harikari.com

Selections from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

This all sounds so familiar…

Unfit indeed.

Time to throw him and his lawless coconspirators out of office.

Back in January when Bush was feeling all bipartisan and conciliatory because he’d just got thumped in the mid-term elections, he thought he’d try and make nice with the new Democratic majority by ceasing his illegal NSA wiretap program and start obeying the surveillance laws outlined in FISA.

King George has changed his mind:

Senior Bush administration officials told Congress on Tuesday that they could not pledge that the administration would continue to seek warrants from a secret court for a domestic wiretapping program, as it agreed to do in January.

Rather, they argued that the president had the constitutional authority to decide for himself whether to conduct surveillance without warrants.

As a result of the January agreement, the administration said that the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program has been brought under the legal structure laid out in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for the wiretapping of American citizens and others inside the United States.

But on Tuesday, the senior officials, including Michael McConnell, the new director of national intelligence, said they believed that the president still had the authority under Article II of the Constitution to once again order the N.S.A. to conduct surveillance inside the country without warrants.

During a hearing Tuesday of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mr. McConnell was asked by Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, whether he could promise that the administration would no longer sidestep the court when seeking warrants.

“Sir, the president’s authority under Article II is in the Constitution,” Mr. McConnell said. “So if the president chose to exercise Article II authority, that would be the president’s call.”

…

The administration’s proposal would also provide legal immunity for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the National Security Agency’s surveillance program without warrants before it was brought under the surveillance act in January. It would also provide legal protections for government workers who took part in the N.S.A. program.

I went back and read Article II, and I didn’t see what Michael McConnell claims to see.  I read it twice and I couldn’t find where the president was exempt from laws protecting our civil liberties.  I read the Fourth Amendment too, and that made it pretty clear to me that the Bush was clearly violating our Constitution.

And notice in that last paragraph where the Administration wants to grant retroactive immunity to corporate telecommunications companies?  And, just as was done in the Military Commissions Act, they want to retroactively grant immunity to all government officials who may have broken laws while carrying out their orders for the past six years.

There is a name for the merger of corporate and state interests that consolidates power in the hands of the few.  It’s called fascism. 

What this story tells me is that some people are finally recognizing the Bush Administration as a fascist regime, and some members in Congress are trying to hold them accountable for their blatant violations of law.  So now the Administration is trying to cover its ass by pushing through laws that grant immunity for everything they and their wealthy corporate coconspirators have done.

High crimes and misdemeanors?  Yes, I think so. 

Start the revolution.

As expected, Bush vetoed the “Emergency” War Funding Bill sent to him by Congress.  He objected to the timetables for withdrawal. 

Congress will have to reconvene to come up with a bill more agreeable to Bush, who wants to retain what has essentially been unlimited power to wage a never ending war.

So should the Democratic Congress cave in to Bush’s demands or should they force their hand?  Given that the majority of Americans and the majority of Iraqis want the U.S. out of Iraq, I think they should find a way to force Bush into accepting benchmarks for progress and a timetable for U.S. withdrawal.

Representative John Murtha thinks so to, and he thinks their ace in hand is the threat of impeachment.  Last Sunday on Face the Nation he said: “There’s three ways or four ways to influence a president.  One is popular opinion, the election, third is impeachment and fourth is the purse.”

Impeachment you say?  I like that one.  Is it possible?  Let me count the ways:

1. Bush did not get a majority of UN members to authorize the War against Iraq, but started it anyway – illegally.
2. He cherry picked intelligence and advice that supported the goal of removing Saddam Hussein.
3. He seized U.S. citizens on U.S. soil and held them indefinitely without charges.
4. He broke laws outlined in the Foreign Intelligence Security Act by seizing telephone records of U.S. citizens without warrants and then “data mined” them for foreign intelligence information – a clear violation of the 4th Amendment.
5. He refused to grant the prisoners captured in Afghanistan their rights outlined in the Geneva Conventions because he said they were not prisoners of war – they were “enemy combatants.”  He then claimed the right to detain the “prisoners” indefinitely on the grounds that prisoners can be detained until the war ends.
6. He changed the definition of torture to include acts like water boarding, sleep deprivation, and other acts that were commonly believed to be “torture” and then, when he signed the Military Commissions Act that banned “torture,” he added a signing statement that said he would torture people anyway if he thought it was in the interest of national security.

