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Exclusive to CounterPunch Newsletter Subscribers! Hillary Clinton's Fatal Vices Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair dissect HRC in her White House years and conclude their series on the woman who may be the next president. PLUS Eva Liddell on the man who really set the course of the Bush presidency PLUS Andy Worthington on the battle for the rights of the Guantanamo detainees PLUS Debbie Nathan on what the border crackdown has done to the women crossing the Rio Grande. Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Remember contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now Order CounterPunch By Email for Only $35 a Year and Receive a Free Copy of "Imperial Crusades: a Diary of Three Wars" by Cockburn and St. Clair

Now Available! How the Press Led the USA Into the Iraq War Buy End Times Now! Today's Stories September 8 / 9, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Will the US Really Bomb Iran? September 7, 2007 Robert Fantina Those Iraq Reports: Bush vs. Reality John Ross Coca-Cola's Raid on a Sacred Mountain James Brooks The Occupation Within Russell Mokhiber Robert Reich and the Elimination of Corporate Criminal Liability Joshua Frank The Green Implosion Continues: Cyberlynching John Murphy John Walsh On the Green Party Mark Brenner New York Taxi Workers Strike Over Tracking Devices Mike Ferner "I Will Salute No More Forever" Website of the Day Help Save Osny Zachary's Life   September 6, 2007 Kathleen and Bill Christison Bush, Iran and Israel's Hidden Hand Allan J. Lichtman When General Petraeus Speaks, Don't Listen ... Norman Solomon The Secret Addiction of Thomas Friedman Yifat Susskind Hurricane Felix's First Responders: Courage and Tragedy on the Miskito Coast Catherine Fenton Why I Am Going to the Protest Laura Santina Can the War Machine be Contained? Farzana Versey Fission Kashmir Yves Engler Haiti: Where a Wage of $2 a Day is Too Much for the Lords of Industry to Pay Kelly Overton Bang Bang; Shoot Shoot: Is Hunting Racist? Michael Simmons One Jew's Views: The Strange Genius of Drew Friedman and Kominsky Crumb Website of the Day Dams and Genocide in Guatemala     September 5, 2007 Stan Goff The End Begins Michael Dickinson Working for Mother Teresa: Memoirs of a Rebellious Volunteer Matthew Abraham Standing Firm with Norman Finkelstein and DePaul's Heroic Students: a Defining Moment Patrick Cockburn The Basra Debacle Dave Lindorff Beware the Wounded Beast Paul Craig Roberts Who Are the Fanatics? Clifton Ross Ecuador and the Struggle for Latin American Unity Elizabeth Schulte Katrina's Forgotten Refugees Joseph Grosso Labor Day in New York City Ben Terrall Where's Nancy? On Trying to Protest Pelosi in San Francisco Website of the Day A Guide to Narco Dollars   September 4, 2007 Jean Bricmont Why Bush Can Get Away with Attacking Iran Patrick Cockburn Cut and Run in Iraq Ron Jacobs The Haditha Massacre: Spinning a War Crime Tom Kerr Buried Alive on San Quentin's Death Row Gary Leupp The Case of Jose Maria Sison Sonja Karkar The Weeping Olive Trees of Palestine Heather Gray The Best and Worst of America: 9/11, Joseph Lowery and the Lethal Silence of Billy Graham Fidel Castro The Super-Revolutionaries Jackie Corr Home Depot Comes to Butte--Begging Bowl in Hand Sunsara Taylor Katrina and the Progress of the System Website of the Day Colombia Journal   September 3, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Brits Flee from Basra Eamon McCann Qana, Derry: The Dead Lie in Familiar Shapes Joshua Frank The End of the Green Party? Chris Floyd Post-Mortem America: Bush's Year of Triumph Marjorie Cohn A Look at Bush's Iran War Plans Walter Brasch The News Drones: How Fake Photos Helped Lead the US to War in Iraq Matt Reichel Redefining the American Dream Website of the Day Don't Get Fooled Again   September 1 / 2, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Entrapment Snares Larry Craig Andy Worthington Britain's Guantánamo Saul Landau The Tragic Ordeal of the Cuban Five David Keen An Occident Waiting to Happen: Intellectuals and the War on Terror Patrick Cockburn The Collapse of Iraq's Health Care Services Diana Johnstone Back in Uncle Sam's Pocket George Longstreth, MD & Karen Longstreth, RN The Sorrows of Occupation: Life in the West Bank Linda M. Woolf A Sad Day for Psychologists--a Sadder Day for Human Rights Ralph Nader Wrapping the World with Advertising Fred Gardner The Trial of Mollie Fry, MD Ben Tripp Enquiry in America Today David Michael Green American Indigestion: Why Bush Governs from the Gut Missy Comley Beattie Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: What the GOP Hasn't Learned About Tolerance Michael Dickinson Who's Cheating: Remembering Princess Diana Paul Krassner Assholes of the Week: From Larry Craig to Wesley Clark Ron Jacobs A Sports Nation of Millions