Macomb County, MI Executive Mark Hackel released audio recordings to local Detroit TV stations in which he claims the voice of Warren, MI Mayor Jim Fouts can be heard saying mentally disabled people are  retards  and  not even human beings.  Hackel claimed the tapes were given to him by someone who is or was a member of Fouts  staff.Channel 4 WDIV-TV reports that reporter Mara McDonald spoke with the person who made the tape, an employee who recorded Fouts in his office. The context was a discussion of Fouts  plans to attend an event regarding the Special Olympics, according to the TV station.Lepine said Special Olympics, sports training and competition for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, are a  very big deal for the community. In one of the recordings, the man s voice said mean things about the way mentally disabled people use bathrooms. What good are they? They re dysfunctional human beings. They re not even human beings.   I don t want any part of this. This is one of the worse things about being mayor. This is the bottom of the barrel.   I don t want to be around them, and I wish them well in a cage,  the voice said in the recording. Fouts has a controversial history with the Democratic Party. He ran for state representative in the 1970s as a Republican, but in Warren, the city offices are nonpartisan. Fouts, however, has attended many Democratic events over the years, but endorsed U.S. Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, for president in 2008 before switching his allegiance to then-Sen. Barack Obama.In this year s election cycle, he was an enthusiastic supporter of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, but later complained about how the party treated him at a Democratic debate in Flint in February and that he didn t get to introduce Clinton when she gave a speech in Warren in August.Bouts, who avoided reporters  calls on Friday, in a Thursday night Facebook post denied it was him, and said that Hackel had experts available to  electronically engineer it.   Detroit FP