What’s in Howard Dean’s Secret Vermont Files?
By Michael Isikoff Newsweek
Dec. 8, [2003?]issue - As investigative reporters and “oppo” researchers flock to Vermont to dig into Howard Dean’s past, they have run into a roadblock. A large chunk of Dean’s records as governor are locked in a remote state warehousethe result of an aggressive legal strategy designed in part to protect Dean from political attacks.
Dean who has blasted the Bush administration for excessive secrecy candidly acknowledged that politics was a major reason for locking up his own files when he left office last January. He told Vermont Public Radio he was putting a 10-year seal on many of his official papers four years longer than previous Vermont governors because of “future political considerations... We didn’t want anything embarrassing appearing in the papers at a critical time.”
“Most of the records are open,” said Dean spokeswoman Tricia Enright, adding there is “absolutely not” a “smoking gun” in those for which Dean has claimed “executive privilege.” Still, Dean’s efforts to keep official papers secret appear unusually extensive.
Late last year, NEWSWEEK has learned, Dean’s chief counsel sent a directive to all state agencies ordering them to cull their files and remove all correspondence that bore Dean’s name and ship them to the governor’s office to be reviewed for “privilege” claims. This removed a “significant number of records” from state files, said Michael McShane, an assistant Vermont attorney general.
The battle over Dean’s records began last year when three Vermont newspapers took him to court after being denied access to his official schedule. Reporters were trying to track Dean’s out-of-state political trips.
State lawyers argued that release of the schedule could jeopardize his safety and that the governor’s office was not a public “agency” covered by state open-records lawtwo notions rejected by the Vermont Supreme Court. (The court ultimately ruled that those portions of the schedule related to his political trips had to be released, but those relating to state policy could be redacted.)
Then last January, Dean’s chief counsel David Rocchio negotiated a sweeping agreement that resulted in about 140 boxes of Dean records containing several hundred thousand pages of documents being locked up for 10 years at a state archive in Middlesex, said Greg Sanford, the state archivist. The sealed papers include Dean’s correspondence with advisers on, among other matters, Vermont’s “civil unions” law and a state agency that critics charged was used to grant tax credits to Dean’s favored firms.
Rocchio said the sealing agreement was driven by “legitimate” policy concerns, but also by, he later acknowledged, political factors. “All you have to do is look at what [Dean’s opponents] are doing with the existing records,” he said. “They’re distorting his record.”
URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3606100/
New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Dean looks back, dryly
Sunday, November 2nd, 2003
For his soon-to-be-published campaign manifesto, "Winning Back America," Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean takes a confessional approach. He describes his privileged preppie upbringing, his youthful drunken behavior and his occasional adventures in petty theft.
"Although I was born in New York and went to school in the city until I was 13," writes the former Vermont governor, who recently claimed to be a farmer, "I really grew up in East Hampton. ... Once in a while, we'd sneak a potato or two out of a farmer's field, just to say we'd done it."
Dean notes that he attended the posh St. George's School in Newport, R.I., "an incredibly beautiful setting, up on a hill overlooking the Atlantic Ocean."
Dean also reminisces about his fraught relationship with alcohol - a narrative that parallels the experience of fellow Eastern Establishment scion George W. Bush, a graduate of Phillips Andover Academy.
"Once we were 18, we could indulge in lazy days of 'Baseball and Ballantine,'" Dean writes. "We'd buy some beer and put it in a garbage can of ice and play softball all day long. If you hit somebody's beer with a batted ball, it was an automatic out."
After he got married, "I quit drinking," he writes. "When I drank, I would drink a lot and do outrageous things, and then I wouldn't drink again for a while. I realized that what was very funny when you're 18 is not very funny when you're 30. I had a terrible hangover after my bachelor party, which didn't help. So I quit. Drinking served no useful purpose in my life, and I just got tired of it. I haven't had a drink in over 22 years."
Dean spokesman Jay Carson said that while his candidate violently disagrees with Bush on most things, "He agrees with him that his younger days were his younger days - and he's going to leave it at that."
I guess those prep-school guys stick together.
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/133177p-118729c.html
30-Year Veteran of the Left-Wing Divorces Liberal Elite
May 23, 2005
[]BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Time to go to the phones. We're honored. Keith Thompson, who wrote the piece
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/22/INGUNCQHKJ1.DTLI just shared with you, is on the line from Petaluma, California. Keith, welcome to the program.
