Sly like a fox

Darth Vader outfoxed Kucinich today. He played the doctor trick(remember the fuss about Nixon's knee at the time of his incoming impeachment?), gaining sympathy, so Kucinich had to cancel the formal announcement at noon today submitting Cheney to an impeachment investigation.

Kucinich plans to pursue Cheney impeachment

By JOE MILICIA

Associated Press Writer
8 hours, 2 minutes ago

CLEVELAND – U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a vocal critic of the Bush administration's war in Iraq, plans to introduce articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday.

Kucinich, a Cleveland Democrat who is again running for president, announced Monday that he will hold a news conference in Washington to discuss his bid to oust Cheney. Kucinich spokeswoman Natalie Laber declined further comment.

Under the House impeachment process, Kucinich's articles would be reviewed by the House Judiciary Committee, which would decide whether to conduct an impeachment inquiry. The committee would seek authority from the entire House before beginning an inquiry.

Cheney spokeswoman Megan McGinn responded to Kucinich's announcement by saying that the vice president has served the nation honorably for almost 40 years.

"The vice president is focused on the serious issues facing our nation," McGinn said Monday.

Kucinich raises the issue of impeachment in a video on his campaign Web site in which he discusses the potential for a U.S. attack against Iran.

Kucinich, whose campaign initiatives in 2004 included opening a department of peace, questions whether the Bush administration's aggressive actions toward Iran already have raised concerns over impeachment.

"So I'm asking you, what do you think? Do you think it's time?" Kucinich says in a video on his Web site.

Lawmakers in the Democratic-controlled Vermont state senate voted Friday to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, saying their actions in Iraq and abroad have raised "serious questions of constitutionality."

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, a Democrat, last month called for President Bush's impeachment, saying his administration had lied about the reasons for invading Iraq.

A message seeking comment from House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., was not immediately returned.

On the Net:

http://kucinich.us/

http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/

Getting Serious About the "I" Word

BLOG | Posted 03/27/2007 @ 05:05am

John Nichols

Former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough had me on his MSNBC show tonight to talk about impeachment.

It was smart, civil discussion that treated the prospect of impeaching the president as a serious matter.

Scarborough took the lead in suggesting that Bush's biggest problem might be that Republicans in the House and Senate who -- fearful of the threat Bush poses to their political survival -- do not appear to be rallying 'round the president. The host's sentiments were echoed by two other guests, columnist Mike Barnicle and Salon's Joan Walsh.

The impetus for the show was Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel's ongoing discussion of the impeachment prospect -- Hagel's not quite a supporter of sanctioning Bush, more a speculator about the prospect -- and a new column by Robert Novak that suggests Bush has dwindling support within the congressional wing of the GOP.

Speaking about impeachment on ABC's "This Week," Hagel said, "Any president who says 'I don't care' or 'I will not respond to what the people of this country are saying about Iraq or anything else' or 'I don't care what the Congress does, I am going to proceed' -- if a president really believes that, then there (are) ways to deal with that."

Novak wrote "The I-word (incompetence) is used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to described a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI's misuse of the Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. 'We always have claimed that we were the party of better management,' one House leader told me. 'How can we claim that anymore?'"

Scarborough drew the two statements together for the purpose of asking whether Bush could count on Republicans to block moves by Congressional Democrats to hold Bush to account for high crimes and misdemeanors.

When a conservative commentator who was on the frontlines of Newt Gingrich's "Republican revolution" entertains a thoughtful conversation about the politics and processes of impeachment on a major cable news network, it should be clear that the cloistered conversation about sanctioning this president has begun to open up.

No, Scarborough is not jumping on the impeachment bandwagon.

He is simply treating the prospect seriously, as did CNN's Wolf Blitzer earlier in the day.

What I told Scarborough is what I have been saying in public forums for the past several weeks: We are nearing an impeachment moment. The Alberto Gonzales scandal, the under-covered but very real controversy involving abuses of the Patriot Act and the president's increasingly belligerent refusals to treat Congress as a co-equal branch of government are putting the discussion of presidential accountability onto the table from which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has tried to remove it.

Does this mean Bush and Cheney will be impeached? That, of course, will be decided by the people. Impeachment at its best is always an organic process; it needs popular support or it fizzles -- as with the attempt by House Republican leaders to remove former President Clinton in a process that, fairly or not, seemed to be all about blue dresses.

While the people saved Clinton – by signaling to their representatives that they opposed sanctioning a president's personal morals – it does not appear that they are inclined to protect Bush.

