods for abortions do not change women’s decisions to go through with the procedure, and they cause “excessive” emotional and financial hardships.

Waiting periods for guns are intended to allow for a “cooling off” period and to provide time for background checks, which were not extended to cover private sales after a background check compromise was blocked by the Senate in April.

It’s hard to predict the impact of waiting periods in an unevenly regulated gun market, but the waiting periods imposed by the Brady Act in 1994 were linked to a drop in gun suicides, which now outnumber gun homicides in the U.S. — Katy Hall

Q&A

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Chris Colfer on Mourning Cory Monteith in the Public Eye “I think a line needs to be drawn, because it’s really unnerving to get messages from people, from 12 year olds in Nebraska telling you how to mourn and telling you how to pay your respects.”

Above: Glee’s Chris Colfer attends the DETAILS Hollywood Mavericks Party on Nov. 29, 2012. Below: Colfer with castmate Cory Monteith, who died earlier this year, in 2010.

FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW, VISIT HUFFPOST LIVE

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The Week That Was TAP IMAGE TO ENLARGE, TAP EACH DATE FOR FULL ARTICLE ON THE HUFFINGTON POST

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St Austell, England 07.29.2013

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Pip Andersen, professional freerunner and parkour expert, somersaults on the roof of the Eden’s Rainforest Biome.

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London, England 07.28.2013 Members of the Eternal Sacred Order of the Cherubim and Seraphim Church choir march through Walworth as part of their annual Thanksgiving service.

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Kiseguro, Democratic Republic of the Congo 08.03.2013 A Nyatura fighter stares off from a hilltop base. The Nyuatura, a Hutu militia, control a territory in Congo’s North Kivu province, and have attacked M23 rebels bordering their zone.

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Brighton, England 08.01.2013 A woman relaxes on the beach as a heatwave briefly returned to the UK.

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Srinagar, Kashmir, India 08.02.2013 Kashmiri Muslim women offer prayers outside the Grand Mosque on the last Friday of the holy Islamic month of Ramadan. Hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Muslim devotees took part in the mass prayer.

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07.31.2013 Oakland Women’s Rowing Club member Elizabeth Clark (center) rows on Lake Merritt. The club is comprised of women between 60 and 80 years old, and is the oldest women’s rowing club in the U.S.

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Helgoland, Germany 08.03.2013 Baby European lobsters from the Helgoland Biological Institute lie in cups before scientists released them into the North Sea. Scientists released a total of 415 one-year-old lobsters as part of an effort to repopulate the lobster population around Helgoland.

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Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 08.01.2013 A youth holds up a sign that reads, “Eduardo Paes, what do you say?

Until when?”, referring to the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, during a protest pressing for clarifications on missing persons. Nearly 35,000 people were reported as missing in Rio alone over the past five years.

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Duisburg, Germany 08.01.2013 A koala sleeps on a tree at the Duisburg zoo.

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Berlin, Germany 08.05.2013 Elaia (center), 6, and her sister Lusitta, 4, play among 1,600 styrofoam panda bear sculptures in front of Hauptbahnhof railway station. The display, organized by the World Wildlife Fund, is meant to draw attention to the fact that only 1,600 panda bears remain in the wild.

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07.30.2013 New England Patriots defensive end Chandler Jones signs autographs for fans after practice at NFL football training camp.

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Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, China 07.30.2013 A woman hugs a terracotta warrior replica as she poses for a souvenir photo at the Museum of Qin Terracotta Warriors and Horses.

Tap here for a more extensive look at the week on The Huffington Post.

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PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH

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How Christianity Became Cool Again HALLELUJAH! 2013 may be the year that it became cool again to be a Christian.

Given the last several decades of political domination of Christianity by a coalition that described themselves as “the religious right,” it is

hard to remember that there was a time in the 20th century when Christians were cool and spoke with a powerful, prophetic voice to the major issues of our day.

There was a time when Christians like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Berrigan brothers, Thomas Merton, Paul Tillich, Dorothy Day, Henri Nou-

Pope Francis waves from his popemobile along the Copacabana beachfront in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, on July 28.

Voices wen, Howard Thurman, Reinhold Niebuhr and John XXIII offered the basic framework for what Christianity meant to the world.

Collectively, these men and women offered some of the most philosophically deep and socially relevant thought of any kind. They inspired a generation of young people to work in racial reconciliation, environmentalism, economic justice, and anti-war activism. They fed the spirit, while also walking in Jesus’ way of justice and peace.

In those days you could say you were a Christian and the above names might come to the mind of the listener — and they were cool, meaning relevant, compelling, edgy and forward-thinking.

Sadly, that has not been true in recent history. And it has infected the American psyche so much so that when a stranger tells even me — a Christian pastor — that they are a Christian, it puts me on edge. Imagine what it must do to a person of another faith or someone who doesn’t subscribe to any religion.

This has been helped by the media who, when they have wanted a “real Christian” on the show, turned to Jerry Falwell, Tony Perkins or James Dobson resulting

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in a Christian profile that represented a large, but by no means universal Christian outlook.

The generic Christian profile that has emerged over these last decades has been someone who does not believe in the equality between men and women, degrades LGBT people, is opposed to science, especially in regards to evolution or climate change, is suspicious of people of other

It is hard to remember that there was a time in the 20th century when Christians were cool and spoke with a powerful, prophetic voice to the major issues of our day.” faiths and no faith, and is promilitarism in foreign policy.

In short, it has been a while since it has been cool to be Christian.

Well, 2013 may be the year that changes.

Last week was a particularly cool Christian week. To start with, the amazing Pope Francis took advantage of his time in Rio for World Youth Day to make sure he visited the nearby favela (slum), a prison, and a drug addict cen-

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ter. While there, he continued his habit of speaking about the poor and inequality in a powerful, focused way that no world leader of any kind has for a long time: No one can remain insensitive to the inequalities that persist in the world! No amount of peace-building will be able to last, nor will harmony and happiness be attained in a society that ignores, pushes to the margins or excludes a part of itself.

In other words: No justice, no peace.

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If more Christians can speak out the way Pope Francis and Archbishop Tutu have last week… it will change the way people view Jesus and the faith that he inspires in so many of us.”

Pope Francis has consistently taken on the injustice in the world’s financial systems and the indifference the world has towards the poor and the outcaste.

Noticeably absent from the Pope’s discourse has been the rights and dignity of gay people — until last Monday when the Pope shocked the world by saying, “Who am I to judge gay people,” and opened

South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu smiles during the Children’s Peace Prize ceremony in the Netherlands in 2012.

Voices the door to gay priests and a basic softening of the church’s hardline stance against LGBT peoples.

Cool.

The Pope was not the only world religious leader to make news on gay issues of late. Archbishop Desmond Tutu rocked people’s mind when he said that he would rather go to hell than a homophobic heaven. The icon of the anti-Apartheid movement made the comments at the launch of a United Nations gay rights program in South Africa: I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this. I am as passionate about this campaign as I ever was about apartheid.

For me, it is at the same level.

Really cool.

But these are just the latest headlines that are bubbling up with cool Christians doing relevant, compelling things. The United Church of Christ has voted to divest from fossil fuel companies; the Episcopal Church is headed by an amazing woman who is both a scientist and pastor and who is spearheading the conversation between science and religion;

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Evangelicals are taking the lead on climate change; the American Bishops are lobbying for immigration reform; the Patriarch Bartholomew is known as the “Green Patriarch” for his work on the environment; Christians are involved with innovative and crucial dialogue with people of other faiths and no faiths; and pastors and priests across the country and the world are ministering to broken people with love

It has infected the American psyche so much so that when a stranger tells even me, a Christian pastor, that they are a Christian, it puts me on edge.” and compassion every day.

If more Christians can speak out the way Pope Francis and Archbishop Tutu have last week — and so many have been in recent memory — it will change the way people view Jesus and the faith that he inspires in so many of us.

And that will be so cool.

Paul Brandeis Raushenbush is the senior religion editor of The Huffington Post.

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PETER S. GOODMAN

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In Search of the Holy Graıl N THE INSTA-ANALYSIS of the stunning deal that put the Washington Post in the hands of a billionaire whose company didn’t even exist two decades ago, the transaction tends to get dismissed as something other than a business deal. ¶ In some accounts, Jeff Bezos is just another unfathomably rich guy loading up on a vanity toy that’s landed in the bargain bin. “Some billionaires like cars, yachts and private jets,” sniffed Andrew Ross Sorkin. “Others like newspapers.” ¶ Others treat the deal like an act of charity, likening Bezos to the robber barons of the late 19th century who plowed their mo-

Amazon. com founder Jeff Bezos (above) acquired the Washington Post on Monday for $250 million.

Voices nopoly winnings into public goods like concert halls and universities.

Perhaps this is “the beginning of a phase in which this Gilded Age’s major beneficiaries re-invest in the infrastructure of our public intelligence,” suggested James Fallows.

That would be wonderful. Yet maybe the deal signifies something much simpler and more hopeful for the state of American journalism: Perhaps Bezos thinks he can make money by producing and distributing consequential work.

As Bezos launched Amazon in the mid-1990s and then forged it into a colossus, he and his partners delighted in turning conventional wisdom on its head. The Web, it was said, was destined to destroy book publishing. All the words would live in what we now call the cloud. Anyone with connectivity would become their own publisher, bringing down those elitist institutions that had long exacted their rents by maintaining their status as gatekeepers to literary taste. The owners of the presses would see their monopolistic grip eroded by the Internet — the same sort of meritocratic celebration that has more recently formed the corpus of obituaries for great print newspapers.

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Yet in one of the delicious ironies of the dawn of the Web, Bezos and Amazon proved that the same technology that was supposed to undermine text on the page and eviscerate its business model could in fact be harnessed to sell more books than ever. Maybe he thinks he can duplicate the trick by retooling another supposed casualty of the Web — serious-minded journalism.

It’s worth bearing in mind that Bezos never accepted the charge often thrown at his enterprise:

... the Washington Post ... is now owned by someone with a demonstrated track record of harnessing the Internet to rejuvenate something already established and meaningful.” that Amazon was basically just another Walmart built on fiber optics instead of bricks and mortar. His didn’t aim to become merely a faceless purveyor of commodity goods that would undercut the local merchant on price alone.

He described his mission as one of erecting an updated, more sophisticated shopping experience.

He would use the technological

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possibilities of the Web to build a platform that would know more about the tastes and purchasing histories of the customer than any local bookstore.

“I want to transport online bookselling back to the days of the small bookseller, who got to know you very well and would say things like, ‘I know you like John

PETER S. GOODMAN

Irving, and guess what, here’s this new author, I think he’s a lot like John Irving,’” Bezos told David Streitfeld in an exceptionally prescient profile published way back in July 1998 in — as it happens — the pages of the Washington Post.

You can argue about Bezos and Amazon’s track record in the years since, whether and how much the company’s success reflects its hard-edged treatment of workers and regulatory arbitrage in terms

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Bezos introduces Kindle Paperwhite during a press conference on Sept.

6, 2012, in Santa Monica, Calif.

Voices of sales tax policies. You can make the case that Amazon is in key respects much like Walmart — a behemoth capable of wielding its size and ubiquity to crush competitors.

But if you care about the future of journalism, it’s also worth appreciating that the Washington Post — forever linked to Watergate and myriad feats of accountability reporting since — is now owned by someone with a demonstrated track record of harnessing the Internet to rejuvenate something already established and meaningful. Someone with an extraordinary digital vision and access to great stores of money.

Someone who has used both of those goods to reshape the consumer experience for millions of people while yielding sustainable profits. That’s no small thing.

For this, we can thank Don Graham, the latest in a family line that — despite inevitable missteps — has looked after a great institution with enormous concern and regard. (I worked at the Post for a decade and I’ll always be grateful for that experience.) Once Graham finally grasped that his paper could not be sustained under any available business model, he had the good sense and decency to hand it

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over to a deep-pocketed entrepreneur who could take a shot at the requisite experimentation.

Graham could have continued to chop away at the newsroom and reduce the Post to a sad state of mediocrity — the trail blazed by too many local newspapers to count — while capturing what revenues remained from a shrinking reader base. Half-heartedly and too late, the Post tried a

[Donald] Graham could have continued to chop away at the newsroom and reduce the Post to a sad state of mediocrity — the trail blazed by too many local newspapers to count ….” paywall, but Graham must have known this was a loser, too: The Post was once a credible alternative to The New York Times, but no longer — not after having shuttered its national bureaus and shrunk its foreign staff.

So he sold, and he took care to put the paper in the control of someone who has shown patience in investing while pioneering new modes of commerce. The Amazon

Voices story is instructive: Bezos persisted in pouring vast sums of money into an unprofitable business, ignoring the naysayers while staying focused on building something of great value. By the late-1990s, as Amazon was being written off in many quarters as just another dot-com that got too big too fast and might well disappear, Bezos openly scoffed at the notion of pursuing quick profitability.

“To have thought otherwise would have been management malpractice,” he later told Mark Leibovich, in another profile published in — yes — the Washington Post.

“Profits,” as Leibovich explained, “meant stinting on marketing, advertising and infrastructure.”

Bezos was in it for the long haul.

He would invest in his vision, whatever Wall Street might say.

Now, there is no Wall Street.

The Washington Post is a private company, to be run as its owner sees fit.

Building the future of e-commerce is, of course, different from taking over a legacy brand in a declining industry. But the essential similarities are worth examining. Amazon was about embracing the Web to forge a more efficient way of distribut-

PETER S. GOODMAN

ing a dusty old product, the book.

That’s basically what newspaper publishers have been trying to do since they figured out that the Web was real and couldn’t simply be ignored: use the Internet to replace newsprint while somehow finding new revenues to replace newspaper display advertising.

“What technology has taken away, technology can return,” Bezos declared in a speech at the PC Expo trade show more than 13 years ago.

He was talking about how the Web, far from simple threat to traditional retail, could revive shopping with the customer in mind, personalizing the experience.

Those words might just as well now be applied to the Washington Post. People like books, so Amazon sold a lot of them. People hunger for investigative reporting, news, storytelling and analysis. The Post is full of people who excel at all of those pursuits. The holy grail is figuring out how to employ them and distribute their work in new and profitable ways.

If there is a way, Jeff Bezos has a better shot at finding it than the next guy.

Peter S. Goodman is the executive business editor of The Huffington Post.

HUFFINGTON 08.11.13

Voices

QUOTED

CLOCKWISE FOM TOP LEFT: BRUCE GLIKAS/FILMMAGIC/GETTY IMAGES; STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/ AFP/GETTY IMAGES; VINCENZO LOMBARDO/GETTY IMAGE; PETE MAROVICH/GETTY IMAGES

“ I can finally get married! Yay government!

So proud of you.”

— Actress Raven Symone,

in a tweet mentioning her sexuality publicly for the first time

“ I am a neoconservative. But... even if you are a neoconservative, you need to take a deep breath to ask if our strategies in the Middle East have succeeded.”

— Newt Gingrich,

in an interview with The Washington Times

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“ Dear Pat Robertson, Desmond Tutu can teach you how to love God’s children. Please consider signing up for lessons. K.Thnx.”

— HuffPost commenter MAX1, on Desmond Tutu prefering hell over a homophobic heaven

“ What’s this ‘Leftover Wine’ that they keep talking about?