So yes, they should throw the impeachment card on the table and see how he reacts to letting the bill go through with benchmarks and timetables, and then they should impeach him anyway.

(Impeachable offenses culled from Phil Worden’s excellent column that appeared in The Bangor Daily News this week.)

FBI Director Robert Mueller testified before the Senate today about his agency’s abuse of provisions of The Patriot Act.  “Abuse” meaning of course that federal laws were broken.

…Mueller testified at the panel’s second hearing into a Justice Department inspector general’s report this month that revealed abuses in the FBI’s use of documents called national security letters to gather data.

Reviewing headquarters files and four of 56 FBI field offices, Inspector General Glenn Fine found 48 violations of law or presidential directives during 2003-2005. He estimates there may be up to 3,000 unidentified or unreported violations throughout the FBI.

Mueller said he had instituted procedures for issuing these letters. “What I did not do and should have done is put in a compliance program to be sure those procedures were followed,” he added.

…

Mueller said he had reduced such inaccuracies since learning of the problem in 2005 but noted that warrant applications are long and contain thousands of facts.

“I’m not impressed with your assertion that there are thousands of facts,” Specter said. “That’s your job. You asked for these powers; we gave you them. If these applications are wrong, you’re subjecting people to an invasion of privacy that ought not to be issued.”

Specter, a Republican, was correct in his assertion that Mueller’s FBI had violated the rights of the American people. 

But what did other Republicans have to say?

Republican Sens. Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Orrin Hatch of Utah opposed altering the law to curb FBI authority. “You’ve acknowledged the problems and pledged to fix them,” Hatch said. “That’s what Congress and the American people need.”

“Pledged to fix them?”  Didn’t Mueller “pledge” to follow the laws when he took over the FBI? 

You’ve just got to laugh out loud when you read this stuff.  These are the same Republicans that were in power when Clinton was president and they wouldn’t give him a break on anything.  They were out to get him from day one and were ready and willing to impeach him on any charge they could find.  They had to settle for a blow job. 

They would have loved to have one of Clinton’s appointees testify before them and admit to how his department broke the laws.  They would certainly not accept any “pledge” to “fix” the problem.

I say pin this on Mueller and Bush and impeach the whole lof of them.  They don’t have any respect for laws–and they admit it!  They are all a bunch of criminals.

Come on Democrats!  Stop being so craven.  Do what you swore to do when you took office–defend the Constitution and the rule of law.  The survival of our Constitution depends on it.  Impeach the entire Executive Branch.

Need a list of impeachable offenses besides the illegal intrusions into privacy that Mueller admitted to?  Stephen Colbert listed all the offenses last week on his show and dared the Democrats to “buckle on your balls like men and impeach the president.”  Watch it.

Let’s impeach the president for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones.

— Neil Young, from “Let’s Impeach the President” on the album Living With War

I’ve written before about why Bush should be impeached for breaking federal wiretap laws.  Today I came across an aricle that makes a very clear case for impeachement.  It was written for The New York Times by James Bamford, a plaintiff in the ACLU case.  Here are a few excerpts:

Last Aug. 17, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the United States District Court in Detroit issued her ruling in the A.C.L.U. case. The president, she wrote, had “undisputedly violated” not only the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, but also statutory law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Enacted by a bipartisan Congress in 1978, the FISA statute was a response to revelations that the National Security Agency had conducted warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. To deter future administrations from similar actions, the law made a violation a felony punishable by a $10,000 fine and five years in prison.

Yet despite this ruling, the Bush Justice Department never opened an F.B.I. investigation, no special prosecutor was named, and there was no talk of impeachment in the Republican-controlled Congress.

…

On Jan. 17, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales unexpectedly declared that President Bush had ended the program, deciding to again seek warrants in all cases. Exactly what kind of warrants — individual, as is required by the law, or broad-based, which would probably still be illegal — is as yet unknown.

The action may have been designed to forestall a potentially adverse ruling by the federal appeals court in Cincinnati, which had scheduled oral arguments on the case for today. At that hearing, the administration is now expected to argue that the case is moot and should be thrown out — while reserving the right to restart the program at any time.

