Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
18, 2003
Paybacks Are Hell
Bush
v. Gore and the Cali Recall
By ELAINE CASSEL
I recall listening to now Solicitor General Theodore
Olson making his pro-Bush argument before the Supreme Court in
December 2000. He was not doing particularly well and his side-kick,
Chief Justice William Rehnquist, stepped in and proposed a promising
argument.
Might it not be a violation of the 14th
Amendment's equal protection clause to have different ways of
recounting votes in differing jurisdictions? Brilliant idea,
Olson must have thought, as he pedaled furiously to pretend as
if he had thought up the argument himself. He need not have,
as Rehnquist carried on for him, even suggesting case precedents.
That equal protection argument threw
the experts--especially since the equal protection clause--which
forbids states from interfering with federal rights--would not
seem to apply to elections. For you see, there is no constitutional
or federal right to vote! If you did not know that before Bush
v. Gore, I hope you learned then that the right to vote for state
office is governed by state law. Further, your right to elect
electors to vote in the electoral college, which elects the president
of the United States, is likewise governed by state law (though
the manner of the meeting of the electors and casting the vote
for President and Vice President is governed by the Constitution).
Said the court,
The individual citizen has no federal
constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of
the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses
a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint
members of the Electoral College. U. S. Const., Art. II, sec1.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in
ruling on a suit by the American Civil Liberties Union and other
organizations, applied the full force of the equal protection
argument to the upcoming effort of some Californians to recall
Gov. Gray Davis. Several counties (the poorest and those with
large minority populations) don't have the new fancy voting machines.
They have, instead, punch cards, complete with hanging chads,
those diabolical voting remnants that gummed up the Florida count.
The 9th Circuit said that those votes
would be more likely than those votes rendered by means of the
new machines to be tabulated incorrectly or not counted at all.
Under Bush v. Gore, the court said, such a voting scheme is antithetical
to the 14th Amendment.
No sooner had the opinion been announced
than Republicans in California and across the country accused
the 9th Circuit of perpetrating a left-wing conspiracy against
the would-be new California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger (or,
to be fair, I guess, against all Republicans). Someone else accused
former President Bill Clinton of influencing the judicial opinion.
That's because Clinton was in California rallying support for
Davis the day before the ruling was announced. Ah, a perfect
correlation.
It is likely that the full panel of the
9th Circuit will rehear the case. There is no telling what it
will do. If it votes along political lines, it will toss the
three-judge court ruling. In any event, this case will make its
way to the Supreme Court.
There, the justices can leave it alone
or delve in. Either way, they are hung by their own petard, quite
literally. I say this with enormous glee. For the decision, according
to election law and constitutional law experts, was totally without
legal precedent and defied all logic.
Will they follow their own rationale
of Bush v. Gore? That is, "When contending parties invoke
the process of the courts, however, it becomes our unsought responsibility
to resolve the federal and constitutional issues the judicial
system has been forced to confront."
Or will they hide behind the excuse they
created for themselves? They demurred, "Our consideration
is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal
protection in election processes generally presents many complexities."
If they do take the case and rule for
the Republicans, they will appear to be the political animals
that they are.
And if the high court rules for the plaintiffs
and, in an act of legal and logical consistency, stops the recall?
A novel thought, but not an event I expect to be writing about.
Elaine Cassel
practices law in Virginia and the District of Columbia, teachers
law and psychology, and follows the Bush regime's dismantling
of the Constitution at Civil
Liberties Watch. This article originally appeared on FindLaw's
Writ. She
can be reached at: ecassel1@cox.net
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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