I live alone, and I’ve never come across ‘leftover wine.’”

— HuffPost commenter Jeffred13, on “7 Home Lifehacks That Every Person Who Lives Alone Must Know”

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: AP PHOTO/CHRIS PIZZELLO; NEILSON BARNARD/GETTY IMAGES FOR COMEDY CENTRAL; CHRIS RATCLIFFE - POOL/GETTY IMAGES; ALDO MURILLO/GETTY IMAGES; JASON MERRITT/GETTY IMAGES

Voices

QUOTED

Just a little tip to Chris Matthews: when you say you shouldn’t talk about something, why not not actually talk about it?

That way, everyone wins!

HUFFINGTON 08.11.13

“ There are times when it’s very embarrassing to be a man. It seems some of my gender live their entire lives without passing the mental age of 14.”

— HuffPost commenter toakreon,

on “Twitter Rape Abuse Of Caroline Criado-Perez Leads To Boycott Threat”

— Interim Daily Show host John Oliver,

in response to Chris Matthews’ comments on Hillary Clinton looking “presidential as hell,” despite saying he knew he “shouldn’t talk about her looks”

“ A guy from a hedge fund entity is the single least qualified person to be making these kinds of judgments, and he is dangerous to our industry.”

— George Clooney,

on hedge-fund manager and Sony stockholder Daniel Loeb, who called out Sony CEOs as being responsible for two movies that underperformed at the box office

“ In a true pro-life society these children would be cared for, sheltered and fed and educated.”

— HuffPost commenter James_Bridges,

on the FBI saving 105 child sex trafficking victims in “Operation Cross Country”

AP PHOTO/PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS

08.11.13 #61 FEATURES

ELEPHANT MAN THE LONG GAME

PART I

THE OTHER McCONNELL

PART II

PART III

PADUCAH’S THE FALLOUT LEGACY

BY

JASON CHERKIS AND

ZACH CARTER

KING PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS BY TROY DUNHAM

KEN UCKY’S HOW MITCH McCONNELL HAS (MIS)RULED THE BLUEGRASS STAT

THE OTHER cCONNELL

PART I

E KENTUCKY’S KING

HUFFINGTON 08.11.13

PREVIOUS PAGE: TOBY JORRIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (MCCONNELL); DHUSS/GETTY IMAGES (CAPITOL)

PADUCAH, KY. —

VER SINCE THE U.S. government’s uranium enrichment plant started hiring in 1951, there has been a Buckley helping to run it. Before his sons, a daughter-in-law and a grandson clocked in, Fred Buckley, now 86, would travel three hours a day from his home in West Tennessee to make $1.46 per hour as a plant security guard.

It felt to Buckley like he was back in the Army, working with a close-knit group of men on a secret mission. He’d served in World War II — after a few weeks of basic training, he ended up on the front lines at the Battle of the Bulge. He rose quickly from infantryman to staff sergeant to squad leader. The job at the plant promised the safety of a stable income and a sense of purpose at the dawn of the Cold War. One month before he started, the first of his two sons was born.

It seemed like Paducah was being reborn too. As new workers from neighboring Illinois, Ohio and Tennessee showed up, the

small city in Western Kentucky faced a housing shortage. “So many people came in, you know?”

Buckley told The Huffington Post.

“Anything that had a roof on it — chicken house, any kind of outbuilding, they were in it.”

Room rates tripled until local officials imposed rent control.

Home construction blanketed the city, while trailer parks rose up on cinder blocks throughout the surrounding county. More than 1,100 homes were built while Buckley waited for his chance to move to the Paducah area. After more than six years, he found a one-story, two-bedroom white frame house on a corner lot off Highway 60, just three miles from the plant.

He still lives there today.

The flood of well-paid men had

JASON CHERKIS

KENTUCKY’S KING

ramifications well beyond the homebuilding industry, lifting almost every business in the region.

Even the local brothel expanded.

Paducah embraced the plant and its patriotic celebration of nuclear power. It called itself “The Atomic City” and envisioned thoroughfares bright with shiny, pastel-colored automobiles, a downtown humming with Cold War money. “The plant just made the

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town, you know?” Buckley says.

He still remembers when they first raised the American flag in front of the plant’s administration building. He was there, standing at attention.

Nobody understands the plant’s importance more than Mitch McConnell. For the past 30 years, the Senate minority leader, now 71, has been the plant’s most ardent defender in Washington. The Republican lawmaker knows its 750 acres located just 12 miles from downtown. He’s walked its grid

Fred Buckley (left) with the Paducah plant union’s vice president, Jim Key.

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under the haze of the ever-present steam cloud emanating from its cooling towers. He grasps its history, its hold on the imaginations of men like Buckley. No other jobs in Western Kentucky presented the opportunity to use more electricity than Detroit and more water than New York City every day of the week.

The senator has remained loyal to the plant and its workers, keeping it running on federal earmarks and complicated deals with the Department of Energy to convert its core function from producing warheads to mining nuclear waste to create electricity. At least in Paducah, McConnell is not the “abominable no-man,” the sourfaced persona of Washington gridlock. He is an honorary union man. “He’s been the best friend to the plant we’ve had over the years,” Buckley says. “He went above and beyond the call of duty for the union.”

Up until the tea party-led ban on earmarks a few years ago, McConnell played out this dichotomy across Kentucky. In Washington, he voted against a health care program for poor children. In Kentucky, he funneled money to provide innovative health services for

HUFFINGTON 08.11.13

pregnant women. In Washington, he railed against Obamacare. In Kentucky, he supported free health care and prevention programs paid for by the federal government without the hassle of a privateinsurance middleman. This policy ping-pong may not suggest a coherent belief system, but it has led to loyalty among the GOP in Washington and something close to fealty in Kentucky. It has advanced McConnell’s highest ideal: his own political survival.

McConnell’s hold on Kentucky is a grim reminder of the practice of power in America — where political excellence can be wholly divorced from successful governance and even public admiration.

The most dominant and influential Kentucky politician since his hero Henry Clay, McConnell has rarely used his indefatigable talents toward broad, substantive reforms. He may be ruling, but he’s ruling over a commonwealth with the lowest median income in the country, where too many counties have infant mortality rates comparable to those of the Third World. His solutions have been piecemeal and temporary, more cynical than merciful.

And with McConnell’s rise into the GOP leadership, his continuous search for tactical advantage with limited regard for policy conse-

BILLY SURATT/GETTY IMAGES

KENTUCKY’S KING

quences has overrun Washington.

McConnell has more than doubled the previous high-water mark for the number of filibusters deployed to block legislation, infamously declaring that his “top political priority” was to make President Barack Obama a one-term president. This obstruction has had serious consequences, as the Great Recession grinds on and large-scale problems like climate change march inexora-

HUFFINGTON 08.11.13

bly forward. Congress has failed to address the nation’s most pressing challenges, and America has come to look more and more like McConnell’s Kentucky.

At the Paducah plant, and throughout the Bluegrass State, McConnell’s influence is a complicated, even poisonous one.

As other aging nuclear facilities have been shuttered, Paducah has groaned its way into the 21st century. The plant has become a barely functional relic in the midst of a decades-long power

U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (left) talks with U.S. Enrichment Corp. General Manager Howard Pulley during a media tour of the uraniumenrichment Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant on Thursday, Aug. 12, 1999.

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down. The town’s post-war pastels have given way to rust, padlocks and contaminated waterways. After three decades under McConnell, Kentucky residents are wondering whether his survival is good for them.

Up for reelection again in 2014, McConnell faces dismal polling numbers. In January, a CourierJournal Bluegrass Poll found that only 17 percent of residents said they were planning on voting for him. A recent Public Policy Polling survey showed him tied in a hypothetical race against Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky’s Democratic secretary of state, weeks before she announced she was running on July 1. Today, McConnell finds himself at both the most powerful and most vulnerable moment of his career. He faces not only a Democratic opposition out to avenge McConnell’s attacks on Obama, but an energized tea party unhappy with the GOP establishment and independents disgusted with Washington.

Keith Runyon was a veteran reporter and editorial page editor for the Louisville-based Courier-Journal, Kentucky’s dominant statewide paper, which has generations of close personal ties to state and

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TODAY, McCONNELL FINDS HIMSELF AT BOTH THE MOST POWERFUL AND MOST VULNERABLE MOMENT OF HIS CAREER. national Democrats. He witnessed McConnell’s rise in Louisville and its suburbs of Jefferson County. He met his future wife, Meme Sweets, when she worked as McConnell’s press secretary after his election as the county’s judge-executive.

Runyon came to know McConnell well. He says that McConnell was not always such a ruthless partisan obstructionist.

“It was not the local Mitch McConnell that became the problem,” he told HuffPost. “It was what he became when he went to Washington.”

In 2006, the former editor and publisher of the liberal CourierJournal, Barry Bingham Jr., 72, “was dying and knew it,” Runyon says. A week before his death in early April, he summoned Runyon to his home.

When he arrived on that balmy morning, Runyon recalls, Bingham was sitting up in a chair in his library. A breeze was drifting in through the windows. Among the

KENTUCKY’S KING

AP PHOTO/BILL ALLEN

many things Bingham wanted to talk about, the paper’s early support of McConnell was one them.

“He looked at me and he said, ‘You know, the worst mistake we ever made was endorsing Mitch McConnell’ in 1977.”

MODERATE MITCH Squint long enough and hard enough, and you can see vestiges of the young, moderate McConnell in his funneling of federal money toward Kentucky projects. This is the McConnell who forged a polit-

HUFFINGTON 08.11.13

ical identity at the elbow of Kentucky’s iconic reformer Republicans, the McConnell who didn’t just admire Martin Luther King, Jr., but made a point of witnessing the March on Washington from the Capitol steps and later spoke up for the cause on his University of Louisville campus.

In the summer before he began law school at the University of Kentucky, McConnell went to Washington as an intern for Kentucky’s beloved Republican statesman, Sen. John Sherman Cooper.

The senator had helped draft the first legislation for federal education aid, had fought school dis-

Senator John Sherman Cooper (RKy.), testifies before the Senate Commerce Committee in Washington, in support of civil rights legislation, on July 3, 1963.

KENTUCKY’S KING

crimination and had been a cosponsor of the bill that created Medicare. He’d been hit with a lot of flak back home for the health care legislation, but his experiences taught him a bleak lesson.

“I noticed that the old country doctors and the country officials — people who had been out in the country and had seen the plight of the people who live in the hollows and down the dirt roads — they were for it,” Cooper told reporters in 1972. “And I remembered my experiences as county judge in Pulaski County, when I’d go out in the county and see these people — desperate, hungry, sick and nowhere to turn, and no one to help them except the old country doctors. You just can’t let people go hungry. You can’t just let them lie there sick, to die. Not in this country. Not with all we’ve got.”

Cooper had also been an ardent supporter of one of Lyndon Johnson’s signature achievements, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and helped defeat the filibuster against it. The summer after his internship, “Cooper grabbed a visiting McConnell by the arm and spontaneously took him to the Capitol” where the two watched Johnson sign the Voting Rights

HUFFINGTON 08.11.13

Act of 1965, according to John David Dyche’s Republican Leader, a biography of McConnell.

McConnell later joined Marlow Cook’s campaign for Senate in 1968, as a field organizer at colleges across the state. By the time he was through, every campus had a Cook group. “I think he believed in what we were doing,” Cook says. “He believed that we were trying to bring a moderate Republican to succeed a moderate Republican. As a Republican, I was the one that could do that.”

After the successful campaign, McConnell joined Cook’s staff in Washington where he worked with the senator to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have guaranteed equal rights for women. Cook says McConnell and his staff all “had to work like hell on it.” The amendment passed but ultimately failed to be ratified by enough states to be written into the Constitution. Cook had been the only Republican leading the deeply controversial effort. “We were fighting the likes of Phyllis Schlafly that didn’t want women in the military,” Cook explains.

“All the churches were against it.”

John Yarmuth, another young reform-minded Republican, crisscrossed the state with McConnell campaigning for Cook, and remembers McConnell as pro-

KENTUCKY’S KING

choice and a supporter of Planned Parenthood. Yarmuth says that after his stint with Cook, McConnell boasted about his work on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Yarmuth himself is now serving a fourth term in the House of Representatives, after switching parties to become a Democrat in the mid-1980s.

Back home, Louisville in the 1970s was experiencing a progressive heyday. The city’s new Democratic mayor, Harvey Sloane, a doctor by trade, had spent two years in Appalachia as part of President John F. Kennedy’s health care initiative. In Louisville, he set up a health center that served primarily African Americans in the West End neighborhood, which helped him launch a political career. As mayor, Sloane started an emergency medical service and helped create a public transportation system.

Neighborhoods began to invest in historic preservation. The county started an ecology court to tackle environmental crimes.

“The community was in a cando frame of mind,” Sloane recalls.

“Those were times where people were willing to step up to the plate.”

The city still had plenty of

HUFFINGTON 08.11.13

“IT WAS NOT THE LOCAL MITCH McCONNELL THAT BECAME THE PROBLEM. IT WAS WHAT HE BECAME WHEN HE WENT TO WASHINGTON.” problems that needed solving, of course, with deeply entrenched racism at the forefront. In 1975, courts ordered local officials to implement a new busing program in an effort to desegregate the school system. For a time, uglier forces prevailed. The Klan showed up and mass anti-busing demonstrations were held. After a calm first day of school, mobs burned buses, attempted to block firefighters from putting out blazes and attacked the police. The National Guard had to be brought in to restore order.

McConnell had witnessed government’s righteous potential under Sens. Cooper and Cook, and he wanted to lead it. As Dyche notes in his biography, McConnell tried to distinguish himself during Watergate by coming out for campaign finance reform in a Courier-Journal op-ed: “Many qualified and ethical persons are either totally priced out of the election marketplace or will not

KENTUCKY’S KING

subject themselves to questionable, or downright illicit, practices that may accompany the current electoral process.” McConnell called for dramatic reductions in campaign contribution limits and labeled the idea of a city-run campaign trust fund a “progressive” proposal.

In 1977, he decided to challenge Democrat Todd Hollenbach Sr. for Jefferson County judge-executive, a job that exercises administrative authority over the Louisville suburbs and some city functions like welfare. The job had oversight over the most populous county in the state.

Hollenbach confesses today that he did not consider McConnell a threat. “First time I ever saw him, I must admit I was amused,” he said. “I just didn’t take him seriously. I can remember thinking to myself, ‘I bet he carried a briefcase in the third grade.’ I thought he was just a comical-looking kind of character. ... He had no personality. He was very uncomfortable in a crowd.”

But McConnell had a message that was independent enough to gain traction. There were roads that required fixing, cronyism that needed stamping out and a jail

HUFFINGTON 08.11.13

whose locks could be broken with a toothbrush. “He was kind of a good-government guy,” remembers Meme Sweets Runyon, who worked as McConnell’s campaign coordinator and later became his press secretary. “He thought the government could do good and could be a solution.”

Charles Musson, a campaign staffer who also later worked in the McConnell administration, agrees: “He wanted to make sure government was effective.”

