NYT Front|Back:King George's Birthday vs. Dubious Mexico Election

FRONT:

A Touchy Topic: Boomer in Chief Hits the Big 6-0
Bush turns sixty. The New York Times fetes King George with a front-page puff piece on how he's handling the milestone. A ridiculous piece of tripe that's hardly fit for print, let alone prime real estate.

Intro:

Let us now peek into the psyche of America's most powerful baby boomer, George W. Bush.

He is not given to self-analysis — "George is not an overly introspective person," his wife, Laura, once said with dry understatement — but Mr. Bush turns 60 on Thursday, and like most other men hitting that milestone, he just cannot seem to get the thought off his mind.

BACK (Page A8):

Suspense Grows as Vote Count in Mexico Race Wraps Up
Mexico awaits the final tally in the presidential election between conservative candidate Felipe Calderón and left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the closest in its history. "Irregularities" in how the vote was counted sound curiously similar to events in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.

Excerpt:

The official count began amid a volatile political storm kicked up Tuesday by the announcement by federal electoral authorities that some three million votes went untabulated in the preliminary count; by demands from Mr. López Obrador for a vote-by-vote recount; and by objections to those demands from the government.

Mr. Calderón, backed by big business and President Vicente Fox, appeared before the news media to repeat his claims of victory. Mr. López Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City who has the support of the poor, held his own news conference to restate his case that the election had been rigged.

He said his campaign had uncovered irregularities at tens of thousands of polling places. Among them, he said, there were polls where the numbers of votes exceeded either the numbers of registered voters or the numbers of ballots. He said that in some cases votes from a single polling place had been tabulated several times.

"So what are we asking for?" Mr. López Obrador said. "That they conduct a full revision, poll by poll. We will act responsibly, as always. But we are asking the authorities to help clear up any doubts, to review inconsistencies and to not allow the will of the citizens to be violated."