But that’s a bit like a bank robber coming into court and arguing that, although he has been sticking up banks for the past half-decade, he has agreed to a temporary halt and therefore he shouldn’t be prosecuted. Independent of the A.C.L.U. case, a criminal investigation by the F.B.I. and a special prosecutor should begin immediately. The question that must finally be answered is whether the president is guilty of committing a felony by continuously reauthorizing the warrantless eavesdropping program for the past five years. And if so, what action must be taken?

…

To allow a president to break the law and commit a felony for more than five years without even a formal independent investigation would be the ultimate subversion of the Constitution and the rule of law. As Judge Taylor warned in her decision, “There are no hereditary kings in America.”

Read it all here.

Sean Penn on Receiving the 2006 Christopher Reeve First Amendment Award:

On January 11, 2003, I made an appearance on Larry King’s show following my first trip to Iraq. I suggested that every American mother and father sit down with a scrap of paper and pencil and scribble the following words: Dear Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so — We regret to inform you that your son or daughter so-and-so, was killed in action in Iraq. I then asked that those mothers and fathers complete that letter in whatever way might comfort them should they receive it. When one considers what a bewildered continuation of those words a parent might attempt to write today, it seems inconceivable that this country could’ve ever bought into this war. Who were those mothers and fathers believing in?! We know it’s not the administration alone, but a culture at large, cloaking itself in self-righteousness, religion, and adolescent hero-dreaming machismo. Would they have believed Rush Limbaugh if they’d known he was high as a kite on OxyContin? Would they have believed the factually impaired Bill O’Reilly if they knew he was massaging his rectum with a loofah while telephonically harassing a staffer? Hannity, had they known he was simply a whore to the cause of his pimps – Murdoch and Ailes? Or the little bow-tie putz, if they knew all he was seeking was a good laugh from Jon Stewart? Maybe our countrymen and women were listening to Ted Haggert while he was whiffing meth and boning a muscle-headed gigolo? Or Mark Foley seeking junior weenis? Joe Lieberman, sitting Shiva? And Toby Keith, singing about how big his boots are?

“Oh, there goes Sean…he had to go and name-call. They say he can’t help himself.” Or, did I name-call? Maybe I just quickly summed up 7 or 8 little truths. Oh, no, you’re right – I name-called. I said, “putz”. I take it back. Or, do I? Did I say “whore?” Pimp? These are questions. But, the real and great questions of conscience and accountability would not loom so ominously — unanswered or evaded at such tremendous cost — without our day-to-day failure to insist on genuine accountability. Of course we’d prefer some easy ways to get there. But no easy ways exist. Not a new Congress. Not Barack Obama. And, not John McCain. His courage in North Vietnamese prison makes him a heroic man. His voting record in Congress makes him a damaging public servant. We have gotta stand the fuck up and show the world how powerful are the people in a democracy. That’s how we regain our position of example, rather than pariah, to the world at large. And that is how we can begin to put up our chins and allow pride and unification to raise our own quality of life and security.

…

What is impeachment? It’s not a Democratic versus Republican event. Not if used responsibly. If the House of Representatives votes to impeach this president, is he thrown out of office? No, he is not thrown out of office. That is not what impeachment is. Impeachment is the opportunity to proceed with accountability and give our elected senators, democratic and republican, the power to pursue a thorough investigation. The power to put the truth on the table. Mothers and fathers are losing their kids to horrifying deaths in this war every single day. Horrible deaths. Horrible maimings. Were crimes committed in enlisting the support of our country in this decision to go to war? For the moment we’re living the most spineless of scenarios; where the hawks abused impeachment eight years ago, now, the rest of us politely refuse to use it today. Let’s give the whistle-blowers cover, let’s get the subpoenas out there, and then, one by one, put this administration under oath. And then, if the crimes of “Treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” are proven, do as Article 2, Section 4 of the United States Constitution provides, and remove “the President, Vice President and…civil officers of the United States” from office. If the Justice Department then sees fit to bunk them up with Jeff Skilling, so be it.