Position papers and campaign strategy were formed in McConnell’s basement during brainstorming sessions — much of it aimed at reaching working-class Democrats. “Mitch would ask questions, and someone would be assigned to do research on that and become the expert on that,” Musson remembers. McConnell worked the fried-fish-and-friedchicken circuit. Some mornings, he served coffee to workers arriving for their shift at the General Electric plant.

McConnell came out in favor of collective bargaining rights for workers and netted the endorsement of the Greater Louisville Central Labor Council. One of his most heavily run ads featured McConnell walking with Cooper, highlighting the young politician’s ties to the progressive GOP’s old guard.

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Dyche reports in his biography that the young politician’s message did not include any Republican branding. “Breaking with local tradition,” Dyche wrote, “he ran his campaign independently from the Jefferson County GOP apparatus and refused to share a slate with the Republican candidates in other races down the ballot.”

While he used negative ads to batter Hollenbach — most notably one that featured a farmer arguing that Hollenbach’s statements on taxes amounted to shoveling manure — Musson and Dyche recall McConnell showing a soonto-be-discarded restraint. He chose not to run an ad addressing the court-ordered busing that had caused so much upheaval two years earlier. Hollenbach had no say over the busing but had fought it in court in an embarrassing and losing effort. Another potential ad featuring the young victims of a high-profile traffic accident was similarly deemed insensitive.

McConnell sealed his victory with the surprise endorsement of the editorial board of the CourierJournal. The young politician told Louisville Today that the daily’s nod showed voters that “the community isn’t going to go to hell if

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“FIRST TIME I EVER SAW HIM, I MUST ADMIT I WAS AMUSED ... I CAN REMEMBER THINKING TO MYSELF, ‘I BET HE CARRIED A BRIEFCASE IN THE THIRD GRADE.’” you have a Democratic mayor and a Republican county judge. It’s OK to split your ticket.”

Once in office, McConnell governed with bipartisanship in mind. He became “very good” at compromising, Musson says. He hired some of Louisville’s leading feminists for his inner circle and began forming coalitions with his Democratic counterparts on the county legislature. “He expected more from me and thought I could do more than I did for myself,” Meme Sweets Runyon says. “He demanded a lot from me and insisted that I could do it.”

McConnell sought to diversify the county’s powerful boards and commissions, which had great sway over planning and development, and had historically been stacked with elites.

He invested in significantly expanding the Jefferson Memorial Forest, adding close to 2,000 acres. His administration also

KENTUCKY’S KING

replaced trees uprooted by a tornado. “He was always willing to support green things if you made a good case for it,” says Runyon, noting that he also started an office dedicated to environmental issues and had a well-respected liberal run it.

McConnell became known for his insistence on quality personnel. There were no more jailbreaks with toothbrushes. “He believed in things like historic preservation and the environment and functional social services,” Runyon adds.

During his second term, McConnell worked closely with the progressive Sloane. If he took a position that might appear hostile to the Louisville mayor, McConnell would give him a warning.

“He would call me and explain where he’s coming from,” Sloane remembers. “There wasn’t personal acrimony there. I did the same thing with him.” J. Bruce Miller, the Democratic county attorney, says McConnell had the same deal with him.

McConnell joined forces with Sloane to attempt a county-city merger as a way of cutting duplicative services and infusing suburban wealth into the city. It was

HUFFINGTON 08.11.13

a fairly liberal idea that proved ahead of its time. The referendum failed twice during their terms, but finally passed in 2000 and went into effect a few years later.

On the merger project, Sloane said the two didn’t disagree a lot.

“I think he was shrewd, and he did attract some good people,” he said. “He wasn’t intimidated by progressive people and thinking. [The merger attempt] didn’t help either of us. I give him some respect for that. … He was very pragmatic. We were not there to be ideologues.”

‘BAD DOGGY’ On the stump, McConnell likes to tell a story about an encounter with a tobacco farmer during one of his early Senate campaigns. “I’m for you,” McConnell recalls the farmer telling him.

“And what’s more, you’re going to win.” The tale has multiple iterations — sometimes it takes place in Western Kentucky in Graves County; at other times, McConnell leaves the location vague. But the story always has the same punch line: McConnell, a Louisville politician, asks the farmer why he’s so sure McConnell will be victorious.

“That feller,” the farmer explains, “he’s from Louie-ville.”

“I believe you’re right,” McConnell tells the farmer, and walks on.

AP PHOTO/RON EDMONDS

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McConnell looks like a guy who would foreclose on your farm. The senator has a net worth of somewhere between $9.2 million and $36.4 million, according to his latest financial disclosure filings.

Yet he has so much rural authenticity that small-town voters mistake him for one of their own.

McConnell’s communion with the working class isn’t the result of any intuitive genius. He studied farmers and coal miners for years, cultivating an understanding of the issues and anxieties that dominate rural Kentucky. He learned to hang.

“He can get down on the level with anybody,” says Mary Canter, who has worked for a decade at the Graves County Republican Party office. “He can come down to just the average John IQ.” Although Canter has met McConnell many times, she can’t say where he lives. His credibility is so well established that his background isn’t questioned.

Even in his early years campaigning for Cook, McConnell made it a point to respect the local language. Yarmuth remembers getting lost in Appalachia with McConnell. When they finally stopped and asked for directions,

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“It’s right back there,” the man told them, down “the road a couple hollers.”

Yarmuth, a lifelong Louisvillian, recalls asking the man, “How loud the hollers?”

But McConnell understood, quickly ended the interaction and told Yarmuth to get in the car. In Kentucky, a holler or hollow is an address — a nook or cranny in a mountain where a family builds a home. In locales without official roads or house numbers, “the next

In his first Senate race in 1984, McConnell ran a now notorious ad against his opponent, Walter Huddleston (above), attacking him for missing a few votes while giving paid speeches.

KENTUCKY’S KING

holler over” can be the best way to give directions.

McConnell capitalizes on his country cachet with ads accusing his opponents of being inauthentic creatures of the political machine.

The first and most notorious was a cold-blooded ad he ran in his first Senate race in 1984 against Walter “Dee” Huddleston, an ad that became infamous for debasing the tone of national campaigns.

Although Huddleston had one of the strongest attendance records in Congress, he had missed a few votes while giving paid speeches. McConnell’s “Hound Dog” ad, produced by future Fox News chief Roger Ailes, featured a man with a pack of dogs searching for Huddleston. It was funny, wry and gently mocking, but the effect was devastating.

Huddleston didn’t think anyone would fall for the ad. “I thought the bloodhounds were kind of silly, but as it went on, I thought it was pretty effective,” he told HuffPost. “It wasn’t true.”

The ad was so effective that McConnell spit out a sequel in which the man chases an actor playing Huddleston up a tree.

It was a sign of things to come, and the launch of a long arc in a

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lengthy and controversial career.

Once McConnell won high office and moved to Washington, his embrace of the broad uses of government dwindled, and he came more and more to focus his career on the goal of acquiring power.

By 1990, when Sloane took on McConnell for his Senate seat, the old respect between the two men had gone out the window. On the stump, McConnell called for abolishing campaign donations from political action committees, yet by October he had taken close to $900,000 in PAC money. He deployed class-war tactics, calling Sloane his “millionaire opponent” for holding stock in oil companies, although McConnell and his campaign were highly favored by the industry. “Just remember: Every time the price of gas goes up, rich people like Harvey get richer — and Kentucky families get poorer. We need to fight back,” McConnell argued.

McConnell’s campaign even came out and said he was open to raising taxes on the wealthy by eliminating some deductions. In a TV ad, he professed the belief that “everyone should pay their fair share” in taxes, “including the rich.”

The central selling point of Sloane’s campaign was his long dedication to universal health

AP PHOTO/BRECK SMITHER

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care. McConnell tried to steal his message with a weak proposal providing meager tax credits and tort reform. He used his own childhood bout with polio to obscure the limitations of his plan.

“When I was a child, and my dad was in World War II, I got polio,” he said in another ad produced by Ailes. “I recovered, but my family almost went broke. Today, too many families can’t get decent, affordable health care. That’s why

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I’ve introduced a bill to make sure health care is available to all Kentucky families, hold down skyrocketing costs, and provide longterm care.”

No attack was too personal for McConnell. Sloane had been caught prescribing himself pain medications with a Drug Enforcement Administration registration number that had expired three years earlier.

The Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure eventually cleared him, and Sloane even took a drug test proving he was no addict. Yet McConnell hyped the whole contro-

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Steve Beshear addresses supporters after losing to McConnell on Nov. 5, 1996, in Lexington, Ky. McConnell’s attack ads during the campaign advised voters not to get “BeSheared.”

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versy in an ad seemingly inspired

by Reefer Madness. As the camera flashed to pills and vials, a voiceover described Sloane as downing a “powerful depressant” and “mood altering” drugs.

“I got releases by my physicians that this wasn’t the case,” Sloane, who had a chronic back injury and a bad hip that would need to be replaced immediately following the election, told HuffPost. “What else can you do?”

Sloane went down in defeat.

Miller, the elected county attorney who worked alongside McConnell, says the senator is a formidable opponent in part because he focuses relentlessly on politics.

Miller recalls throwing a Valentine’s Day party that McConnell attended. After making small talk with McConnell about the Super Bowl, a friend pulled Miller aside in exasperation. The friend, Miller says, couldn’t believe McConnell didn’t know who had actually played in the game.

McConnell used to invite Miller out for dinner about three times a year. “It always centered around politics,” Miller says, of their social interactions. If there was any conversation about their children, Miller says he’d be the one

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to bring it up. “He had daughters, and I would be the one that would have to initiate a discussion of them. ... He knew I had a son who was a professional golfer at the time. ... If I asked him about his daughters, he wouldn’t say, ‘Tell me about your son.’”

“He’s intense,” Miller says. “It’s almost single-minded intensity. I’m not being critical of it. That’s why everybody got beat by the guy.”

McConnell kept producing animal-themed attack ads that made The Dukes of Hazzard look like Shakespeare, with messages so over-the-top as to mock the hillbilly humor they were meant to evoke. The G’s are dropped, and the mud is thrown. In his 1996 reelection bid against the future governor Steve Beshear, McConnell’s ads played off his opponent’s last name. One warned voters in a Kentucky drawl not to get “BeSheared.” In another, the voiceover declared “Old Beshear’s a state fair champion at fleecin’ taxpayers” who has taken thousands of dollars “from them foreign agents and lobbyists.” The ads all featured sheep being sheared.

McConnell only played dumb on TV. Behind the scenes, he engineered key victories in U.S. House races as he built the Republican Party in Kentucky into a powerhouse. “He is the person primar-

DOUGLAS GRAHAM/CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY/GETTY IMAGES

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ily responsible for making us a Republican state,” says Al Cross, the veteran political reporter and director of the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

When longtime and popular Democratic Sen. Wendell Ford decided not to seek reelection in 1998, McConnell saw an opportunity to expand his political empire. He’d been Kentucky’s first Republican senator in 12 years.

Now, as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), he tapped Rep. Jim Bunning, who had won six consecutive House elections, to grab the other Senate seat.

“He was the chairman of the committee, and he was recruiting,” says longtime Bunning aide Jon Deuser. “They had a great working relationship.”

Bunning’s opponent, Rep. Scotty Baesler, cut the profile of a promising Democratic politician.

He was known across the state as a college basketball star for the University of Kentucky’s iconic coach Adolph Rupp. He’d worked as an attorney providing free services to the poor before being elected mayor of Lexington.

Baesler had used his political

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capital to implement key support programs for seniors and anti-drug initiatives targeting schoolchildren. During the 1998 campaign, he helped push the Clinton administration into providing more than $19 million to overhaul public housing in Lexington and provide job training programs for the city’s poor. He was the pragmatic liberal alternative to McConnell.

Bunning had only one innate advantage over Baesler: He’d had the more distinguished sporting career as a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies and Detroit Tigers. He’d thrown a nohitter and a perfect game. As a politician, however, Bunning never

When Rep. Scotty Baesler (left) ran for the Senate seat opposite McConnell in 1998, McConnell ran a series of attack ads that effectively ended his career in national politics.

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got out of the minor leagues. He’d been an unremarkable representative in the House, best known on Capitol Hill for his acerbic blather and combative disposition.

McConnell, however, saw someone he could steer to victory. “He was practically the campaign manager for Bunning in that race,” says Dave Hansen, a GOP campaign manager who served as political director of the NRSC in the 1990s. The senator sent his top men to aid Bunning. Kyle Simmons, his chief of staff, took a leave of absence to become the Bunning campaign coordinator.

Tim Thomas, McConnell’s field representative for Western Kentucky, took personal leave to volunteer for the Senate hopeful.

But the senator was more than just a careful stage manager. He was the campaign’s pivotal instigator. In August 1998, McConnell took the stage at the annual Fancy Farm Picnic in Western Kentucky and delivered a speech that would define the contentious race between Bunning and Baesler.

The colorful, open-collar campaigning at Fancy Farm, a state-fair-sized festival, is a rarity in contemporary American retail politics. Typically, stump

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“HE’S INTENSE. IT’S ALMOST SINGLE-MINDED INTENSITY. I’M NOT BEING CRITICAL OF IT. THAT’S WHY EVERYBODY GOT BEAT BY THE GUY.” speeches are choreographed for the press, their audiences stacked with enthusiastic supporters. But at Fancy Farm, those running for office are expected to tailor their speech to the setting and let it rip under the ceiling fans. It’s as much a comedic roast as it is a political rally.

“It’s kind of this throwback,” Hansen explains. “Candidates get up there, and they make the most outrageous comments to stir people up.”

McConnell gave Bunning a clinic in his ruthless approach to campaigning at the Fancy Farm event.

The Republicans coordinated vicious speeches targeting Baesler’s status as a founding member of the Blue Dogs — a caucus of conservative House Democrats. Much to the chagrin of progressives, Blue Dogs have since become a major force in Democratic politics, but the group was still something of a novelty in the late 1990s, a fact that McConnell and Bunning

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exploited to comic effect. McConnell slammed Baesler as a “blue chihuahua,” who had “mistaken Kentucky taxpayers for a fire hydrant” and who would serve as a “lap dog” for President Bill Clinton. Bunning delivered a call-andresponse mockery with the festival’s GOP audience.

“He would go through all these votes Baesler made and say, ‘What do y’all think about that?’ And the crowd would shout, ‘Bad doggy!’” recalls Trey Grayson, an attorney and party activist who would later be elected Kentucky’s secretary of state.

The typically mild-mannered Baesler took the bait and responded with a brutal stemwinder of a speech against Bunning, replete with outsized hand gestures and ugly facial contortions. Although his rant played well with the live audience, an angry man wildly waving his arms and shouting in the August heat left a visual impression that was ripe for McConnell’s manipulation. As soon as Baesler’s rant ended, McConnell was eager to make sure his staff had caught it on tape.

“We filmed it,” says Hansen, who was working for McConnell at the time. “We put it to Wagner music,

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and it made one hell of an ad.”

With Baesler’s antics playing out in slow motion over music by Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer, McConnell moved the tone of American political ads even lower than his landmark “Hound Dog” spot or the Beshear sheep ads had.

“Mitch saw the video and thought he saw something. He showed it to the Bunning folks,” says Grayson. “Baesler looked crazy. He looked kinda like Hitler.”