[] THOMPSON: Well, it's great to be here, and I must say it's great to be back. You probably don't recall, but 13 years ago, 1992, I was on your show, because when I'm not writing incendiary essays I sometimes do political impressions. I do an impression of Ted Kennedy and I also do one of first President Bush, and I told Johnny Donovan -- who was with your show at the time and still may be -- and he had me record some bits, and you played them on the air at that time. So it's interesting to be back in a whole different capacity.
RUSH: Let me tell you something. I don't remember specifically but I have to tell you when I saw the name Keith Thompson, I said, "This name rings a bell. I couldn't place it, but now I can."
THOMPSON: That Keith Thompson. (laughter)
RUSH: Pardon me?
THOMPSON: THAT Keith Thompson.
RUSH: Yeah, exactly. How long has this piece of yours been in the works? It sounds like it didn't happen overnight.
[]
THOMPSON: No, it did not happen overnight. And, you know, I've got -- by the way, you'll be interested to hear that I've gotten lots of response. But you know something? I have gotten a significant number of e-mails, over 200 from people in the Bay Area who describe themselves as progressives, as liberals, and even on the left, who said, "You have spoken for me. You've put words to something. Look, I still don't agree with Bush on the following issues, but I cannot abide this any longer myself," and I only gotten a handful of really negative stuff from what I call "the psychiatric wing of the party," the really crazy types. But I tell you, I don't mean to say that I'm a pied piper, I just had my ear to the ground and I'm []looking to my own heart and I've been feeling this for some time. One person wrote me and said, "Gee, you know, you felt that about Ronald Reagan back in the eighties about the Soviet Union. How come it took you this long?" and I thought about it. I wrote him back and I said, "Have you ever had one of those experiences where, you know, when you take the garbage out on a Thursday morning -- they're going to pick up the garbage on a Thursday morning -- you set the garbage in a plastic bag on the inside of the door Wednesday night intending to take it out? Well, I forgot to take it out for about ten years," which is to say these thoughts had been ruminating and marinating, and truly it was a pivotal point for me. It all came together when I saw after the Iraq elections the people on Fox News and CNN, on your show and all the other, and mainstream -- you know, NBC, CBS, all of them. The people cheering for the Iraqis were conservative.
RUSH: Yeah.
[]
THOMPSON: The people who were looking for -- spinning marvelous variety of excuses about why democracy is still likely, could very well fail, Nancy Pelosi, Lynn Woolsey, my congresswoman here in California, Ted Kennedy, so-called legitimate mainstream liberals putting forth remarkably well thought out scenarios about how it could fail, and I said, "What is going on?"
RUSH: How they wanted it to fail, Keith.
THOMPSON: Oh, wanted it to fail, absolutely correct.
RUSH: They wanted it to fail.
THOMPSON: They needed it because they need -- the line I felt strongest about was, "They wanted democracy to fail more than they loved freedom," or they wanted George Bush to fail. There's a mania. I mean, you know it well. You deal with it every day. There has not been this mania in the country against a president since Nixon, and I gotta tell you, that includes Bill Clinton. I supported Bill Clinton. He was kind of the last straw for me -- and I know he took a lot of hard-core stuff from the right, but I'll tell you, nothing like Nixon and Bush have received from the left.
[] RUSH: I got one minute here before I have to take a break. Where do you think the left is headed?
THOMPSON: I think it's a historical defunct dead end. I think, you know [a] scientist said, science precedes "funeral by funeral," and that's a way of saying when people who can't change don't change they die off. It sounds Machiavellian, but I think there's a new generation of young people, they read books like South Park Conservatives. They're not buying it anymore.
RUSH: Well, we'll see. It's clearly a point of view that you've written about that has not yet reached the leadership of the Democratic Party.
THOMPSON: No, I don't mean to say that. They're going to hold on, and there are some good people that call themselves liberals. When I call myself a liberal I mean it in the sense of liberal democracy. If you read Bobby Kennedy's speech in 1966 in South Africa, it reads like something you'd give or Bill Bennett would give.
RUSH: Well, the same thing with Hubert Humphrey talking about "family values" back in the sixties, and that's the thing that amazed me, and it's what your piece is really all about and that is the liberals of today-- Well, let's put it this way: JFK, were he to be alive today thinking as he thought when he was alive, would not have a home in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Keith, I gotta run but it's great to hear from you. A great piece, and thanks for the call.
END TRANSCRIPT
Read the Articles...
(San Francisco Chronicle: Leaving the left - Keith Thompson)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/22/INGUNCQHKJ1.DTL
(Welcome to the Web home of writer Keith Thompson)
http://www.thompsonatlarge.com/work6.htm