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Today's
Stories
February 14/15, 2004
Stan Goff
Beloved Haiti
February 13, 2004
Alan Maass
Kevin
Cooper's Fight to Live
Karyn Strickler
McCarthyism in the Sierra Club
Annie Higgins
On
a Street in America
Adam Federman
Democratic Snipers Target Nader
Mike Whitney
George W. Faces the Nation
Brian Cloughley
Our Imperial Leader Has Spoken
Website of the Day
Lying Action Figure Doll
February 12, 2004
Ray McGovern
George
Tenet's Spin Cycle
Robert Jensen
Bush's
Nuclear Hypocrisy
Saul Landau
Elegy to the Salton Sea
February
11, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Hail, Kerry: Senator Facing-Both-Ways
Steve Perry
Bush
v. Bush?
February
10, 2004
Kurt
Nimmo
Inquisition in Iowa
Ron Jacobs
Politics and the Beatles: Don't
You Know You Can Count Me Out (In)
Elizabeth
Schulte
The Many Faces of John Kerry
Mickey
Z
Meet the Oxmans: "The Rich
Shouldn't Sleep at Night Either"
February
9, 2004
Michael
Donnelly
Will Skull and Bones Really Change
CEOs? Inside John Kerry's Closet
Chris Floyd
Smells Like Team Spirit: the Bush
B-Boys Replay Their Greatest Hits
Bill
Christison
What's Wrong with the CIA?
Dr. Susan
Block
Janet Jackson's Mammary Moment:
Boob Tube Super Bowl
February
7/8, 2004
Kathleen
Christison
Offending Valerie: Dealing with
Jewish Self-Absorption
Jeff Ballinger
No Sweat Shopping
Dave
Lindorff
Spray and Pray in Iraq: a Marine
in Transit
Alexander
Cockburn
McNamara: the Sequel
February
6, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Are the Kurds in the Way?
Joanne
Mariner
Anita Bryant's Legacy
Saul
Landau
Happiness and Botox
Kurt Nimmo
Horror Non-fiction: A How-To Guide
from Perle and Frum
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The Real Intelligence Failure:
Our Own
February
5, 2004
Benjamin
Shepard
Turning NYC into a Patriot Act Free
Zone
Khury
Petersen-Smith
A Report from Occupied Iraq: "We Don't Want Army USA"
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2003
Teresa
Josette
The Exeuctioner's Pslam? Christian Nation? Yeah, Right
David Krieger
Why Dr. King's Message on Vietnam is Relevant to Iraq
Christopher
Brauchli
Monkey Business: Of Recess and Evolution in Georgia Schools
Norman
Solomon
The Deadly Lies of Reliable Sources
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Presenting President Edwards!
February
4, 2004
Brian
McKinlay
Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's
Last Round Up?
Mark
Gaffney
Ariel Sharon's Favorite Senator: Ron Wyden and Israel
Judith
Brown
Palestine and the Media
Frederick
B. Hudson
Moseley-Braun and the Butcher: Campaign for Justice or Big Oil's
Junta?
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating
the Spooks
M.
Junaid Alam
Philly School Workers Fight for Fair Contract
Fran Shor
Whose Boob Tube?
Kevin
Cooper
This is Not My Execution and I Will Not Claim It
February
3, 2004
Alan
Maass
The
Dems' New Mantra: What They Really Mean by "Electability"
Nick
Halfinger
How the Other Half Lives: Embedded
in Iraq
Rahul
Mahajan
Our True Intelligence Failure
Neve Gordon
The Only Democracy in the Middle East?
Laura
Carlsen
Mexico: Two Anniversaries; Two Futures
Terry
Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Powell from the Boobs & Body Parts
Fairness Campaign
Hammond
Guthrie
Investigating the Meaningless
Website
of the Day
Waging Peace
February
2, 2004
Gary
Leupp
The Buddhist Nun in Tom Ridge's Jail
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Manners of Their Deaths: Capital Punishment in a Smoke-Free
Environment
Tom
Wright
The Prosecution of Captain Yee
Winslow
Wheeler
Inside the Bush Defense Budget
Lee Ballinger
Janet Jackson's Naked Truth
Leonard
Pitts, Jr
For Blacks, the Game of Justice is
Rigged
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Hollow Candidate:
The Trouble with Howard Dean
Website
of the Day
Resistance:
In the Eye of the American Hegemon
Jan. 31 / Feb 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
January 30, 2004
Saul
Landau
Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List
Michael
Donnelly
Bush's Second Front: The War in
the Woods
Elaine
Cassel
Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo
David Vest
More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton
Mike
Whitney
The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression
David
Miller
The Hutton Whitewash
Sam
Husseini
How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake",
Senator Kerry?
January 29, 2004
Patricia
Nelson Limerick
John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist
Ron
Jacobs
Homeland Security and "Legalized"
Immigration
Rahul Mahajan
New Hampshire v. Iraq
Greg
Weiher
Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on
Moon and Mars
Norman
Solomon
The State of the Media Union
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Does NH Mean Anything?