“When I ran, he was the best help Jim ever had,” Baesler says of McConnell. “He got that ad running lookin’ like I was a crazy man. I thought that thing — without question, he saw its value.”

The race was not called until well after midnight, but Bunning eventually emerged victorious by a little more than 6,000 votes. The barrage of negative ads against Baesler not only worked, they effectively ended his career in national politics. At 57, he was a washout. Two years later, Baesler ran for his old House seat and lost to a Republican by 18 points.

At least in Kentucky, McConnell has proven to be an incredibly effective Democrat-vaporizing machine. He has ended the political careers of everyone he has ever defeated, except Beshear, who was elected governor in 2007, 11 years after losing to McConnell.

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“When he took over a long time ago, Republicans weren’t alive in Kentucky,” Baesler says. “Now everything’s competitive. They’ve even had a Republican governor.

That wasn’t the case until he got involved a long time ago. He’s the backbone of the whole thing. And I wish he wasn’t. If he hadn’t been with Bunning, I woulda won.”

McConnell had moved Kentucky Republicans a long way from Cooper’s passionate defense of Medicare. The defeat of the practical, reform-minded Baesler

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had consequences for the state.

In his 12 years as a senator, Bunning’s most significant legislative achievement consisted of singlehandedly blocking the extension of federal unemployment benefits in 2010. His hardline stance eventually became a standard negotiating position of the Republican Party, cold comfort to the more than 10.7 percent of Kentuckians who were officially out of work at the time.

Bunning’s Senate career will be best remembered for his message to those politicians who dared to provide aid to needy citizens: “Tough shit.”

McConnell and his wife — former U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao — wave to supporters during a stop on his 2008 reelection campaign in Florence, Ky.

PADUCAH’S ALLOU PART II

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N THEIR WAY TO VICTORY, McCONNELL had shared with Bunning a strategy that he had long preached to his own campaign staffers. The senator had adopted what he called his “west of Interstate 65 strategy,” named for the highway that splits the state from Louisville in the north down to the Tennessee border. McConnell believed that his elections

were won or lost west of I-65. The far western counties were once a Democratic stronghold, but the territory showed signs that it could be open to a determined Republican.

“He basically told other parts of the state they weren’t going to see him as much from, say, the first of August till Election Day,” a former McConnell staffer recalls. “He primarily was going to focus west of I-65. That’s where he thought more gains could be made.”

McCracken County, set along the banks of the Ohio River in Western Kentucky, played a pivotal role in McConnell’s expanding power and influence. With its history of strong African-American leaders

and outspoken union membership, the county initially opposed him: When he was first elected to the Senate in 1984 by a narrow margin, McConnell lost McCracken by about 4,000 votes. It was a victory to even get that close.

In his critical reelection fight against Sloane, however, McConnell took the county by more than 1,500 votes, and his influence in the region has grown ever since. McConnell now owns the west. Al Cross credits Paducah, the McCracken county seat, and the surrounding area as “the key to his success.”

To capture Paducah, Cross says, McConnell had to court the uranium enrichment plant’s workers.

“He understood from the get-go, you ... try to take care of the biggest employer in the key town,”

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Cross says. That meant promising job security.

There were good reasons to be concerned about the Paducah plant’s survival. With the Cold War arms race giving way to the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and new hope for arms treaties between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the Atomic City began to lose its luster. In 1980, the Paducah plant employed about 1,940 workers in production activities. Within five years, more than 650 of them were gone. In 1987,

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a similar uranium enrichment facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., was shuttered, leaving Paducah and a third plant in Ohio as the only such operations left over from the Manhattan Project. The technology was fast becoming obsolete.

Among the workers, rumors of the plant closing became an everpresent part of the job.

If the Paducah plant were to close, it would have a devastating effect on the local economy.

Production only accounts for a fraction of the plant’s economic significance: Hundreds of guards, drivers and other contract workers are employed at the plant,

McConnell (left) and former Senator Jim Bunning lean across McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, to exchange words at the annual Fancy Farm picnic on Aug. 7, 2004.

Politicians from across the state flock to the picnic each year to meet voters and make speeches.

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while restaurants, homebuilders, and other establishments are all dependent on the business that the plant’s employees provide.

In 1990, McConnell offered an incumbent’s solution by playing up his ties to then-President George H.W. Bush and floating the idea of a new state-of-theart plant in Paducah. According to news accounts at the time, Sloane was far less enthusiastic about nuclear power, citing concerns about safety and hazardous waste. “That killed Sloane in that campaign,” the plant union’s vice president, Jim Key, told HuffPost.

Paducah never got that new plant, but McConnell discovered a winning strategy and continued to patch together new contracts and make-work jobs, exploiting residents’ fears over layoffs. The senator kept the plant’s doors open, but he did so at the expense of the workers’ own well-being. For decades, the plant’s toxins had spread through the air and into the ground, slowly killing its own workers and tainting the surrounding area — a fact McConnell ignored in Washington and in Paducah.

Workers had breathed in plutonium-dipped dust, sloshed through areas high in harsh chemicals, and

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TODAY, McCONNELL FINDS HIMSELF AT BOTH THE MOST POWERFUL AND MOST VULNERABLE MOMENT OF HIS CAREER. got hazardous powders on their food and in their teeth. They’d taken the poisons home with them on their clothes. On site, workers had erected “Drum Mountain,” a scrap heap that bled contaminants into the soil. Lawyers and scientists would later deploy “groundwater plume maps” to show how far the toxins had spread.

But the effects of the toxins were plain to see. As early as the 1970s, Fred Buckley’s patriotic fervor had begun to dim. He no longer completely trusted management.

Although he moved up the plant’s ranks, from security guard to running control rooms, he suspected the work was far more dangerous than his bosses had let on. When he welcomed his son Michael at the plant in August 1973, he did so with a warning: Better make sure the equipment isn’t contaminated. Don’t trust the company.

Trust yourself. “I tried to stress — be sure to not take anybody else’s word for it,” he recalls.

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Buckley had seen his friend Joe Harding waste away to nothing.

The two had known each other since childhood, when their families had adjoining corn and soybean farms in Tennessee and they walked to school together along crop-lined roads. Valedictorian of his high school, Harding took in a year of college while Buckley went off to war. But when the two reunited at the plant, Buck-

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ley began to notice how the work made Harding sick and the bosses hounded him for speculating about possible radiation contamination. “They didn’t give him the respect they should have,” Buckley says. “He did his job. Joe came to work after he looked like a ghost.”

Sores crept up Harding’s legs and wouldn’t heal. Fingernail-like protrusions grew out of his elbows, wrists, palms and the soles of his feet. The nails, he said in an audio diary, were “very, very painful.” He’d try to trim them, but

Known as the “Atomic City,” Paducah’s cultural identity is largely defined by the uranium enrichment plant that has operated nearby for more than 60 years.

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they’d just grow back. His daughter, Martha Alls, now 71, recalls watching his head shake violently from tremors during Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners.

Harding, who would develop a fatal stomach cancer, knew he had company among his fellow workers. He kept a record of 50 other workers who were either dying or had died of cancer. An internal memo from the plant revealed that management kept its own death list in secret.

In 1971, the plant fired a very sick Harding; he was denied workers’ compensation, pension, and health insurance. But Harding continued to speak out against the plant and became a minor celebrity with the anti-nuclear movement. He spent the night of his death in 1980, with his body wasted away to barely more than bones and his skin wrinkled like a walnut shell, giving a last interview to a Swedish media team who had flown in. “I picked them up at the Holiday Inn,” Alls says of the foreign reporters. “They stayed with Daddy until midnight.

I took them back to the hotel. He died the next morning. I think it just wore him out telling it all.”

The year before McConnell was

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first elected to the Senate in 1984, Clara Harding had her husband’s body exhumed and his bones tested, which, according to news accounts, revealed excessively high levels of uranium. A decade later, a co-worker told The Boston Globe that Joe Harding’s exhumed body “was hotter than a firecracker.”

Clara Harding kept up her husband’s crusade, but it took a toll.

She had to sell her house and move into a duplex. “I think she wrote to everyone in the government,” Alls says. “I just felt like this was a hopeless case. This was the government — you don’t mess with your government.” The federal government fought Harding’s claim. According to the CourierJournal, the feds spent $1.5 million in legal fees to deny her the $50,000 she sought in benefits.

McConnell’s sole concern about the plant seems to have been protecting it from layoffs and lawsuits. Midway through his first Senate term, he came out in favor of economic sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime, but fought the ban on importing that country’s uranium. McConnell worried about the effect of fewer uranium shipments on jobs back in Paducah. In 1988, he voted against an amendment that would have made Department of Energy nuclear subcontractors liable for

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accidents caused by intentional negligence or misconduct at plants like Paducah.

McConnell’s opposition to trial lawyers became his justification for inaction on worker health.

After coming out against another provision aimed at assisting workers in high-risk jobs, he complained that the bill would simply “stimulate personal injury and worker compensation litigation on a scale far beyond our present imagination.”

Back in Paducah, however, the litigation was just about to begin.

In the late ’80s, wells near the plant were showing signs of possible contamination. Ronald Lamb helped run a mechanic shop on his family’s old farmland a few miles from the plant. He and his father and mother all drank from the same well and started getting sick.

“We thought we were dying,” Lamb told HuffPost. “I lost the hair on my arms. It looked like I had chemo.”

On Aug. 12, 1988, government officials contacted 10 households with an ominous directive: Stop drinking and bathing in the water from their wells. The Department of Energy began sealing off wells near the plant and re-routing the water supply for roughly 100 residences.

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Lamb says he repeatedly wrote letters to his local elected officials, including McConnell, but didn’t get much more than a form letter in response. “They felt your pain but felt like you were being taken care of,” Lamb recalls.

Lamb didn’t think so and spoke up around the country, including two trips to Washington in the early ’90s on his own dime. He and his family also filed a lawsuit.

Even though that case was unsuccessful, it led to a January 1997 class-action lawsuit with Lamb

The Paducah plant’s hazardous “Drum Mountain,” a scrap heap that bled contaminants into the soil.

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and dozens of other area residents that argued the plant had rendered their properties essentially worthless. The complaint alleged that “massive” discharges of radioactive materials and heavy metals had spread to their land, “causing and threatening severe property damage and health problems.” The complaint further alleged that the flow of hazardous waste continued unabated. That case was settled in 2010 for an undisclosed amount.

Ruby English, a West Paducah resident whose well was shut off, says her husband Ray had also written to McConnell without success. English had thyroid and colon cancer. Ray worked in the nearby wildlife refuge bordering the plant, she says, and he’d come home with stories about seeing the creek water turn purple and yellow. He’d drink from the well and wash in the creek. He died a few years ago, his immune system a wreck. “The damage is done. I feel sorry for the workers the most,” English says.

“They’re right in the middle of it. ... It’s pathetic, it really is.”

“Once full of aquatic life,” the court complaint filed on behalf of residents stated, “the Little Bayou Creek is now void of any meaning-

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ful plant or animal life.” A pair of deer were found near the plant in the early ’90s with trace amounts of plutonium in their systems, according to the Associated Press.

A 1990 Department of Energy inspection report noted that hazardous contamination had spread to rabbits, squirrels and apple trees.

The inspection highlighted management deficiencies and evidence of contamination at the Paducah plant. In multiple areas, management acknowledged the plant lacked the tools to measure such contamination or had not put adequate safeguards in place.

Four years later, the Environmental Protection Agency declared the facility a Superfund site, adding it to the agency’s official list of ecological cleanup priorities.

Michael Buckley remembers the very room where they had held worker meetings had to be cordoned off; the room was found to be full of contaminants. Drum Mountain, he says, was no secret.

“I didn’t consider it a joke,” he remembers. “Everybody knew the residue in the barrels was contaminated. You know that runoff’s gonna get into the underground water.”

The workers had little control over the mess and lacked suitable protections. “The essential problems were created in the haste to build nuclear weapons,”

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says Terry Lash, director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy during the 1990s.

“Because of the threat to the existence of the country, they just didn’t worry about the long term.”

McConnell and other Kentucky officials were intimately familiar with the plant’s problems. Tim Thomas, who worked on McConnell’s staff as a field representative for Western Kentucky starting in 1997, told HuffPost that the senator’s office and the Department of Energy had discussions “on a regular basis.”

McConnell and his staff toured the facility every few years and knew about the contaminated water supply and the mountain of leaking storage containers. McConnell also knew the name of Joe Harding. “I had heard of the widow,” Thomas says. “We had heard of Joe Harding. We didn’t know if this was an isolated incident or what. We were not in an investigative position.”

Mark Donham, 60, served as chairman of the Paducah Citizens Advisory Board, which was tasked with watchdogging safety issues and making recommendations to the Department of Energy about the cleanup. He doesn’t recall

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Thomas or any other representatives from McConnell’s office taking a big interest or even attending the board’s public meetings detailing the contamination spread.

Meanwhile, the plant’s own community relations plan in January 1998 noted that the number of possible hazardous waste zones had soared to 208. Despite all the concerns, Donham says, “McConnell never stood up and lobbied for an investigation.”

When The Huffington Post asked McConnell at his weekly Senate press conference on the Hill in June about his handling of the hazardous waste issue, the senator brushed it aside. “That’s of course a parochial question,” he said. “I’ll be happy to address it if you’ll check with the office.” His office did not respond to follow-up questions or multiple requests for an interview with the senator.

It was not until the Washington Post reported in August 1999 — 19 years after Harding’s death and five years after the Superfund listing — that thousands of plant workers “were unwittingly exposed to plutonium and other highly radioactive metals,” turning the plant’s problems into a national scandal, that McConnell finally sprang into action. He called for hearings into the contamination outside the plant and

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rushed to Paducah for a tour of the facility.

McConnell and Bunning requested a Government Accountability Office report on the situation at the plant, but the agency returned a scathing indictment of the senators’ own inaction. Since 1993, McConnell had served on the Senate Appropriations Committee -- the panel responsible for the government’s final funding decisions -- but according to the GAO, the Department of Energy hadn’t been given the money it had requested to clean up the Paducah site.

“The funding available for cleanup had been much less than requested [by DOE],” the April 2000 report reads. “Cleanup at the site, including the removal of contaminated scrap metal and low-level waste disposal, was delayed because of funding limitations.”

All told, there were roughly 496,000 tons of depleted uranium in storage, according to the GAO, along with 1 million cubic feet of “uncharacterized waste.” Drum Mountain had swollen to 8,000 tons of life-endangering scrap and stood nearly 40 feet tall. The feds suggested that the plant, so utterly compromised, could become its own spontaneous threat. “Some of

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this waste and scrap material poses a risk of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction that could threaten worker safety,” the report reads.

With a wave of press coverage focused on the Paducah plant, McConnell did something that few in Washington would expect from the fierce Obamacare opponent: He worked to pass what amounted to a new entitlement that allowed plant workers over age 50 access to free body scans and free health care. The program also provided $150,000 lump sum payments to

McConnell speaks next to a tower of 20,000 pages of health care rules and regulations at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., in March 2013.

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workers who developed cancers or other illnesses from radiation exposures, and up to $250,000 in compensation for medical problems caused by other toxins.

Spouses and children were also eligible for the program, which cost the federal government more than $9.5 billion.