So…look, if we attempt to impeach for lying about a blowjob, yet accept these almost certain abuses without challenge, we become a cum-stain on the flag we wave. You know, I was listening to Frank Rich this morning, speaking on a book tour. He said he thought impeachment proceedings would amount to a “decadent” sidetrack, while our soldiers were still being killed. I admire Frank Rich. And of course he would be right if impeachment is all we do. But we’re Americans. We can do two things at the same time. Yes, let’s move forward and swiftly get out of this war in Iraq AND impeach these bastards.

It’s really quite a strong piece.  Read it all here.

The Democrats have had two weeks to savor their mid-term election thumpin’ of the Republicans.  Nancy Pelosi has announced their agenda for the first 100 hours of the new Democratically controlled Congress.

…they will try to pass bills that directly affect the pocketbooks of working-class and middle-class people, including raising the minimum wage, cutting interest rates for student loans and allowing the Medicare program to negotiate lower drug prices.

Other top priorities for January are lobbying reform, implementing the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission and rolling back subsidies to the oil industry.

That’s all fine and good, but you might also recall that within hours of finding out they’d won Congress, both Pelosi and Howard Dean said that impeachment was “off the table.”  They talked about working together with Republicans to move the country forward with the Democratic agenda.

I can understand them not wanting to be too confrontational before they’ve even assumed their majority positions, but let’s not forget that our president and his Administration have broken laws.  In order to cover his tracks, Bush rammed the Military Commissions Act down their throats before the election so that he could sign it before there was any chance a new Congress could reject it.  The law gave him retroactive permission to falsely detain people and prevent them from defending themselves in a court of law.

Personally, I think that some provisions of the act, like say the provision that suspends habeus corpus, will eventually be challenged in the courts, and the law will be ruled unconstitutional.  That will open the door to congressional investigations about how and why the enemy combatants were captured and detained, and then how they were treated.

(Go here to see what Dennis Kucinich has to say about why it’s important to know the truth about the Iraq War.)

But even before that, Congress will have an opportunity to do something about Bush’s illegal NSA wiretap program.  A judge has already ruled that the program is unconstitutional, and that means the president broke the law.  He should be investigated and held accountable for his actions.  The Democrats now have the power to hold hearings and require administration officials, including the president, to testify under oath.

I think that most Democrats have memories reliable enough for them to recall just how ruthless the Republicans were in their pursuit to pin anything on Clinton.  All they could come up with was a lapse in behavior that involved consensual sex in the oval office, so they impeached Clinton for that.  (Nice Doonesbury cartoon about it here.)

A couple more things they might want to recall is that in 1990 the Republicans spent more than 100 hours investigating whether or not Clinton had used the White House Christmas card list to scout for donors.  Those same Republicans allowed just 12 hours of hearings on the Abu Ghraib scandal.

So Democrats, don’t take all your cards off the table just yet.  You’ve got to play the hand your dealt and if you find good reason to impeach Bush, it’s your duty to do so.

Photo from The Seattle Times.  Story here.

I received this photo from my uncle who says, “This came from one of my most conservative, Republican friends. I guy I’ve known for fifty years from Olympia and who has been rabid in his support of Bush until recently.”

So it’s true. Many of the hardcore Bush supporters now agree that Bush sucks. That explains these latest poll results. 36% here, and 32% here.

From Lewis Lapham’s essay, The Case for Impeachment:

The Conyers report doesn’t lack for further instances of the administration’s misconduct, all of them noted in the press over the last three years-misuse of government funds, violation of the Geneva Conventions, holding without trial and subjecting to torture individuals arbitrarily designated as “enemy combatants,” etc.-but conspiracy to commit fraud would seem reason enough to warrant the President’s impeachment. Before reading the report, I wouldn’t have expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don’t know why we would run the risk of not impeaching the man. We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country’s good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world’s evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation’s wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies. In a word, a criminal-known to be armed and shown to be dangerous. Under the three-strike rule available to the courts in California, judges sentence people to life in jail for having stolen from Wal-Mart a set of golf clubs or a child’s tricycle. Who then calls strikes on President Bush, and how many more does he get before being sent down on waivers to one of the Texas Prison Leagues?

Well that would be us through our elected representatives in Congress. So people, get on it. Start asking your congressmen to do what’s gotta be done.