Poets' Basement Buknatski, Davies and Mickey Z   August 31, 2007 Jeff Gibbs Why I Am Not Going to the Protest Paul Craig Roberts The War Criminal in the Living Room Ray McGovern Do We Have the Courage to Stop War with Iran? Robert Weissman The Benchmarks Iraq is Missing Matt Vidal Subprime Lending and Shady Mortgages Robin Mittenthal The Biofuels Trap Chris Kutalik Auto Makers Push Health Care Trust Solution for Industry in Crisis Richard Forno Watching Freedom's Watch Binoy Kampmark Dianified Dave Zirin Kenneth Foster Lives Website of the Day Free the Jena 6   August 30, 2007 Gary Leupp Larry Craig on the Seat John Ross Dead Forest Defenders Anthony DiMaggio Arabic as a Terrorist Language: the Right-Wing Assault on the Gibran Academy Jordan Flaherty Racism and Criminal Justice in New Orleans Michael Donnelly The Sierra Club Greenwashes Al Gore (and Desecrates John Muir) Russell Mokhiber Whiskey is for Drinking, Water is for Fighting Dennis Brutus and Patrick Bond Global Financial Apartheid William S. Lind The Truth Tellers Martha Rosenberg They Call Him Dr. Cruel Jeff Leys / Brian Terrell Seasons of Discontent: a Presidential Occupation Project Website of the Day Bragg: "Old Clash Fan Fight Song" August 29, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Maliki and The Mass Shia Pilgrimage to Kerbala Winslow T. Wheeler The Costs of the Afghanistan War David Rosen The GOP's Outed All-Stars: The Forced Freeing of Gay Men from the Republican Closet Dave Zirin Confronting Katrina Paul Craig Roberts More Shame, More Sorrow Diane Farsetta Christie Todd Whitman's Nuclear Spinning Wheel Ben Davis Who Won't Stand Up for Kenneth Foster?: Charles Rangel, For One Alan Farago The Housing Crisis and the Environment Jenna Orkin Echoes of 9/11: Another Fire at Ground Zero Don Monkerud The Vanishing American Vacation Richard Nasser Surfing Gaza: More Uplifting News from NPR Website of the Day Don't Sleep on the Struggle   August 28, 2007 Uri Avnery The Language of Force Bill Quigley Katrina, Two Years Later Joshua Frank The Fight to Save the Rocky Mountains China Hand "I am Alden Pyle:" Bush's Vietnam Fantasy Firmin DeBrabander Drug Wars: From Afghanistan to Baltimore Charles Peña Nuclear Fear Factor Andy Worthington Good Riddance, Gonzales Ramzy Baroud Abbas and the Abyss Anthony Papa Roger Stone's New Patsy Ashley Smith Drawing the Line at Kennebunkport Website of the Day B is for Bomb August 27, 2007 Jorge Mariscal The General Reports Bill Christison Why the US and Israel Should Lose Middle East Wars Manuel Garcia, Jr. 911 Emergency! Calling Robert Fisk!: You are Now Entering a Black Hole Anthony DiMaggio Chronicle of a Coup Foretold?: Bush, al-Maliki and the Press Bruce A. Roth India and the New Nuclear Era John Walsh Abe Foxman's Genocide Denial Roadshow, Part 2 Dave Lindorff Gonzo's Gone Ron Jacobs Taking It to the Streets Binoy Kampmark Poshed Up: Why the Beckhams Should Go Back to Brighty Russell D. Hoffman My Favorite Scientist: John Gofman, Bane of the Nuclear Industry Website of the Day George W. Told the Nation             Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition September 8 / 9, 2007 Wane Along With Me, O Ireland Still in the Clover By BEN TRIPP If you were walking down O'Connell Street in Dublin, Ireland, during the last few days of uncharacteristically sunny weather (the kind of weather that sends postcard photographers scattering to take pictures of landmarks before the clouds close in again), you might have seen an extraordinary figure plying the pavements. Handsome in a certain way, like Flipper the talking dolphin, this man stands out from the crowds. Men sense an authority, a kind of intensity that comes only to those that have stared down death a thousand times on myriad exotic shores. Women see a tough face, hardened despite the rolls of fat by years of sheer endurance into a visage at once masterful and tender. Flashing eyes like chips of moss set beneath stormy, almost eel-like brows. A couple of perfect teeth behind the mobile lips that suggest smoldering carnality, often aloud. What makes him so irresistible? Is it the rakish angle at which he wears his hair? The erect carriage, like a Neanderthal attempting to pass for human? There is something noble about this man. All sense it. He is an ancient presence in their ancient land, or at least a presence advancing well into middle age. And were you the one he turned to for directions to a destination the name of which he has gotten completely wrong, you would have heard the gravel voice, all whiskey and cigars but with occasional breaks into a falsetto lisp, so well known in the pits of Calcutta, Rangoon, and such dark destinations. Had you responded to that voice, you would have been telling this author where to go. You wouldn't have been the first. It's been sunny the last few days in the Emerald Isle. Life here is rushing towards a