But the legislation was not a high priority on Capitol Hill.

When the bill stalled, Bill Richardson, then President Clinton’s energy secretary, credits McConnell with pushing it through. “I remember the bill was in trouble,” Richardson told HuffPost. “There was some last-minute shenanigans, and McConnell got it done.”

At least to Richardson, McConnell claimed to have worried about safety at the plant. “McConnell talked to me about this issue,” Richardson says. “He was pretty outraged, but he basically said that he had been trying to work [on this] and I was the first secretary to listen.”

After the bill became law and the entitlement was put in place in 2001, McConnell and his wife, Elaine Chao, who was President George W. Bush’s labor secretary at the time, flew to Paducah and awarded the first $150,000

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check and a folded American flag to Harding’s widow. The money was nowhere near enough to cover the extent of his medical bills.

“He didn’t get anything compared to what he was supposed to,” his daughter Alls, who says she’s a McConnell supporter, told HuffPost. She added that the ceremony “meant everything to Mother. ... It was recognition that Daddy had done good.” Residents who drank from the poisoned wells, like Lamb and English, weren’t covered by the entitlement.

But the program was enormously popular in Kentucky, and with good reason. Workers who had seen nothing for decades were suddenly receiving payments.

Thousands of others were being screened, and many lives were saved. The free checkups caught cancers and heart conditions.

The exams identified a few suspicious nodules in Michael Buckley’s lungs. “I want to definitely keep track of the problems and make sure they don’t get any larger,” he says.

Years later, during his 2008 reelection campaign, McConnell was still championing the compensation bill in a TV ad that featured Michael’s father, Fred, praising the senator for helping out Paducah’s workers. “Without a doubt, Senator McConnell has saved people’s

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lives,” Fred Buckley told viewers.

The ad ended with another worker declaring that the senator “cares for the working man.”

McConnell had spun a political liability into gold, going from potential goat to savior. He flooded the media market in Western Kentucky with that ad. “They ran that thing every night it seemed like to me for two years,” Fred Buckley recalls.

Cleanup is still slow in coming.

Outside Big Bayou Creek, which flows into the Ohio River, the Department of Energy has posted a sign that warns of toxic sediment.

“Use of this waterway for drinking, swimming or other forms of recreation may expose you to contamination,” it states.

In 2008, the senator thumped his Democratic opponent by more than 4,000 votes in McCracken County.

McCONNELL’S SAFETY NET In Paducah, old men waited years with cancerous growths before they were treated. In Appalachia, men with rotting teeth give up waiting and yank them out with pliers. In the southwest part of the state, prenatal care for some expectant mothers is an emergency room visit after their water breaks.

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KENTUCKY DOESN’T HAVE SO MUCH A SAFETY NET AS A PAINFUL WAITING LIST — A VERY, VERY LONG ONE. In central Kentucky, a woman must live five months with a numb arm before seeing a nurse at a free clinic 45 miles from home.

Kentucky doesn’t have so much a safety net as a painful waiting list — a very, very long one. More than 17 percent of its citizens go without health insurance of any kind, even as the state’s high poverty rate results in more than 880,000 Medicaid patients. Only about 43 percent of the state buys health insurance from the private sector.

The public health results are what you might expect: terrible.

The state has the seventh-highest obesity rate in the nation and, predictably, the eighth-shortest life expectancy. Kentucky babies start with disadvantages from their first cry: The number of premature births in the state has increased over the past decade, while the number of babies born addicted to drugs jumped by nearly 1,100 percent between 2001 and 2011. Certain counties have infant mortality rates higher than those of “third

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world countries,” according to a March 2013 report from the Kentucky Department of Public Health.

To try to address the needs of Kentucky residents, health care providers in the state have been forced to get creative. In Elkton, the Helping Hands Health Clinic is supported by twice-a-week bingo games put on by the staff, while in Danville, the Hope Clinic operates out of an old bank and serves six counties. Last July, a mobile clinic set up a triage on fairgrounds in Wise County, Va., which served many Kentucky residents who crossed over the state line. Stan Brock, the clinic’s founder, says that in a little more than two days, they saw 1,453 dental patients and pulled 3,467 teeth. “It filled several buckets,” he recalls.

For years, McConnell responded to Kentucky’s poverty and health care crises by directing millions of dollars in federal earmarks to various projects in the state, constructing what has amounted to a lottery system. To get help, the plight of Kentuckians did not have to rise to a national scandal like the Paducah plant’s contaminated workers. Nor did it require the tint of a conservative cause. They just had to be very lucky. (Nobody has

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emphasized just how lucky more than the senator himself. McConnell has greeted the recipients of his earmarked funds like winners of the Powerball jackpot, complete with giant novelty checks.)

Earmarks have political benefits, and McConnell made a point of visiting remote counties to tout the federal money he had secured for his constituents.

“I hate to call it passing out checks, but you know that’s kind of what it amounts to,” says David Cross, who served as chairman of the Clinton County Republican Party until 2012. Cross remains a McConnell-supporting Republican, and still lives in Clinton County, which has a population of about 10,000 on the state’s southern border. Cross says McConnell would visit Clinton “when there was some aspect of the federal government involved locally and Senator McConnell was involved and he wanted the local community to know he was involved.”

McConnell was one of hundreds of politicians who benefited from making this kind of selective disclosure, since earmarks were essentially anonymous under congressional procedures for decades. New rules in 2008 required members of Congress to disclose their funding requests, and the practice was banned outright in 2011. A Huff-

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ington Post review of three years’ worth of public earmarks, from 2008 through 2010, shows that McConnell orchestrated the delivery of nearly half a billion dollars in federal funds, with a pronounced emphasis on projects in his home state. If earmarks coordinated with presidential budgets are included, the figure swells to $1.5 billion.

Earmarks are no longer part of McConnell’s political toolkit, but the senator is still campaigning on his pork-barrel legacy. Just days after Alison Lundergan Grimes formally jumped into the Senate race, he was already reminding voters of the federal benefits he has steered to Kentucky, and ridiculing Grimes’ ability to bring home the bacon as a backbencher.

“Kentucky would lose dramatically by trading in a leader of one of the two parties in the Senate for a rookie,” McConnell told reporters on July 3. “Kentucky is in an extraordinary position of influence as a result of their confidence in me over the years. ... Do we really want to lose the influence?”

The biggest chunk of McConnell’s earmarks were devoted to defense spending, but they financed an astonishing variety of projects, including at least $21.9 million on

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“KENTUCKY IS IN AN EXTRAORDINARY POSITION OF INFLUENCE AS A RESULT OF THEIR CONFIDENCE IN ME OVER THE YEARS. ...

DO WE REALLY WANT TO LOSE THE INFLUENCE?” civilian health efforts and $24 million for a “medical/dental clinic” at the Army’s Fort Campbell.

McConnell directed money to everything from mobile health screenings to lab upgrades for stem cell research into heart failure. One earmark funneled money to a University of Louisville scientist for groundbreaking research into aging, with treatment implications for Alzheimer’s and even space travel.

Indeed, the state’s public universities have been big benefactors of the senator’s earmarks.

In the decade before the earmark ban, McConnell bestowed approximately $140 million on the University of Kentucky, according to Bill Schweri, the university’s director of federal relations. Much of the McConnell largess went to new building construction and steady research support.

Schweri met regularly with McConnell’s staff, becoming intimately

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familiar with what the senator would approve. McConnell’s staff had the same basic questions for every pitch: How will this help Kentucky? How will this keep University of Kentucky alums from fleeing the state? “He wanted to see the university be an economic driver in the state,” Schweri explains.

Using a public university to drive the state’s economy, much less providing public health care,

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would be anathema to members of the tea party. At least nationally, the Senate minority leader isn’t so generous or noble. McConnell has, almost as a matter of routine, favored corporate subsidies and tax cuts for the wealthy over safety net support for Americans living in poverty. Nearly every social support program can count on McConnell’s opposition, from home heating assistance to allowing states to access cheaper medications.

Children receive no special exemption from McConnell’s tough

A couple attends a group session at Centering Pregnancy, a prenatal care program at Baptist Women’s Clinic in Western Kentucky that benefited from McConnell’s earmark funding.

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love at the federal level. He has sought to prevent disabled children of legal immigrants from receiving benefits and has been a fierce opponent of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides medical coverage for families who make too much to qualify for Medicaid but can’t afford private insurance. It is no shock that his opposition to Obamacare has been unwavering, all the way down to Medicaid expansion in his own state, which will give more than 350,000 Kentuckians access to the program.

But at least in Kentucky, there is what might be called the McConnell option. Some of his federal appropriations went to health care services for the state’s most vulnerable citizens. And unlike Obamacare, his earmarks frequently provided direct government services without a privatesector intermediary.

In the 2005 and 2008 federal budgets, McConnell and his staff recognized the rotting teeth and premature birth problems in their state, and funded a program whose research saw a linkage between the two. The University of Kentucky received a total of $1.78 million for the program — a drop in the buck-

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et, but, Schweri says, an easy sell.

“Staff picked up on it right away,” he recalls. “Senator McConnell has really, really good staffers. They are very knowledgeable. It never ceases to amaze me how clued in they are to the state of Kentucky.”

The earmark funding trickled down to the Baptist Women’s Clinic’s pilot prenatal care program, known as “CenteringPregnancy,” which targeted at-risk, soon-to-be moms. Along with providing sonograms and routine care, nurses and midwives moderated group sessions that went beyond breathing exercises and swaddling techniques. They found room to address what so much of Kentucky’s social services could not.

The expectant moms talked about not having a place to live, worries about completing high school, and living under the boot of abusive men. Some women confessed they couldn’t afford transportation and had to walk to the sessions.

“It will be the heat of the summer, and you will have moms that are walking,” says LeAnn Langston, a registered nurse and a nurse manager with the clinic. “We’ve had women pushing strollers in the heat of the summer.” After bonding with each other at the sessions, groups formed carpools.

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In 2006, CenteringPregnancy’s first year, 370 women participated, almost all of them young and on Medicaid. The program’s popularity ensured a significant impact locally, but like many of McConnell’s other health solutions, it was all but irrelevant statewide.

The earmark provided for an examination room as well as a dentist and a hygienist on site to offer screenings and cleanings at no charge to the mothers.

Oral infections can complicate a pregnancy and have an impact on birth weight. Some of the women, Langston recalls, had never been taught how to use a toothbrush. “A lot of it was the culture — ‘Everyone in my family has false teeth,’” Langston explains.

“They would show up in the ER if they had a toothache. They really didn’t acknowledge their mouth unless there was pain.”

The clinic dentist flushed diseased gums, excavated years of calcified plaque and uprooted necklaces of dead teeth. Full-mouth extractions, Langston says, were not rare. Neither was evidence of drug use. After the clinic put in place random drug testing and ramped up counseling, Langston says, nearly 90 percent of the women who test-

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McCONNELL DIRECTED MONEY TO EVERYTHING FROM MOBILE HEALTH SCREENINGS TO LAB UPGRADES FOR STEM CELL RESEARCH INTO HEART FAILURE. ONE EARMARK FUNNELED MONEY TO A UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE SCIENTIST FOR GROUNDBREAKING RESEARCH INTO AGING, WITH TREATMENT IMPLICATIONS FOR ALZHEIMER’S AND EVEN SPACE TRAVEL. ed positive on the initial visit were drug-free by the time they were ready to deliver their babies.

The women needed all the help they could get. For many lowincome mothers in Kentucky, Medicaid covers at most the first two months after they give birth.

If they have drug problems, bed space at rehab facilities is limited across the state. Just traveling to these places can be a barrier, says Dr. Ruth Ann Shepherd, the director of the Division of Maternal and Child Health in the state’s Department for Public Health. “I

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don’t know that there is ever going to be enough treatment facilities,” she adds.

Lack of space isn’t the only problem. After weeks of effort, Langston and her team recently secured one of her moms-to-be a spot in a detox facility roughly three hours away in Lexington.

Her detox lasted five days and ended with the promise of outpatient counseling, the woman, 31, told HuffPost.

She had been soothing her anxieties with illegal prescription drugs, methadone and, on the rare occasion, she says, crystal meth. She didn’t see a single therapist at detox. It took her 48 hours to relapse.

“I felt like I needed it,” she says.

“I had a panic attack as soon as I got home. I’m a self-medicator.

That’s just where I go.” It’s been more than a month and she’s still waiting for the outpatient care.

Today, the drug testing and the CenteringPregnancy program continue at Langston’s clinic. But the funding from McConnell’s earmark dried up in 2009, and without it the on-site dental clinic had to close.

Similarly, high blood pressure and diabetes are huge problems across the state. In the 2009 and

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2010 federal budgets, McConnell earmarked close to $3 million to fund heart health classes that would educate residents in the state’s rural areas about how to eat better and exercise. Organized by the University of Kentucky, the class curriculum — with its eat-your-vegetables philosophy — would not have been out of place at one of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move events.

Instead of getting kids interested in exercise, however, these classes aimed to persuade adults to stop eating only canned vegetables and to replace soda with water. Debra Moser, a nurse and professor with the University of Kentucky who designed the project and participated in some of the class work, recalls people saying their parents had died from heart attacks and they were just going to die of one, too. Others said they drank soda because coal mining had contaminated their wells.

The program couldn’t address the poisonous wells. But it could at least highlight alternatives in the Kroger aisles. Moser says about 1,400 residents enrolled in the classes; 60 percent didn’t have a primary physician. For those who stuck with it and continued to be monitored by health care providers after the classes ended, there were across-the-

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board reductions in the risk factors for heart disease.

Along with the exercise tips and self-sufficiency lessons, the class instructors passed on referrals to places like the Hope Clinic in Danville, where low-income and no-income residents could get free health care. Hope receives only enough funding to operate parttime during the week and has just three rooms, including one with a recliner for patients with mobility issues or those who are so obese that they can’t lift themselves up onto the examination table.

Late February brought two new patients who had gone without health care for years, recalls Terry Casey, a nurse practitioner at Hope. Both had strokelevel blood pressures. Casey says she obtained medications right away from a local pharmacy and promptly sent off lab work, but their conditions were already grave. Within two weeks, one had suffered a stroke while the other had a heart attack.

Casey, whose clinic receives no federal funding, thinks the heart health classes are a small BandAid for a much larger problem.

And she was surprised that McConnell had anything to do with

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them. “Every day I see people who come through here that are in such terrible shape without resources that, from my perspective, what I see is people like McConnell working against expanded health care coverage and they get involved in the politics and they don’t pay attention to what’s going on on the ground level,” she says.

In nearby Lincoln County, down a two-lane road hemmed in late February by dry yellow pastures and lonely houses gray with rot, Shelia Calladine, 63, is living out of a school bus painted white and parked on a Baptist association’s property, the keys and electricity courtesy of a man she calls “Brother Gary.” The bus seats have been ripped out and replaced with dollar-store clutter. The centerpiece of a small table is an empty pale blue pill organizer sitting on top of a plastic Cash Express cup.

Calladine says she was only allowed to move into this shelter-onwheels if she agreed to marry her boyfriend. That was the deal Gary had made with the couple. The marriage, Calladine says, was a mistake. “I shouldn’t have done that,” she says. “I don’t feel forced but pushed. Not forced but pushed.”