With each new revelation about what Gonzales did at the behest of the Bush White House to politicize prosecutions by U.S. Attorneys, the revulsion with the way this president has disregarded the Constitution and the rule of law becomes more intense. And citizens are not cutting their president much slack.

A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll -- conducted over the weekend -- shows that, by close to a 3-to-1 margin, Americans want Congress to issue subpoenas to force White House officials to testify in the Gonzales case. Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed say the president should drop his claim of executive privilege in this matter, while only 26 percent agree with the reasoning Bush has used to try and block a meaningful inquiry.

If the president wants to get in a fight with Congress over how to read the Constitution, it appears that the people will back Congress. And that backing is what will begin to restore the backbones of House members who, despite Pelosi's attempts to quiet talk of impeachment, are getting more and more intrigued by the prospect of holding this president to account.

As Hagel says, "This is not a monarchy. There are ways to deal with (executive excess). And I would hope the president understands that."

If Bush doesn't recognize this reality now, he soon will.

Democrats' Victory Means More Iraqi Deaths: End the War, Then Impeach

March 26, 2007

By SUNSARA TAYLOR

"House, 218 to 212, Votes to Set Date for Iraq Pullout" reads the New York Times. "Democrats Tout Plan for Troop Pullout," headlines the Washington Post. "Pelosi's Gamble on Iraq Pays Off," beams the Los Angeles Times. The reader is to believe that the Democrats have "employ[ed] their new Congressional majority to create the most forceful challenge yet to President Bush's war policy."

Today's headlines are parroting the lies of pro-war politicians -- AGAIN!

Today, the lying headlines borrow from the script of leading Democrats, but are every bit as dangerous as the headlines that repeated George Bush's claims four years ago that Iraq had WMDs.

Today's lying headlines are declaring a "victory" against George Bush's murderous Iraq war and working to lull into satisfied passivity the people who need to be raising their voices and raising hell right now more than ever!

As Howard Zinn put it, "To me [this vote] is tantamount to the abolitionists accepting a two-year timeline for ending slavery, while giving more money to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act."

To everyone who was relying on or hoping that the Democrats would act to end the war, the actions of the Democratic leadership are a sharp wake-up call. Only the people in our millions, mobilized in massive and ongoing resistance, can bring this war and this president's whole program to a halt.

Buried is the real story of:

How Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emmanuel, Jack Murtha and other leading Democrats maneuvered, bribed, threatened, reprimanded and bullied their party into voting to continue the war on Iraq in the face of overwhelming, widespread, deeply-felt, and growing public opposition.

How the new appropriations bill continues to fund Bush's wars to the tune of $124 billion dollars -- more than Bush even asked for!!

How the timetable for withdrawal from Iraq in the bill is so distant (seventeen months away!) it can mean nothing to the people of Iraq whose country is under the ruthless boot of U.S. occupation and is spiraling down a path of sectarian civil war that grows worse by the day.

How this timetable is so conditional -- insisting merely that Bush seek the approval of Congress before extending the date by which troops are supposed to be withdrawn -- that it is easy to imagine that deadline coming and going with no meaningful change in troop levels.

How the new bill -- and the politicians who pushed it -- put the onus for Iraq's misery on the Iraqi people themselves, demanding they meet benchmarks determined by the country that illegally invaded it! Closing the arguments for the Democrats just before the vote, Representative Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania, asked, "When are these Iraqis going to come off the sidelines and fight for their own country?"

And barely mentioned in today's lying headlines is the fact that liberal Democrats had originally proposed an appropriations amendment that would only have provided enough funds to bring the troops back from Iraq and that this wasn't even allowed by leading Democrats to make it out of the committee to be considered by Congress.

Finally, who could ignore Bush's brazen promise to veto this new bill anyhow and the Democrats know they don't have enough votes to override him?

In the words of White House spokesman, Tony Snow, "You've got to ask yourself, why go through this long, drawn out exercise of going and wheeling and cajoling and trying to buy votes within your own party when, in fact, you know its not going to go anywhere?"

Anyway you slice it, yesterday's vote is no "victory" for the people of this country, of Iraq, or of the world, all of whom overwhelmingly oppose the Iraq war and are aching for it to be stopped. Instead it means that after four years of war crimes, massacres, rapes, torture and what can only be called a colonial occupation that has cost more than half a million deaths and led to the fastest growing refugee crises in the world, the Iraqi people must now brace themselves for more!

