Will Pitt's truthout program: talks about Dean and Gillepsie

Stupid train.

thanks for doing the program. You sounded great :-)

Need a tissue?

Sadly, the sound is not working currently on my 'puter.'

Our top story today comes from the well-worn campaign trails of New Hampshire, and comes as well from an unexpected source. The Republican Party, in the guise of Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie, took direct aim at Vermont Governor Howard Dean. Dean, who leads the other Democratic Presidential contenders in several polls, has been harshly critical of George W. Bush’s foreign policy record. This past Sunday in Merrimack, New Hampshire, Dean accused Bush of not knowing how to protect America. “``He doesn't understand what it takes to defend this country,” said Dean. “He doesn't understand that you better keep troop morale high rather than just flying over for Thanksgiving.''

Gillespie responded to this attack by quoting a statement made by Dean last April. According to Gillespie, Dean said at that time that America had to prepare itself for the time when it wouldn’t have the strongest military, rolling out an attack line that will doubtlessly reappear many times in the next several months. The Dean campaign did not immediately respond to this broadside, but Dean has said that his comment was that the United States will not have the strongest military if it does not ``begin to use diplomacy as part of our foreign policy.''

Bear in mind that Bush will have somewhere in the neighborhood of three quarters of a billion dollars to use in his campaign to win the 2004 election, giving him a 10-1 spending advantage, basically, over all nine Democrats combined. There is also the old Chicago saying that you should never interfere with a perfectly good train wreck; in other words, the Democratic candidates are beating each other up on an almost daily basis, and you’d think the Republicans would just sit back and enjoy the show. But no. Dean has received from the Republicans one of the sharpest attacks against a lone Democratic candidate to date in this campaign. This, among other things, raises his profile considerably. Jim Dyke, communications director for the Republican National Committee, said the party does not consider Dean the Democratic frontrunner. If that is the case, why did they come at him? Truthout will be keeping a close eye on this.

Elsewhere on the campaign trail, George W. Bush bought himself some trouble in key electoral college states by dropping tariffs against steel imports. Our sixth story in this edition describes the decision to drop these tariffs, made after the European Union threatened to levy a 2.2 billion dollar trade embargo against American products. For Mr. Bush, this was a Hobson’s choice; he was in trouble no matter what he did. If he kept the tariffs on imported steel in order to protect domestic steel manufacturers, the European Union’s trade war would have affected billions of dollars worth of products manufactured in many key electoral states. By dropping the tariffs and knuckling under to the European Union’s threats, Mr. Bush has angered the steel industries in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia – all vital states for both party’s election hopes. In what could be considered a cruel twist, Mr. Bush picked up $850,000 in campaign contributions in Pittsburg, heartland of the American steel industry, just before deciding to remove the tariffs.

Our second story for this edition, ‘ACLU Says Patriot Act Unconstitutional,’ describes the first legal challenge to be brought against section 215 of the patriot act, the part that lets federal agents obtain such things as library lists and medical information. The American Civil Liberties Union is spearheading this effort in the U.S. district court in Detroit, Michigan. The ACLU filed this lawsuit in July on behalf of the Muslim Community Association of Ann Arbor and five other nonprofit groups. The U.S. government argued that the case be dismissed, saying there is no basis for the plaintiffs' complaints since the provision being challenged has never been used. We will keep you posted for any developments in this matter.

On the Iraq front, the UNMOVIC weapons inspectors, who began the search for the still-missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but were not allowed to complete the process, are adamantly requesting that they be allowed back into Iraq to complete their work. They have been barred from doing so by the Bush administration, which is using its own hand-picked team of inspectors to try and ferret out the missing weapons. Meanwhile, pressure is mounting for American forces to justify the claims made earlier in the week that 54 guerillas were killed in that firefight in Samarra. A police station was shelled in central Iraq, wounding six. The full details on these matters can be found in the third, fourth and fifth stories in this edition.