As a cold, persistent rain fell outside and her skinny dog yipped at the barren farm and empty lots, Calladine spoke about growing up

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as a restaurant manager’s daughter who began waitressing at age 9 and never finished high school.

She spent decades behind dimly lit bars and truck-stop cash registers. When she realized that she couldn’t see the poker machines from the bar, a doctor told her she had diabetes. She didn’t have health insurance. If she ran out of insulin before payday, she had to hope her body wouldn’t miss it.

Sometimes she woke up in hospital beds.

While she was working at a truck stop in Livingston, a coworker found her naked on a bed in the motel where she lived. She’d fallen into a diabetic coma.

McConnell’s earmarks never shone their short-term hope on Calladine. Somewhere, maybe a county away, they found some other down-on-their-luck souls and taught them about turkey bacon or pulled a dead tooth from their rotting gums. But the senator never chose what his state truly required: comprehensive solutions to, instead of temporary patches over, the gaping holes in Kentucky’s health care system.

Obamacare has its own shortcomings for Kentucky. It will not address the chronic shortage of

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doctors in rural areas or the lack of doctors who accept poor patients. But it will at least grapple with the statewide crisis in accessing health insurance.

After returning to Lincoln County and finding the Hope Clinic, Calladine says, she has been able to get a handle on her diabetes and a recently discovered thyroid condition. The rest of her care must wait, however — even emergencies.

Three weeks earlier, Calladine fell and fractured her ankle. But the emergency room is only free with a referral from the clinic, and her next appointment at Hope wasn’t for two days. So she had no choice but to wait, sit out the pain and watch her ankle swell. “If it got any fatter, it felt like it was going to bust,” she said.

Sheila Calladine, 63, and her dog, outside the school bus in which she lives.

THE LEGAC PART III

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PREVIOUS PAGE: BILLY SURATT/GETTY IMAGES (CAUTION SIGN, PADUCAH PLANT); AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE (MCCONNELL)

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ARLY IN McCONNELL’S FIRST CAMPAIGN for Jefferson County judge-executive in ’77, staffer Charlie Musson remembers calling businesses and asking if his candidate could stand outside their storefront and do some politicking. On the way to one of those first campaign stops, he could see McConnell stewing in the backseat of their car.

“The whole drive out you could tell he’s getting anxious,” Musson says.

Finally, McConnell couldn’t help but speak up. Maybe they could turn the car around and just go back home. “How do I do this?” he asked.

McConnell was actually good with young voters and had impressed Musson with the way he took the time to talk politics over Cokes with his high-school-aged volunteers. But even with this first campaign, the 35-year-old McConnell understood his true value. “Can I go back and make fundraising calls?” he offered from the back seat.

Before the race, when he was teaching political science at the University of Louisville, McConnell had explained to his class what built a political party. He’d written on the blackboard three words: “Money, money, money.” Although he would churn out position papers, he told Louisville Today after his victory that “issues, unfortunately, usually are kind of peripheral to winning a campaign.”

McConnell eventually carried that philosophy into the Senate.

It’s what people note most vividly about his tenure.

The day after winning his first reelection contest in 1990, he was already using the occasion to solicit funds for his next campaign. Former Louisville Mayor Wilson Wyatt told Louisville Magazine about a

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lawyer at his firm inviting Wyatt to the event. “He asked me if I cared to join him and a few others for lunch with Senator McConnell, to celebrate. Then he said I’d need to bring along a check for $2,000, because the senator was already raising money for 1996,” Wyatt told the magazine in 1995. “He’s serious.”

Alan Simpson, the now-retired Republican senator from Wyoming, recalled to the Lexington Herald-Leader in 2006 that when McConnell asked for money, “his eyes would shine like diamonds.

He obviously loved it.” A former aide to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Christian Coalition lobbyist

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remarked in the same article that fundraising is the senator’s “great love above everything else. ... His fundraising is like a corporation, a booming, full-time business.”

In the mid ’90s, McConnell was tapped to run the GOP’s Senate business as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The job meant targeting winnable races, helping to discover promising candidates and building a war chest that could put onthe-bubble contests in play. All the spreadsheets and the strategy sessions showed McConnell had a real chance at a Senate takeover.

Democrats were defending more seats than Republicans in 1998 — Arkansas, Nevada, Ohio and both Carolinas were all major

McConnell speaks during a campaign stop on Oct, 31, 2008, in Florence, Ky.

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GOP targets. It was six years into Bill Clinton’s presidency — a time when the president’s party typically weathers significant losses — making other seats in conventionally Democratic states appear vulnerable. Both Barbara Boxer in California and Patty Murray in Washington would trail for almost the entirety of their races that year, and Russ Feingold created a takeover opportunity in Wisconsin by placing principle before politics and setting a strict limit on his own campaign spending.

“At the beginning of the cycle, much like last cycle, there was that early chest thumping on the Republican side,” says Paul Johnson, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for the ’98 race. “It was advantage Republican and all sorts of good things were gonna happen for them.”

But McConnell & Co. fatally miscalculated with their national GOP message tying Democratic candidates to Clinton and his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The president became more popular during the impeachment proceedings, and the Republican attacks galvanized disheartened Democratic supporters. On elec-

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tion night, McConnell’s hound dogs got neutered. State after state fell to Democrats. By the time all the votes were counted, Republicans hadn’t gained a single Senate seat.

McConnell’s ability to raise cash for candidates kept him from being laughed out of Senate leadership. As head of the NRSC, he had capitalized on the explosion of “soft money” — unlimited spending by political parties on so-called party-building activities, which often included controversial advertising critical to campaigns.

In 1998, McConnell raised more than $37 million in soft money, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, besting the NRSC’s previous high-water mark by 30 percent — unheard of in an election year with no presidential contest — and eclipsing the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s 1998 haul. According to the Lexington HeraldLeader, he would raise more than $90 million in each of his election cycles during his run as chairman.

McConnell recognized early the importance of protecting his turf. There has been no greater Senate foe of campaign finance reform. When Feingold and McCain proposed a bill to ban soft money outright in 1996, McConnell spearheaded the opposition and launched a filibuster — at the time

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a relatively extreme response reserved only for dramatic legislation.

He also placed a call to Indiana lawyer James Bopp Jr. Although his office was 650 miles from Capitol Hill, Bopp had cultivated a substantial reputation in rightwing circles for his work on behalf of Washington-based conservative Christian organizations, including the anti-abortion National Right to Life Committee. In the 1970s, many of these groups began injecting politics into their cultural advocacy, which sparked investigations from the Federal Election Commission. Bopp pioneered a defense for these groups rooted in the First Amendment, a traditional foundation of liberal advocacy.

Before McCain-Feingold had even been voted on, McConnell and Bopp founded the James Madison Center for Free Speech and began plotting opposition to the legislation if the filibuster failed.

In 1997, McConnell held the line. Even though McCain and Feingold mustered 53 votes, McConnell’s filibuster forced a 60-vote standard and killed the bill. But five years later, with soft money up 500 percent over the past decade, McCain and Feingold gathered 60 votes, and President George W.

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Bush signed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.

Defeated on the Senate floor, McConnell with Bopp’s aid went straight to court, filing a lawsuit against the FEC to challenge the initial implementation of the bill — a naked effort to overturn the law in court and another tactic often deployed by liberal lawyers thwarted by conservative policymakers.

They even garnered support from ACLU heavyweight and corporate lawyer Floyd Abrams. McConnell told The New York Times that he found all the criticism thrown his way “exhilarating.”

“He was proactive,” Bopp says of McConnell. “It took a year of litigation. It got to the Supreme Court. ... He would have meetings with the five lawyers representing him fairly regularly. He’s a lawyer, you know. He can’t help himself. I keep telling him he’s a politician, not a litigator.”

McConnell lost his own case, but within the decade, he had transformed election law. Bopp and the James Madison Center kept filing First Amendment cases on campaign finance, and in 2010, their Supreme Court victory in Citizens United v. FEC allowed independent groups to spend unlimited sums from corporations and wealthy donors on elections.

McConnell’s legal and ideological

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infrastructure had birthed the era of the super PAC. He was proud of it. When U.S. News & World Report ran a headline calling McConnell the “Darth Vader” of campaign finance reform, he framed it and hung it on the wall of his Capitol Hill office.

After 30 years in Washington spent fighting Democrats on nearly every front, McConnell has embraced his persona as the dark lord of Capitol Hill. John Yarmuth, the Democratic Kentucky congressman who as a young Republican had traveled with McConnell organizing college campuses for Cook, says the two are no longer on speaking terms. “He won’t talk to me now,” Yarmuth says of McConnell. “I’ve known him for 45 years.”

Recently, Yarmuth says, he ran into the Senate minority leader at a largely empty airport VIP room.

McConnell was sitting alone with a newspaper. “I looked straight at him,” Yarmuth says. “I said, ‘Hi, Mitch.’ There wasn’t a muscle in his face that moved. ... He just buried his head in the paper.”

McConnell’s life has become an endless campaign.

Marlow Cook is disappointed in his former staffer. “When you go to Washington, you make your

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WHEN U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT RAN A HEADLINE CALLING McCONNELL THE “DARTH VADER” OF CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM, HE FRAMED IT AND HUNG IT ON THE WALL OF HIS CAPITOL HILL OFFICE. record,” says the retired former senator. “Nobody else makes it for you. And the record that he has made, he has to be comfortable with or he wouldn’t be there. ... A man makes the reputation he gets.

Mitch has to be satisfied. If I were there and I were in that position, I would not be satisfied.”

FRANKENSTEIN But even in the realm of winning elections, the purpose supposedly served by McConnell’s campaign finance obsession, McConnell’s actual record is weak — two disappointing terms as NRSC chairman and an obstructionist legislative strategy as minority leader that helped burn the GOP in the 2012 elections. Only in Kentucky is his party building truly tangible.

Over the past 30 years, McConnell has grown the Republican Party in the state from a small col-

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lection of idealists like Cooper and Cook into a dominating force in his image. In the summer of 1999, he helped engineer his party’s historic takeover of the state Senate.

Behind the scenes, he played what the press described as a “pivotal” role in pushing two Democratic lawmakers from familiar regions to defect to the GOP. State Sens.

Dan Seum of Jefferson County and Bob Leeper of Paducah changed parties and turned the state Senate over to the Republicans.

Before he announced his switch, Seum says he made a pilgrimage to McConnell’s Louisville residence.

McConnell corralled the state Republican leaders into a room, where they pledged to support Seum. “The point is if you are going to make this jump, this switch, it’s nice to know someone helpful, and Mitch was very helpful,” he says.

Leeper has since become an independent. But the Republicans are still in control of the state Senate and have a credible shot of one day taking over the state House of Representatives. Kentucky Republicans know who to thank: They named their headquarters building after McConnell.

McConnell’s Bluegrass Committee PAC has capitalized on his

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national leadership position to funnel cash into state politics. Its donations have gone not only to tight congressional races across the country, but to down-ballot contests in Kentucky, all the way to lowly statehouse challengers.

“A whole lot of people are indebted to him from that early support,” Trey Grayson, the former Kentucky secretary of state, says.

“He earned a lot of loyalty.” The size of the check wasn’t necessarily what mattered either. Even $1,000 sent a signal to the state’s political class.

Such campaign spending became even more critical to McConnell after the tea party swept

McConnell played a role in pushing Democratic Senators Bob Leeper (left) and Dan Seum (right) to defect to the GOP in 1999. Leeper is now an independent.

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into congressional power in 2010 and banned the earmarks that helped keep his Senate seat secure. In the 2012 electoral cycle, the Bluegrass Committee spent $77,000 on 58 candidates for state office in Kentucky, up nearly 60 percent from the $49,000 it gave to a total of 33 Kentucky state candidates in the 2010 cycle.

Yet even in Kentucky, there are signs that McConnell’s clout has eroded. McConnell spent several years grooming Grayson to be the next U.S. senator from the Bluegrass State. He had been instru-

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mental in guiding Grayson’s reelection as Kentucky secretary of state in 2007. He counseled Grayson and challenged him to meet fundraising goals. Two years later, when McConnell had tired of Bunning and pushed his already vulnerable, former friend into retirement, Grayson got the nod.

Grayson, who was only in his 30s, says McConnell assisted in all aspects of the campaign, introducing him to potential donors and grassroots activists, and helping him develop a message. The two talked regularly on the phone.

Grayson describes McConnell’s assistance as “just so thorough.”

He should have had an easy path

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Trey Grayson addresses a news conference in Louisville, Ky., in 2010.

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to victory. “I had locked up establishment support,” he recalls. “I did all the right things.”

Ironically, if it weren’t for McConnell’s tireless work attending Rotary Club functions and hotel luncheons across the state, building up the party infrastructure and filling Rolodexes, Grayson might have had a Senate career.

But the minority leader had developed the Republican brand into such a force that it had become big enough to invite an anti-establishment insurgency.

When tea party favorite Rand Paul jumped into the GOP’s Senate primary, he didn’t just campaign against Grayson. He ran against McConnell and Washington, and — shockingly — thumped Grayson, 59 percent to 35 percent. On that election night in May 2010, McConnell called his candidate to offer his condolences — and offer a bit of advice about defeat. “It was important to accept it gracefully,” Grayson says McConnell told him.

McConnell certainly has. He traveled to Paducah to attend an actual tea party hosted by the county GOP on Broadway Street to rally support for Paul in the general election. Since Paul won the

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Senate seat, it’s been the senior senator who has made the greatest concessions to his junior colleague — whether by becoming a supporter of legalizing industrial hemp or hiring Paul’s right-hand man to run his own 2014 reelection campaign. The joke among Washington insiders now is if you want to know where McConnell stands on an issue, just ask Paul. Quite a turnaround — McConnell’s gone from reformist, good-government Republican to Ayn Rand fanboy.

Rand’s a Republican. The rest doesn’t matter to McConnell.

“One of the things he always talked about — you need to stick together,” explains Kentucky state Senate President Robert Stivers II (R). “Sit down and work through problems. But always stick together. Stay with your team.”

In Kentucky, McConnell has, in a sense, created a GOP Frankenstein — letting loose a beast he can no longer control. The Republicans taking up all the oxygen in the state’s capital city of Frankfort aren’t looking for ways to help the state assuage its deepest and most chronic deficiencies. They’re too busy seeing United Nations conspiracies in education standards and approving bills that would supposedly nullify future federal gun regulations. The Kentucky Republican Party has become the

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party of local Todd Akins and Louie Gohmerts.

In February, the state Senate passed a bill requiring a doctor to perform an ultrasound on a woman seeking an abortion. If the doctor failed to present the ultrasound image to the patient, the doctor could be fined $100,000 for a first offense and as much as $250,000 for subsequent offenses. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Paul Hornback, a Republican from Shelbyville, tells

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HuffPost he had sought McConnell’s advice “many times,” even before he ran for the Senate.

“He was one of the first ones I talked to before I decided to file,” Hornback says. “He thought it’d be a good idea. ... He knew that my values would fit in well with the Republican Party.” In 2010, the Bluegrass Committee PAC gave Hornback’s campaign $1,000.

Hornback says McConnell’s conservative values gave him the courage of his own convictions and adds that he’s received encouragement from the senator’s

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul (left) joins McConnell, as they arrive for the annual political picnic in Fancy Farm, Ky., on Aug. 7, 2010.