January
28, 2004
Kathy
Kelly
Bearing Witness Against Teachers of
Torture and Assassination
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
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
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
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Weekend
Edition
February 14 / 15, 2004
Dean's Demise
No
Big Loss for the Left
By JOSH FRANK
In Vermont the prosecution never rests, or at
least it didn't during Howard Dean's tenure. As governor, Dean
openly claimed that the legal system unfairly benefited criminal
defendants over prosecutors.
Dean in early 2001 chose not to reappoint
Vermont's four-term defender general Robert Appel, due to their
difference in legal philosophy. During Appel's stint as defender
general of Vermont, his ideology and interpretation of the law
often clashed with Governor Dean's.
Back in 1999 Dean also blocked Appel
from accepting over $150,000 in federal grants, which was to
be used to help the state represent mentally-ill defendants.
Following the incident Vermont's Rutland
Herald editorialized on Dean's stonewalling of federal funds:
"For Dean to block a government
agency from receiving federal money was unusual in itself. But
Dean's openly expressed bias against criminal defendants provided
a partial explanation. Dean has made no secret of his belief
that the justice system gives all the breaks to defendants. Consequently,
during the 1990s, state's attorneys, police, and corrections
all received budget increases vastly exceeding increases enjoyed
by the defender general's office. That meant the state's attorneys
were able to round up ever increasing numbers of criminal defendants,
but the public defenders were not given comparable resources
to respond."
Such funds are typically used to pay
for expert testimony in criminal cases. Truly, said monies are
imperative for providing a fair trial for mentally disabled defendants.
Appel openly commented on his frustration with Howard Dean's
view of citizen's constitutional rights, and regarding Dean's
belief that defendants get all the breaks Appel quarreled, "I
would say it is a fundamental difference in perspective between
me and my boss."
And in a July 1997 radio interview with
Bob Kinzel of the Vermont News Service, Dean announced, "I'm
looking to steer the [Vermont Supreme] court back towards consideration
of the rights of the victims."
In this same interview Dean claimed he
would initiate this through expediting the judicial process,
as well as by appointing state judges who were willing to undermine
the Bill of Rights.
As governor, Dean wanted to use such
justices to "quickly convict guilty criminals," and
added that he was "looking for someone who is for justice."
He went on to say, "My beef about the judicial system is
that it does not emphasize truth and justice over lawyering.
It emphasizes legal technicalities and rights of the defendants
and all that."
The Vermont Press Bureau on July 17,
1997 quoted the reaction of Vermont Constitutional Law Professor
and Attorney Michael Mello to Dean's radio quips. "Dean
is just ignorant," charged Mello, "I don't think he
understands what judges ought to do. He perceives the Supreme
Court as being broken in some way and sees himself on a mission
to fix it. That is pure, ignorant, political demagoguery. Nonsense
on stilts."
Many lawyers across Vermont claim the
legal system under governor Dean was far too "one-dimensional."
In the same Vermont Press Bureau article, Leighton Detora, the
President of the Vermont Trial Lawyers Association was quoted
as saying, "I don't think he has any regard for any process
that gets in the way of what he wants to accomplish Look at
how he was trying to move the justices around like chess pieces
there. He's a doctor, and as such, he has all the learned responses
to the legal profession -- that we are just out here, and lawyers
jobs are to make things more complicated," said Detora.
"In his own arrogance, I think somehow he thinks he has
a lock on truth and wisdom."
That truth and wisdom has all but derailed
Dean's campaign. His internet support has turned out to be narrow
and unfounded. Dean's team also squandered an unprecedented amount
of money on vile TV and radio ads which fattened the pockets
of his ex-campaign manager Joe Trippi. It was blatant conflict
of interest as Trippi's media firm cashed in on almost every
ad produced for the Dean campaign. And his horrid advertisements
that aired in Iowa and New Hampshire shoved his campaign right
off the political tight-rope it had walked for so many months.
It also didn't help that the Democratic Leadership Council, the
insiders that really call the shots in the early primaries, shunned
Dean's bid for the White House despite his corporate tenure in
Vermont. The whole while the mainstream media focused its energy
on Dean's fiery demeanor and personality quarks, mislabeling
him a lefty radical and over playing his screaming speech following
his Iowa fall. But Dean is not progressive, he has always been
a measly centrist.
So Dean's failures early on cost him
vital traction in Washington and Michigan, where he had high
hopes but was crushed during their February 7th primaries. Governor
Dean's campaign has virtually ignored all other primaries since
New Hampshire, coming in a distant fourth in both of the February
11th primaries in Virginia and Tennessee, where John Kerry continued
along his brutal rampage of garnering delegates. However, Dean
is putting all his remaining energy in capturing the upcoming
showdown in Wisconsin on the 17th. Indeed Wisconsin may be Dean's
last stand, where he will hang up his campaign hat and head back
home to the Green Mountain State if he's not victorious.