This is a moment that cries for clarity and boldness among those who are able to see the stakes of this, actions and voices that can cut through the lies about a "victory" that threaten to quiet and pacify the anti-war movement right when it needs to be louder than ever before.

The war must be stopped! The War-Criminal-In-Chief must be impeached!

Self-deception or self-censorship about this right now will be paid for in blood. But bold truth telling and defiant political actions will find a wide and receptive audience in the anti-war majority. This majority has begun to reemerge in the streets across the country, on the Pentagon, and in recent student strikes. Whether this spreads like wildfire or is dampened at this critical moment is up to all of us.

Sunsara Taylor writes for Revolution Newspaper and sits on the Advisory Board of The World Can't Wait ­ Drive Out the Bush Regime. She can be reached at: sunsarasworld@yahoo.com

Top NYT National Story: Bush Impeachment

Attention Big Media: How about an opinion poll or two on impeachment, hmmm?
---
And #2 NYT story over all.

2. NATIONAL March 22, 2007

In Utah, an Opponent of the ‘Culture of Obedience’

By KIRK JOHNSON

The mayor of Salt Lake City has become a national spokesman for the impeachment of President Bush.

Impeachment: 'The Only Remedy That Remains

[Opinion] Thoughts occasioned by a peace march in Minneapolis

Mikael Jonathan Rudolph (MikaelMN)

The Minneapolis (Minnesota) Star Tribune accurately portrayed the local peace march and rally that took place this past Sunday and appropriately featured it as Monday morning's number one story "above the fold" on its front page along with a large photograph of the marchers similar to this one taken nearly simultaneously.

ⓒ2007 Kayakbiker

This is yet another sign of steadily growing citizen opposition to the disastrous, failed policies of President Bush, along with Saturday's march on the Pentagon and similar protests around the nation and the world. The effectiveness of citizen protest and calls for peace, however, is certainly questionable as peace advocates marched once again in what is becoming an Iraq invasion anniversary tradition.

President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have made it abundantly clear that no matter what the new majority of Democrats in Congress pass as legislation in opposition to the war, it will be vetoed, ignored or otherwise circumvented. This war will continue. Innocent Iraqis will continue to suffer terribly -- caught in the middle between their American occupiers, the "insurgent" resistance and the battling opposing forces of the burgeoning Sunni-Shiite civil war.

By this time next year another thousand American families will have flag-draped caskets come home instead of sons, daughters, fathers, or mothers. The number of horrendously damaged souls doomed to be relegated to holding cardboard signs on our street corners over the next couple of decades goes up every day.

No amount of protesting, no amount of candle-wax burned, no amount of letter writing, calls or e-mails of complaint to our Representatives and Senators will end this war.

The war was illegal from the start as a preemptive war of aggression banned by the Geneva Accords. The Bush administration clearly knew Iraq posed no imminent threat to the United States and yet ordered the attack and occupation anyway of the sovereign nation whose only real crime was having the audacity to live on top of one of the world's largest oil fields.

We American citizens were lied to. The world was lied to. Most critically, Congress was lied to. The "intelligence was fixed to justify the policy" as made clear by the Downing Street Memo.

The plans to invade Iraq were clarified in 1998 according to the "Project for a New American Century" a Neo-Conservative think tank. All that was needed was a "new Pearl Harbor" to justify it. This was made clear in an article published as: Rebuilding America's Defenses (page 51).

Participants in PNAC included:

• Vice President Dick Cheney
  
• Cheney's recently convicted former top aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby CIA leaker
  
• World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz
  
• U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad
  
• Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld Not Gone?
  
• Former Florida Governor and George W. Bush's brother Jeb Bush
  
• Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton
  
• Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage CIA leaker
  
• Former "Drug Czar" William Bennett
  
• Former Vice President Dan Quayle
  
• Fellow high profile conservatives Richard Perle, William Kristol and others.
  

The authors of the PNAC document got their "New Pearl Harbor" wish on Sept. 11, 2001 and the Bush administration has failed to thoroughly investigate the financing, planning, execution and cover up of the crimes of 9/11 ever since.

Despite there not being an iota of truth to the administration's claims of Saddam's connections to Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or 9/11, they are still talking about them all in the same breath repeatedly to manipulate the uninformed. Even so, America's patience with this war is plummeting, yet public opinion holds no sway with these war criminals the Hague is considering prosecuting along with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The "War on Terror" is an eternal commitment to imperialism, it isn't a conflict that can be won because the declared enemy isn't a nation state nor is it a people group. It is a quasi-military tactic. We might as well declare war against bullets.