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staff. “He set a standard out there for all of us in the party,” Hornback says. “Our thoughts are pretty much in line.”

McConnell is in line to awkwardly embrace them all, whether teaching state pols how to raise money or set up committees or simply create a lasting culture.

If that means using his beloved University of Louisville football games as Republican unity sessions, so be it. Invites to his tailgate parties are coveted.

“Before I was Senate president, he did it with the prior Senate president,” Stivers says of the tailgates. “He did it with me as a floor leader.”

McConnell might, if the mood strikes during the game, offer a stiff high five. “You can see almost the emotion,” Stivers says.

MONUMENTS In place of a discernible philosophy or lasting impact on the lives of ordinary citizens, there are other monuments. In Owensboro, there’s a Mitch McConnell Way and, on the city’s riverfront, a Mitch McConnell Plaza. Outside Louisville, there is a 5.4-mile trail in the Jefferson County National Forest called Mitch McConnell

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Loop. In 2004, Bowling Green established the River Walk at Mitch McConnell Park.

The Mitch McConnell Center for Political Leadership crowds half a floor of the University of Louisville’s library with a hodgepodge of mundane artifacts celebrating his Senate career. One placard notes that he has served longer than Wendell Ford, while another details his interest in Henry Clay’s desk. A portrait of a younger McConnell is inscribed: “In a representative democracy senators are elected to lead, not merely to reflect which way the political wind is blowing at any given time.”

Though Paducah has yet to name a building or street after McConnell, the town is a testament to his complicated legacy. Millions in earmarks have promised new waterfront development, but that optimism recedes a block or two away from the Ohio River. The downtown business district is gaptoothed with darkened buildings and empty lots. Even the storefront biker church looks in need of salvation, inhabiting half of a big pink building still advertising discount clothes for a long-departed retailer.

Remnants of the city’s Spielbergian rocket dreams endure in the murals along the imposing flood wall that still celebrate the Atomic City. Both the city and its senator

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are holding onto a bygone era. McConnell may not have been loyal to his moderate roots or conservative orthodoxy, but he has been loyal to the jobs at the uranium enrichment plant to the point of absurdity.

In March 2011, McConnell told then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu that the Paducah plant “happens to be the economic engine of far Western Kentucky.” Once upon a time, it was. But the number of jobs at the Paducah plant have dwindled steadily over the past few decades.

Today there are only about 1,100 production employees, down by about 100 from two years ago.

This spring, the government contractor USEC announced that it would shutter production at Paducah. McConnell, along with Sen. Paul and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), immediately released a statement indicating that they wanted the plant to continue reenriching depleted uranium. And they may succeed in 2013 — as they did in 2011 — in persuading USEC and the Department of Energy to keep the plant on life support for another few years. But the enrichment has already ceased and becomes more difficult to restart the longer the plant remains idle. Workers have received of-

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ficial notices from USEC that layoffs are weeks away.

“During its tenure on the site, USEC has built a strong record of safely and effectively following radiological and environmental regulations,” USEC spokeswoman Georgann Lookofsky told HuffPost. “We’re committed to return the plant to DOE in a condition that complies with the terms of our lease” and all “environmental, health, safety and regulatory requirements.”

Allan Rhodes Jr., who serves on the Paducah Board of Commissioners and owns a coffee shop in town, thinks McConnell has been missing in action on the plant closing. “Now when we need him the most visibly, I don’t see him leading the charge,” Rhodes says.

“I’m sure his life is pretty sweet.”

The plant workers’ union is beginning to question their members’ past support for McConnell.

Jim Key, the union vice president, says he hasn’t heard from McConnell’s office since April. “Inactivity tells me and no communication tells me he’s given up on Paducah,” Key says.

McConnell can only save jobs at the plant by essentially authorizing busywork. If the Department of Energy wanted to put money into nuclear power, it could do so in far more efficient ways, and could do

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it even in Paducah, buying updated technology and retraining personnel. But McConnell has not gone to bat for a new uranium enrichment centrifuge for Paducah. New technology is expensive, and a biannual patch earns the same political loyalty with a much lower price tag.

Unfortunately for the plant, McConnell’s steady funding has done little more than slow its slide into economic irrelevance.

On a Friday in early April, Fred Buckley’s grandson Wade, 29, clocked out at the plant for the last time. He was the last of the Buckleys to earn a paycheck there.

Wade Buckley had been the McConnell ideal, the reason he showered state universities with earmark money. The Buckley grandson had graduated from the University of Kentucky with a mechanical engineering degree and didn’t flee the state as soon as convocation was over. He took a job at the plant as a project manager handling major repairs.

Wade worked alongside men who knew his father and grandfather.

But unlike his kin, he didn’t feel like he was part of any boom. Nor did he think his paycheck was something he could count on forever.

And the job stifled. “To tell you the

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“NOW WHEN WE NEED HIM THE MOST VISIBLY, I DON’T SEE HIM LEADING THE CHARGE.” truth, I always knew that job would not be a lifelong career for me,” he says. Walking into the plant meant entering a time warp. “It is 60-, 65-year-old technology. Things that are inefficient don’t survive.”

After less than two years at the plant, Wade Buckley began to plan his exit. He is single. He doesn’t have kids. He didn’t bother looking around Paducah for his next job. Following a three-month search, he decided to accept an offer from John Deere in Augusta, Ga. He would be evaluating product lines and making improvements to the company’s tractors.

Wade’s father, Michael Buckley, says he understood why his son had to move. But he wished his son could have found a job closer to home. “I really hated it,” he says.

“He’s always been close to us.” His son wouldn’t be able to come over on Saturdays or after church on Sundays. He’ll miss that.

On the morning of his move in mid-April, Wade stopped in to see his grandparents. He and his

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grandfather sat in the gray easy chairs in the living room, next to the old grandfather clock and the stereo that never played anything but traditional country and the truest gospel. It was sad, Fred Buckley says, those last moments.

He told Wade that the “sky is the limit,” that you could count on a company like John Deere.

“You got to go where the work is,” Fred Buckley acknowledges — a sentiment he’d felt when he first commuted to the plant from Tennessee.

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In Augusta, Wade settled into a duplex close to all the amenities he could ever need. He marvels at John Deere’s resources, at how not every task requires stacks of paperwork. He loves that everything at his job is new. There are opportunities to collaborate, to test, to invent.

“You are just free,” he says. “I have options now.”

Jason Cherkis is a reporter and researcher for The Huffington Post.

Zach Carter is The Huffington Post’s senior political economy reporter. Paul Blumenthal contributed reporting.

McConnell walks back to his office after the Senate voted down the Housepassed stopgap spending bill on Sept. 23, 2011.

THE THIRD METRIC

MAKING THE RAT RACE A MARATHON WHEN 65 IS NO LONGER THE FINISH LINE

By GREGORY BEYER and CATHERINE PEARSON

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THE THIRD METRIC

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ONE OF THE MORE VEXING PUZZLES FOR AMERICAN WORKERS GOES SOMETHING LIKE THIS: You’re probably not going to be able to retire as soon as you’d hoped, and it’s more important than ever to start thinking about retirement.

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THE THIRD METRIC

There have always been those who, out of necessity or by choice, have skipped or spurned retirement, working on until the day they die — quite possibly feeling that a carefree, work-free lifestyle would be wholly unsatisfying.

But for those who aspire to one day call it quits, more Americans are recalibrating their retirement expectations. In 1991, according to an annual survey for the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 11 percent of workers anticipated that they would work past age 65; by 2013 that figure leapt to 36 percent, with 7 percent saying they had no plans to stop working. Survey respondents who expected to

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“ For previous generations, the dream was to get yourself set up so you can quit work and not have to do anything ever again… I think I might get really bored.” push back their retirement plans cited a range of reasons, from the struggling economy to their inability to afford retirement.

Financial considerations are, of course, central to retirement planning. But in order to prepare for careers that may extend well into their 60s or beyond, more people are also prioritizing their health earlier on, to make sure their careers are sustainable in the long term. The trend of delayed retirement comes as the average Ameri-

THE THIRD METRIC can life expectancy increases — it is now 78.7 years old, up from 62.9 in 1940, when regular, monthly Social Security benefits began to be paid out. As the website of the Social Security Administration puts it: “When you are considering when to collect retirement benefits, one important factor to take into account is how long you might live.”

That factor — “how long you might live” — implies a multitude of questions for any working American who chooses to fastforward through the decades and imagine himself arriving at work at, say, age 67: How will I feel?

How will I be motivated? How long can I really sustain this career?

Americans work an average of 1,790 hours per year — more than most countries, including France, Germany, the U.K., Canada and Japan — and the U.S. is the only developed nation without a national vacation policy. The recession forced many people out of the workforce and required others to delay their retirement plans to overcome large financial losses associated with the 2008 stock market crash, said Lauren Nicholas, a health economist with the University of Michigan. “From a long-term perspective, we are working longer.”

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“ In times when the economy is uncertain and the future of retirement is uncertain, being active is my way to invest.”

In addition to financial realities, workers also have to contend with mental hurdles, since the notion of retiring at or around 65 has long held as conventional wisdom.

“There’s just something about that number — 65 — that still feels like an unofficial finish line,” as Business Insider put it. And for young people, decreased earning potential because of unemployment or delayed starts to their careers can be another factor, with the result that the precedent of parents and grandparents retiring relatively young may seem less like a blueprint for their own futures than a relic of an earlier time.

RECALIBRATING THE DREAM

That’s the case for Arika Lycan, whose grandfather worked for General Electric for more than two decades. He had a pension and retired in his mid-60s. Lycan, who is 28, works for a small nonprofit in Michigan that promotes gardening and access to healthy food, and loves her work as an outreach and volunteer manager.

With a salary under $50,000,

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THE THIRD METRIC

she expects to work another 35 to 40 years in the nonprofit sector — work that fits with her skills and passions, and gives her a clear sense of satisfaction and meaning.

To ensure that her career is sustainable, Lycan has already identified her health as a “big priority.”

She participates in her office’s new “wellness pods,” which ask employees to identify physical, mental and spiritual goals. She maintains a healthy diet and has also become a fitness buff, running, stretching and practicing yoga to manage stress and relieve the neck and shoulder pain she developed from slouching and from long

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workdays at the computer. “In times when the economy is uncertain and the future of retirement is uncertain, being active is my way to invest,” Lycan said.

At a time when 8 in 10 workers are stressed out by at least one thing about their jobs, asking them to think deeply about retirement isn’t likely to have a calming effect. But as employees face the prospect of working later into life, some employers see it as an imperative to bring about changes in the work environment.

More than 80 percent of midsize and large U.S. companies now offer incentives for employees who participate in health programs, according to Aon Hewitt, the insurance brokerage and hu-

COURTESY OF AARON DAVIS

THE THIRD METRIC man resources company. Many focus on basic health markers, such as diet, exercise and chronic disease prevention, but a growing number take a broader view of what “lasting health” means, emphasizing relaxation and happiness. Case in point: 36 of the 50 employers topping the AARP’s 2013 list of best employers for workers over 50 offered stress management training to both fulland part-time employees.

These companies are part of a growing movement to push back against difficult economic realities by redefining the way we think about work — as less of a rat race and more of a marathon, with rests and recharging opportunities along the way.

“There’s a lot you can do in a workplace,” said Ilene Masser, director of the Reach for Wellness Program at NYU Langone Medical Center. “You can bring in an awful lot of programs, and you can really change a life.”

NYU has partnered with more than 350 companies to develop wellness programs, including workshops that help employees identify their “stress signals.” Internally, medical center employees can opt into a year-long chal-

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“ I don’t want to be the sad person that’s broke or still working long hours when I’m 65.” lenge that promotes relaxation and stress reduction in exchange for financial and other rewards. There are 30-minute seated yoga classes at lunch and a 24/7 relaxation phone line that plays three- and nine-minute guided meditations.

“Begin to take these next few moments for yourself by getting into a comfortable position, closing your

Consultant Aaron Davis, 38, strives to stay in shape so that he’ll be in the best possible health once he retires.

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THE THIRD METRIC eyes and letting distractions simply float away,” a recording coos.

The programs are aimed at keeping employees healthy both in the short- and long-term. “Our programs are focused on helping all employees develop and maintain a healthy lifestyle, including exercising and maintaining a healthy weight, regardless of length of employment,” said Masser.

Some companies are finding that thinking strategically about personal sustainability is good for the bottom line. After the insurance company Aetna discovered that employees with the highest stress levels had health care costs that were $2,000 higher than those with the least stress, it instituted two mind-body stress reduction pilot programs: one that focused on mindfulness meditation, and one that taught employees viniyoga, a type of yoga that emphasizes repetition and breathing. Employee participants experienced a 33 percent to 36 percent decrease in their perceived stress levels and also saw improvements in heart rate measures, an indication that their bodies were more adept at managing the stress that can accompany a long career.

“By helping employees reduce

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More than 80 percent of mid-size and large U.S. companies now offer incentives for employees who participate in health programs. stress or manage stress better, we can not only help them improve their health now, but also hopefully in the long term,” said Ethan Slavin, a spokesperson for Aetna.

“We hope that these programs not only help improve their health, but also serve as another reason that employees would stay with Aetna for the long term, and in turn be committed to the success of the company.”

Of course, exposure to workplace wellness programs depends on where you work. For individuals who are self-employed or work for companies without

COURTESY OF MIKE YOUNG

THE THIRD METRIC structured programs, there’s no relaxation hotline or institutional impetus to think about long-term personal sustainability.

But people like Mike Young don’t need to be told. Young, 43, a North Carolina-based real estate agent who also runs a landscaping company, regularly trains with a running club, which not only keeps him in shape but fosters friendships, a key to longevity.

He considers his weekly visits to church as integral to his wellness as his regular green smoothies.

Both help him stay balanced so he can work, perhaps indefinitely.

“For previous generations, the dream was to get yourself set up so you can quit work and not have to do anything ever again,” he said. “The more I think about it, I think that’s not good. I think I might get really bored.”

For others, the dream of retirement still beckons. Aaron Davis, 38, is an independent distributor and consultant for a network marketing company, working on commission and supplementing his income by working as a hair stylist. He takes pains to care for his well-being, sleeping eight hours a night and working out regularly, not so he can work forever, but so

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that when he retires, he’ll be in the best possible health to enjoy his free time.

“I’m aware of some of the stats about retirement, and how it’s not really happening,” said Davis. “I don’t want to be the sad person that’s broke or still working long hours when I’m 65.”

Gregory Beyer is deputy features editor of The Huffington Post.

Catherine Pearson is a senior reporter at The Huffington Post.

Real estate agent Mike Young, 43, trains with a running club to stay in shape and build friendships, both of which keep him healthy in the long term.

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25 QUESTIONS

Is Elysium As Good As District 9?

(AND 24 OTHER URGENT QUESTIONS)

Matt Damon as Max in Elysium.

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25 QUESTIONS

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LYSIUM, director Neill Blomkamp’s first film since 2009’s surprise hit District 9, is out in theaters this weekend. Elysium stars Matt Damon (The Rainmaker) as a man who desperately wants to be on a utopian space station that is called Elysium, which is also the title of the movie. Will Elysium live up to the expectations set by District 9? As a service, we answer every question that you could possibly have about Elysium. — Mike Ryan

01

Are there any songs by Elysium in Elysium? You’re thinking of the synthpop group Erasure. Elysium is a new science-fiction movie.