But don't be too disheartened. Like his
prosecution stances as governor, Dean's platform overall has
always been right of center. Despite his critiques John Kerry's
Beltway ties, Dean himself is not much more than a fiscal Republican.
That's right. During Dean's rule in Vermont,
he was renowned for cutting state budgets and promoting rigid
economic conservatism. And that fiscal austerity caused few Vermonters
to consider Dean a friend of labor. IBM, one of Vermont's largest
employers, consistently downsized their workforce as employees
attempted to unionize. The manager of IBM's government relations
at the plant in Essex Vermont was quoted in Business Week in
August of 2001, as saying, "[Dean's] secretary of commerce
would call me once a week just to see how things were going."
What a friendly governor, but labor advocates
claimed Dean rarely listened to their concerns.
Political science professor at the University
of Vermont Garrison Nelson, also says that "[Dean] is not
a liberal. He's a pro-business, Rockefeller Republican."
Conservative pro-business individuals
in Vermont especially loved Howard Dean's perplexed business
agenda. As Business Week reported, Wayne Roberts who worked for
the Reagan Administration thought Dean was a "frugal man."
"There is no way in heck he would tolerate a deficit,"
Roberts blasted.
John McClaughry, president of the conservative
Vermont think tank, the Ethan Allen Institute, says "The
Howard Dean you are seeing on the national scene is not the Dean
that we saw around here for the last decade. He has moved sharply
left." Many of these critics site Dean's political ambitions
as the reasons for changing his rhetoric when rallying his young
supporters along the campaign trail.
Nevertheless Dean still claims to be
an old school fiscal conservative, and hails his balancing of
the state budget in Vermont. On August 30th 2003, the Washington
Post quoted a Democrat and former Vermont state Senate president
Dick McCormack as saying of Dean that, "He made us very
disciplined about spending, even if we didn't really like it.
I was a liberal Democrat, and I fought him a lot."
Vermont is not legally bound to balance
the state's budget, but for Dean, it may as well have been.
"I'm a fiscal conservative,"
Dean said in early in the primaries. "I'm most proud of
our fiscal stability -- I left the state in better shape than
I found it Capitalism is a great system."
So what did Dean do for Vermont? Not
as much as he takes credit for.
On Dean's watch Medicare costs in Vermont
skyrocketed. Dean's endorsement of Newt Gingrich's economic program
in the 1990s was grossly apparent. Dean time and again praised
Gingrich for slashing Medicare and other social programs in order
to help balance the federal budget. Dean said at the time, "The
way to balance the [federal] budget is for Congress to cut Social
Security, move the retirement age to 70 [cut] Medicare and veterans
pensions, while the states cut everything else." And Dean
took that initiative.
As the Associated Press noted on November
24th of 2003, "[Dean] did make cuts in Vermont to programs
for the elderly, blind and disabled when balancing budgets [And
he] did cut some social programs in Vermont."
Under the guise of "fiscal responsibility,"
Dean also managed to cut the Aid to Needy Families with Children
program, public education, and as noted, funding for public defendants.
In total governor Dean cut $6 million
in state education and retirement funds for public school teachers
in Vermont, as well as $7 million of state employee benefits.
Dean crushed health care for the elderly with a $4 million dollar
gouge, and stomped a $2 million dollar reduction in Vermont welfare
programs that were earmarked for the disabled and blind in state.
Medicaid recipients also lost over $1.2 million in much needed
benefits.
Dean claimed these cuts were mandatory
and unavoidable because the state had a $60 million dollar deficit.
All this in a state where the population is a little over 600,000.
Vermonter Keith Rosenthal points out
in an article for the International Socialist Review last fall;
during Dean's tenure, he was able to fund a $30 million for a
new prison in Springfield Vermont, a $7 million for a low-interest
loan program for businesses, as well as cut the state's income
tax by 8 percent which accounted for to $30 million dollars in
revenue.
Many liberals in the Vermont state legislature
were angered by Dean's balancing tactics. The legislators did
not feel comfortable with "cutting taxes in a way that benefits
the wealthiest taxpayers." And by 2002, Dean's prosecutor
friendly government increased investments in state prisons by
nearly 150 percent, while funds for state colleges grew by a
mere 7 percent.
So what is so wrong with humming the
tune of balanced budget responsibility? Certainly President Bush
has been singing in the wrong octave for the last three years.
But when eliminating every cent of deficit is done at expense
to the common good, progressives should feel queasy when confronted
with Dean's conservative mantra. But then again they won't have
to be faced with such rhetoric too much longer. Dean is dieing
fast. Too bad these same arguments can be made against botox
injected John Kerry, who may soon lose face if the new infidelity
claims turn out to be true. Sure we need Bush out; it is just
unfortunate the Democrats are the likely replacement.
Josh Frank
can be reached at: frank_joshua@hotmail.com
Weekend
Edition Features for February 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
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