The Iraq War is not ending, it is escalating. The next escalation is already assured. According to some media sources covert pre-op military action is allegedly already taking place across the border in Iran. (New Yorker, RAW STORY.) Iran is almost certain to be attacked by the U.S. and/or Israel within the next few months. National Democratic Party leadership pressure and American Citizen pressure may have delayed this, but it is still in the works. There is a fourth aircraft carrier group heading to the Gulf as a "replacement" to arrive very soon. The likely timing for an attack is while all four carrier groups are there and before one group is rotated out.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) had the courage, the integrity and basic common sense to recognize that there is only one way to pull the plug on this American war-for-profit machine last Thursday when he spoke to the House of Representatives:

"This House cannot avoid its constitutionally authorized responsibility to restrain the abuse of executive power.

"The administration has been preparing for an aggressive war against Iran. There is no solid, direct evidence that Iran has the intention of attacking the United States or its allies.

"The U.S. is a signatory to the U.N. Charter, a constituent treaty among the nations of the world. Article II, Section 4 of the U.N. Charter states, 'all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state...' Even the threat of a war of aggression is illegal.

"Article VI of the U.S. constitution makes such treaties the supreme law of the land. This administration, has openly threatened aggression against Iran in violation of the U.S. constitution and the U.N. charter.

"This week the House appropriations committee removed language from the Iraq war funding bill requiring the administration, under article 1, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution, to seek permission before it launched an attack against Iran.

"Since war with Iran is an option of this administration and since such war is patently illegal, then impeachment may well be the only remedy which remains to stop a war of aggression against Iran."

"Impeachment may well be the only remedy which remains to stop a war of aggression against Iran." -- Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)

If we American citizens are not working for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney and the removal from office of their entire administration we are not working for peace. Other efforts are noble, well-intended and honorable but absolutely impotent in the face of this voraciously bloodthirsty evil.

Martin Luther King had to take his legion across the bridge into a bloodbath provoked by a racist police force in Selma, Alabama, and Mahatma Ghandi marched his followers to the sea in resistance to the British military in order for true change to occur. It is long past time for the citizens of this nation, so many of whom call themselves Christians, to "storm the temple" as Jesus of Nazareth did and evict the moneychangers in the White House, utilizing the authority granted us in our constitution. That authority and mechanism for accountability and justice is called impeachment.

Who is ready to march with a petition of memorial to their Representative insisting on justice through impeachment for war crimes? We've been asking nicely for peace for four years (much longer for many, I know). It is time that we demand the justice that is the only way through which peace will come:

DIY Impeachment

Parents, when "asking nice" accomplishes absolutely nothing, know the next method of healthy discipline for their children is to be more authoritative. It is time to take away their toys.

Time out Mr. Bush.

Time out Mr. Cheney.

Time out.

Peaceful marchers: See you at next year's rally or are you ready to realize "the only remedy that remains" to secure the peace you seek is impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney?

A version of this article also appeared on www.ImpeachforPeace.org

2007/03/20

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, who called for the end of fighting in Iraq and the impeachment of Bush

Feminist Daily News Wire
March 19, 2007

Anti-War Protestors Gathered Around the World

Anti-war protesters across the country and around the world gathered Saturday to mark the four-year anniversary of the war in Iraq. The Washington, DC march, sponsored by A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), assembled at the Lincoln Memorial and crossed the Potomac to rally at the Pentagon. Among the marchers were Iraq War veterans, Gold Star families, and CodePink. Signs with titles like "Impeach Bush for War Crimes" and "Visualize Impeachment, Save the Country" were abundant.

Among the speakers at the Pentagon was Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, who called for the end of fighting in Iraq and the impeachment of Bush. Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan also spoke, saying, "we're here in the shadow of the war machine."

Ramsey Clark, founder of ImpeachBush.org was also among the protestors and spoke in support of impeaching President Bush, saying, "The president and vice president committed high crimes and misdemeanors. How many crimes do they have to commit? How long does this have to go on?" CNS News reports.

A similar message was sent last week during Valerie Plame's hearing, when CodePink members wearing shirts with "Impeach Bush" positioned themselves directly behind Plame, broadcasting their message to television viewers everywhere.

Saturday protests also took place in other cities; protestors marched in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, New York and Hartford, Connecticut. Overseas, thousands marched in Madrid calling not only for US withdrawal, but also for a prompt closing of the terrorist suspect prison in Guantanamo Bay. Similar protests also took place in Greece and Turkey.