PREVIOUS PAGE: © 2012 COLUMBIA TRISTAR MARKETING GROUP, INC.

02

What kind of science-fiction movie is Elysium? It’s a science-fiction movie with dystopian themes that draw heavily from the Mad Max movies, only this movie stars Matt Damon.

03

So Matt Damon plays Mad Max? No, no. Matt Damon’s character is far more docile than Max Rockatansky. So, even though there are similar themes, there

should be no confusion between the two stories.

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04

What is the name of the character that Matt Damon plays?

05

What year does Elysium take place? 2154.

Max.

What is an Elysium? Elysium is a giant space station where life is perfect and disease has been eradicated.

07

What is Earth like in 2154?

Earth is livable, but not exactly what anyone would call ideal living conditions. Also, it looks very, very hot.

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Matt Damon is a big movie star, so he gets to live on Elysium, right? Again, Elysium takes place in 2154, so, probably not. But, Matt Damon’s descendents are most likely living there. As for Matt Damon’s character, Max, no, he does not live on Elysium.

09

How is someone chosen to live on Elysium? It appears that a person would have to have a lot of money. Characters often reference purchasing a ticket to Elysium, and it’s assumed that a ticket is very expensive.

10

Do we get a sense of what a normal day living on Elysium

25 QUESTIONS

is like? Not really, but the short glimpses we do get make it look like one big party at the Hamptons, which makes me hope that there is a third option for people who don’t like “dystopian desert wastelands” or Hamptons parties. (Though not mentioned in the film, I like to think there’s also a satellite called Purgatorium, or something, that at least has working wifi.)

So, does it break down to the fact that if you have money, you live on Elysium and if you don’t you live on Earth? Based on the information that we’re given in the film, yes. But, I’m sure there are some wealthy circa-2154 hipsters somewhere on Earth trying to gentrify the neighborhood.

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Elysium, a giant space station where life is perfect and disease does not exist.

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25 QUESTIONS

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What does Max do for a living? Max is a laborer of some kind. Which, considering Max’s past as a convicted criminal, is portrayed as kind of a success story.

13

So why does Max want to get to Elysium? Max suffers an accident at work that exposes him to a lethal dose of radiation and is given only five days to live. His only chance of survival is to reach Elysium because there is a cure there.

14

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If someone doesn’t have the money to buy a ticket to Elysium, how does someone get to Elysium? There are illegal ways to get there, which usually involves flying a spaceship toward Elysium and hoping that the spaceship doesn’t get shot down. If the spaceship does make it, the illegals are usually deported within a few minutes.

15

Why does anyone want to go there if they just get deported immediately? The hope is to have just enough time to use the “cure everything machine,” which seems to be as prevalent in an Elysium resident’s home as a toaster would be in ours.

16

Does Elysium use a hammer or a baseball bat to beat you over the

head with modern day symbolism concerning health care and immigration? A hammer. Probably a smaller one.

Maybe a ball-peen hammer.

17

Does Max have to use this illegal route? Yes, but his route is a little more complicated. He’s also fitted with this strange exoskeleton contraption that, a.) helps him stand because of his radiation disease, and b.) helps him fight the police robots.

Is Elysium as good as Neill Blomkamp’s first film, District 9? No.

Jodie Foster stars as Secretary of Defense Delacourt.

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19

What is the biggest problem with Elysium? Like most movies this summer, Elysium suffers from an overabundance of dumb and overcomplicated plot points. To be fair, Elysium is the least dumb of the dumb summer movies. But, considering how Blomkamp avoided this in District 9, it’s surprising and disappointing.

20

If you’re going to be blurbed in this weekend’s commercials for Elysium, what do you hope your quote would be? “Elysium is the least dumb of the dumb summer movies!” — Mike Ryan, The Huffington Post What’s an example of an overcomplicated plot point? As we know, Max needs to get to Elysium. Along the way he plans to kidnap the owner of the factory in which he used to work, John Carlyle (played by William Fichtner). It just so happens on this particular day John Carlyle had embedded covert information about Elysium that he plans to bring to the Secretary of Defense (Jodie Foster) — information that Max accidentally steals from John Carlyle. (It gets even more complicated because there’s

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25 QUESTIONS

a strange fail-safe installed with this information that I honestly can’t figure out, and if I tried to explain it would spoil important parts of the movie.)

22

Please tell me there’s not a brave little boy traveling along with Max in Elysium? Well, there is a brave little girl, but it’s not as bad as it sounds.

23

What’s the best part about Elysium? Matt Damon is solid as Max. Above all, it’s one of the first movies of the CGI era in which I didn’t feel like I was watching CGI. There are robots in this movie that look like real robots. Actually, I have no reason to believe that they are not real robots. Elysium is worth seeing for the effects alone.

24

Who is the most disappointing character in Elysium? Jodie Foster’s Secretary of Defense Delacourt, for at least 50 reasons.

Who is the oddest character in Elysium?

Sharlto Copley’s Agent Kruger, who seems like he’s in a completely different movie than Elysium.

Now, I should add, the other movie that Kruger is in looks terrific, but he’s definitely not in the same Elysium movie that everyone else is in.

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STRESS LESS

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7 Reasons for Men to Unwind

BY CAROLYN GREGOIRE

MEN AND WOMEN’S average stress levels may be roughly on par with each other, but the physical and psychological toll of long-term stress on men and women is quite different.

In addition to the numerous health impacts of stress experienced by both sexes, tension and anxiety can also take a unique toll on the male mind and body, starting with the immediate stress response. While stress tends to activate the “tend and befriend” response in women, men have been found to react to stress more with the aggressive “fight or flight” response, according to one study.

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Exit “When the fight or flight response is activated [in both sexes], our bodies go into emergency mode and take care of immediate and acute needs, focusing on getting energy to the muscles, and we don’t take care of the longer-term needs of the body,” Christy Matta, MA, author of The Stress Response, tells The Huffington Post.

“We shut down things like our immune systems, reproductive systems ... It does suppress the release of testosterone and it suppresses other reproductive systems. The wear and tear on the body is severe from repeated stress.”

With this in mind, ahead find seven important health reasons for men to de-stress.

1. DECREASED FACIAL ATTRACTIVENESS The male hormone testosterone has been linked with a strong immune system and facial attractiveness in men. A University of Aberdeen study in which women ranked the attractiveness of 94 men found that those with higher testosterone and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol had higher immune system responses, and were deemed the most attractive, Health.com reported.

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Men with higher cortisol levels, in turn, were deemed less attractive.

Cortisol, the study suggests, may play a role in blocking testosterone’s appeal to potential mates.

2. EARLY HEART DISEASE RISK An extensive body of research has established that stress is a risk factor in the development of heart disease, and inherited stress can also increase the risk of early heart disease. Recently, a Henry Ford Hospital study found that men with a family history of heart disease had a diagnosis of heart disease an average of 12 years earlier than those without a family history. They were also more likely to have a higher stress symptom score (an evaluation based on worry, impatience, anger and other symptoms) than men

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Exit without a family history of heart disease — suggesting that the propensity to get stressed may be, to some degree, inherited.

“Depression and stress are known risk factors for heart disease, and they both have strong heritability,” lead author Mark W. Ketterer, Ph.D., of Henry Ford Hospital’s Department of Behavioral Health, said in a press release.

“None of the other risk factors, including high cholesterol, high blood pressure or diabetes, were shown to have a significant familial link in this group. Therefore, it’s likely that men who have an early onset of heart disease might have a genetic predisposition to stress, which causes the heart disease.”

3. SPERM & OFFSPRING DEVELOPMENT Here’s a big incentive for future fathers to start de-stressing now: Research in animals suggests that chronic stress could result in gene expression changes to dad’s sperm — and those changes could manifest in his offspring in the form of a muted reaction to stress.

“It didn’t matter if dads were going through puberty or in adulthood when stressed before they mated.

We’ve shown here for the first time

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While stress tends to activate the ‘tend and befriend’ response in women, men have been found to react to stress more with the aggressive ‘fight or flight’ response.” that stress can produce long-term changes to sperm that reprogram the offspring HPA stress axis regulation,” lead researcher Tracy L. Bale, Ph.D., said in a university press release. “These findings suggest one way in which paternalstress exposure may be linked to such neuropsychiatric diseases.”

4. PROSTATE CANCER DEVELOPMENT A recent study on mice found chronic stress to accelerate the development of prostate cancer, suggesting that prostate cancer patients could benefit from stress reduction as part of their treatment.

University of California studies have demonstrated that stress management can yield positive results in men with prostate cancer.

5. ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION According to WebMD, 10 to 20 percent of all cases of erectile dysfunction (ED) are linked to psychological factors like stress, anxiety and depression. Robert M. Sapolsky, Ph.D., professor of neu-

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rology at Stanford, explained that turning on the parasympathetic nervous system (also known as the “relax and renew” system) is essential for arousal — but when we’re stressed, we’re operating from the sympathetic nervous system (“fight or flight”).

“You have trouble having an erection in the first place because you can’t establish that parasympathetic tone,” said Sapolsky in a 2012 talk for the Science of a Meaningful Life series. “[Or] you manage to have an erection ... and you accelerate the transition from parasympathetic to sympathetic, and the whole thing goes too quickly.”

6. LOWER SPERM COUNT Stress and anxiety could play a large role in male fertility, according to new research. Recent studies conducted in Italy, as reported

by Reuters Health, found that men who were stressed ejaculated less and had a lower sperm count and concentration than those who were not under stress. Stress was also positively correlated with deformed and less mobile sperm.

7. SOCIAL WITHDRAWAL The stereotype of the “strong and silent type” may actually be a pic-

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ture of the male stress response.

A 2010 University of Southern California study found that men who are stressed out exhibit less activity in the brain regions associated with understanding others’ feelings. When placed under acute stress, the men had less of a brain response to facial expressions, especially fear and anger, whereas women had greater activity in these brain regions.

“These are the first findings to indicate that sex differences in the effects of stress on social behavior extend to one of the most basic social transactions — processing someone else’s facial expression,” Mara Mather, director of the Emotion and Cognition Lab at USC, said in a press release. “Under stress, men tend to withdraw socially while women seek emotional support.”

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EAT THIS

Win Hearts With This Crepe Cake

BY KRISTEN AIKEN

HERE’S a secret about baking that most great bakers keep hidden, but I’m about to blow it for all of us. Here it is: it’s not really about the baking. For those of us with even the tiniest bit of anxiety, shyness, or fear of rejection, baking is a profound expression of our affection. It’s the least creepy way to extend a heartfelt message without saying a word, whether that message is, “Hey, I really like sitting in this newsroom with you all day,” or, “Hey, I’m secretly in love with you and maybe want to have your babies.” See? It’s a totally non-creepy, non-verbal way to say something that could potentially be very awkward. Baking is a safe haven for your heart and a substitute for your words.

T

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PREVIOUS PAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK/MCHIN; THIS PAGE FROM TOP: LARA HATA/GETTY IMAGES; DAVID MARSDEN/GETTY IMAGES

This is . . . a cake that sprang forth from the recipe rubble with a blinding ray of light and a heavenly choir of angels.”

Keep in mind that when a baker offers you a slice of their latest project, they might as well be offering you their fragile little heart.

That said, there is nothing us bakers love more than an enthusiastic eater. Eat our cake happily, and we’ll adore you forever. (Reject it, and we might curse your name a few times.) It’s for that reason that we spend our best efforts on our favorite people, in which case the term “labor of love” applies most literally. The enthusiastic eater is the type of person for whom you make a crepe cake. A 32-layer crepe cake filled with layers of hazelnut cream and drenched in a dark chocolate ganache glaze.

This is a recipe I unearthed during my time working at Martha Stewart, a cake that sprang forth from the recipe rubble with a blinding ray of light and a heavenly choir of angels. It’s the kind of recipe that looks daunting, with more steps than you’d care to count, but try not to think of it that way. Let’s think of it as “more fun time you can spend in the kitchen” (that may be a stretch, but I’m really trying to convince you how much you need to make this cake).

IF YOU BREAK IT DOWN, THESE ARE THE BASIC STEPS YOU NEED TO TAKE:

1. M ake 32 chocolate crepes. Do yourself a favor and buy yourself one of these handheld crepe makers. It’s cheap, it’ll speed up the process tenfold, and it’ll create uniformly sized crepes, which is very important when you’re stacking 32 of them on top of each other and expecting them not to slide off in an avalanche.

BEST NEWS: You can make the crepes a couple of days in advance.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: GETTY IMAGES/FLICKR OPEN; KRISTEN AIKEN; SHUTTERSTOCK/PAPOBCHOTE AKKAHBUTR; RIOU/ GETTY IMAGES; JAMIE CARUSI (ILLUSTRATIONS)

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EAT THIS

Exit 2. M ake the hazelnut cream filling. Don’t be a hero: Whip out your stand mixer (or a hand blender) and let it do the work for you. There’s meringue involved, and there’s a thermometer involved. Don’t let either of those things scare you away, because listen — you’re probably blessed with the same temperature-reading and button-pressing skills that Martha is. She’s not a robot, contrary to rumor.

ALSO OF NOTE: The hazelnut filling calls for “hazelnut cream,” which has confused everyone in the Martha Stewart universe. This is just Nutella, guys. What’s that? You don’t like Nutella? Fine. Replace it with whatever you want — peanut butter, melted chocolate, caramel, butterscotch.

Anything that’s a similar consistency to Nutella is just fine.

3. Assemble the layers. This just takes a large offset spatula and some patience. Just remember that every layer counts: If you spread the first layer of filling unevenly, you’ll end up with a cake as asymmetrical as Javier Bardem’s nostrils.

4. D rench the cake in ganache. That’s the fun part. Martha will show you the way.

Then stick it in the fridge.

Then feed it to someone lucky!

TAP HERE TO MAKE MARTHA STEWART’S DARKEST CHOCOLATE CREPE CAKE STEP-BY-STEP

ALSO TRY:

Lemon Strawberry Crepe Cake

Boston Cream Crepe Cake

Spicy Chocolate Mousse Crepe Cake

Biscoff & Raspberry Crepe Cake

Nutella & Cream Crepe Cake

01

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Top Anthony Weiner Aide Calls Former Intern a ‘Slutbag’

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NSA Program Collects ‘Nearly Everything a User Does on the Internet’

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PARALYZED MAN ADOPTS PUPPY; PUPPY EATS HIS TESTICLES

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05 Arizona Boy Digging for Worms Finds a Loaded Handgun Instead

More Than One Million Americans Can’t Get Bank Accounts Due to Small Mistakes

06 Exit

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‘Frankenburger’ Made With Test-Tube Meat Has Arrived

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Kentucky Citizens Call New Science Curriculum ‘Socialism,’ ‘Fascist’

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GOP GOVERNOR GIVES ABORTION RIGHTS PROTESTERS A PLATE OF COOKIES

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10 Russian Official: Gay Olympic Athletes Will Be Subject to Arrest

Woman Throws Starving Dog Down a Garbage Chute

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