future that nobody, thirty years ago, imagined would ever come. Bono from U2, James Joyce, and maybe a peat speculator or two would make the Big Time, and everybody else would just keep muddling along as they had been doing the last fifteen centuries. Then the Celtic Tiger awoke, and in a bizarre mixed metaphor this animal not associated during any epoch with Northern Europe ran around shaking hands with the established industrial powers, skipping the steam & iron phase of economic powerhood and cutting straight ton the Information Age. The first blush of the tiger has passed, as Thomas Friedman might say, but it has earned its stripes. The sleepy, half-empty Dublin of a decade ago, butt of parochial jape, has become a wide-awake urb with a throbbing pulse. Typically, this phenomenon has mostly taken the form of real estate speculation. Property prices here are similar to those of Cincinatti and other middle-American cities, unendurably inflated but somehow one imagines one could scrape together the mortgage. Dublin's not yet London or New York, and god willing it won't be. One reason it is still within the bounds of insanity here is because there were fields and cottages right outside town until only a few years ago, so an explosive program of suburb-building has advanced largely unopposed. Tens of thousands of mingy micromansions have sprung up in teeming rows, anchored by Tesco and other European megabrand shopping centers: exactly the sort of growth that made cities like Denver, CO, and Phoenix, AZ, the thriving metropolises they aren't today. That's what worries an old-timer like myself. Ireland is ruined. You can ask any Irish person and they will tell you this, in the most optimistic and cheerful manner possible. The Olde Oireland that was good enough for Richard Harris in The Field has been overtaken by a new land, one driven by profits and the punch-clock. So how bad is it? Don't be silly. Ireland remains the kind of place where a quick trip on the spacious train takes one ten minutes from the heart of Dublin into rolling green pastures, tile-roofed villages, and enough sheep to put the clouds in a million Watteau landscapes. Guinness may be owned by Heineken, but it's still Guinness. Wireless Internet and the works of Joyce do not compete for space here. There are cobblestone alleys among the tarmacadam ways. Old brown-bread Ireland is still here under the rich frosting of modern times. Why does any of it matter, anyway, besides that I'm writing this to avoid participation in the hotel-room-packing process on the way to my fiancee's cousin Fionnuala's home in Kilkee? That's the main thing. Here's the gist of my drift, then: Ireland has survived the mighty global economic boom that is now ending. The Ireland that made it through the Viking raids, the English, and a thousand years of iron Catholic domination has made it through the glittering greed-time mostly intact. Intact enough. One senses that the grass would return to overtake the parking lots of the new airport-convenient business parks in only a few years. The endless suburbs that now make all of Eastern Ireland into a kind of leprechaun version of Los Angeles will soon enough be old themselves, and softened by weather and a little healthy deferred maintenance into the kind of villages they were thrown up to imitate. I do not presume to curse the place, damn Ireland to eternal rustication, nor demand it return to some Neolithic past where Lucky Charms and fairies and shamrocks gambol in the green pastures for my personal amusement. Ireland, like many recent economic engines to emerge from the EU, is entitled to its piece of the modern age, and it will hang on to much of it, regardless of how bad things get in the net few years for this flat-world global economy everyone's on about. This is a chance to upgrade the infrastructure, bury some fiber optic cable and double-glaze the chillier cottages. But if things go south to the degree that the grimmer and usually correct economists suggest, not just in Ireland but around the world, it is good to be somewhere that is comfortable with a little backwater status. The Irish seem almost to yearn for those days. My next peregrination takes me to the West Coast of Ireland, so much like California that people actually call it "The Reykjavik of Ireland". There I'll be in the deep countryside, elf-ridden and cow-blown, and it will be time to make the comparison between Dublin at the end of its boom years and the rural parts where the boom is merely an echo off the hills, like the refrain of Danny Boy I keep hearing echo off the back of my skull after the third Guinness of the morning. Ben Tripp, author of Square in the Nuts, is a hack in many mediums. He may be reached at credel@earthlink.net. Creative commons copyright 2007 by Ben Tripp Your Ad Here

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