Congress

We Need to Demand Hearings!

dlindorff — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:03:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

With the Bush Administration, the two leading presidential
candidates, and the Congressional leadership, as well as a phalanx of
Wall Street lobbyists all pushing hard for a massive transfer of
taxpayer money to the coffers of banks and investment banks, the
American people need to demand a halt to this bums' rush to a bailout.

We've seen what happens when Congress forgoes the time-tested
process of deliberative and investigative hearings and simply takes a
floor vote on a Bush Administration-backed measure. First there was the
October 18, 2001 resolution for use of military force against Al Qaeda
in Afghanistan. Because there were no hearings on that measure, its
loose, deliberately ambiguous wording has been used ever since by the
Bush/Cheney crew as authorization for their global so-called "War" on
Terror, including the claim that the president has the dictatorial
power ignore treaties, US law, and bills passed by the Congress.
Shortly thereafter, there was the Patriot Act, a compendium of
anti-Democratic measures that had failed to win passage in Congress
over the years which were cobbled together in the dead of night by
Bush/Cheney zealots and passed on a voice vote the next day by a
Congress too cowed to hold hearings on the measure. Then, in October
2002, there was the second authorization for use of military force
resolution, this time against Iraq, which has ended up miring the US in
a disastrous five-year-long war without end that has killed 4500
Americans, chewed up 40,000 more, and killed in excess of one million
innocent Iraqi civilians.

Had there been serious hearings on any of these three terrible
measures, there is a chance none of them would have passed, or that at
least, had they been passed, they would have been reworded to tie the
administration's hands. The first AUMF could have limited military
actions to attacking Al Qaeda. Period. The Patriot Act's constitutional
overrides could have been exposed early, and challenged. And the
administration's lies about the alleged threats posed by Iraq could
have been challenged in public by other witnesses, plus a clear
requirement could have been included that any attack on Iraq would need
UN authorization.

Now Congress is being pressured to pass an equally horrific bill
with no hearings. We know that 200 leading economists, including at
least three Nobel Laureates, one of them former World Bank economist
Joseph Stiglitz, are opposed to the bailout, saying throwing a trillion
dollars at Wall Street won't work and will be a waste of taxpayer money
or worse. We know that it fails to address the root problem--the
housing and mortgage crisis. We know that it could be a crippling blow
to the dollar. Yet without hearings to expose this giant scam, the only
ones getting through to members of Congress are Wall Street lobbyists,
their pockets stuffed with campaign cash.

Citizens can't even get past the Capitol switchboard, which is
jammed with angry callers trying to get through to their
representatives and senators.

The point that needs to be made is that there is no great urgency to
pass a bill. The administration's claim that the bottom will fall out
of the economy and that the country will be plunged into a depression
if the bill isn't passed immediately is nonsense. The Great Depression
took years to develop after the 1929 stock market crash.

The current market could collapse, and there'd be plenty of time to
act to revive the national economy. Meanwhile, the credit crisis, which
is serious, has been underway for months and months. It is not
something that came up last week and needs to be resolved tomorrow (as
if that were possible by the mere passing of a give-away bill). There
is plenty of time to hold the kind of hearings that will let members of
Congress, and the American public, learn about the causes of the
crisis, of its impacts, and about what the various strategies are that
might most effectively address it.

So the public demand should not be for passage of a "good" bailout
bill. It should be for a halt to this rush to passage of any bill. The
demand should be for "No Bill Without Hearings!"

So call Congress (202-225-3121, 202-224-3121 or 800-828-0498) and
tell your representative and your two senators that you don't want them
railroaded. Tell them you demand hearings before legislation. And tell
them, again, that you will vote against anyone who votes for the
current bailout for Wall Street. (Hint: If you can't get through, then
call one of their local offices, which are listed in the blue pages of
your phonebook, or go visit a local office.)

Don't forget to write letters, too, to your local paper demanding hearings and a reasoned response to the crisis, not a bailout.
_________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Iraq $165B VOTE

schuman — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:21:40 -0400

I am starting this post for members of Rep. Kildee's district to post the results of thier phone call to Kildee's office. My results: I called his office at 2:00PM (not sure if the vote already took place) and spoke with a secrectary. I told him I was calling to make sure Rep Kildee votes "NO" on the Iraq budget today. He said "OK" and took my name and city. Everyone PLEASE CALL and STOP this from passing! 202-225-3611

Re Elect No One

paulkruger — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:01:03 -0400

Re Elect No One.

Everyone has an opinion so here is mine. I welcome and encourage feedback on this idea.

I am a liberal in most things and a registered democrat. However that does not mean I believe anyone who is a politician and a democrat is a good public servant. In the past ten years both D's & R's have increasingly sold out their seats to the highest bidder to fund campaigns, leaving those they swore their oath of office to server, "We the People" flowing in the wind.

There are many reasons this happend. It is more about power than greed on the part of the elected party but ALL about greed on the part of those big corporations handing over money by the basket full to get their "man/woman" in office. And they expect, and get, something in return for their money.

The primary cause is the enormous cost of a successful campaign. Then there are loopholes that allow big money contributions that must be closed. Politicians don't want to close those holes through which their contributions flow.

My logic is that "We the People" can use the one effective tool we have, our vote, to correct these problems by kicking them all out and starting over. Send the message "Listen to us". If this is done through a couple of election cycles, politicians will start to get the message. Big corporations will also get the message that funding their candidate may actually casue them to lose the election.

Once we get some people in office who are really "public servants" and not just professional politicians, they will start to correct election problems including closing permanently, methods that allow big business to donate money, including "bonus's" to employees to be donated as individuals.

Watching the same people re-elected over and over is not progress, It is a continuation of the same bad politics we have had for years. Time for a change.

Campaign Announcement

acqsysandrea — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:38:34 -0500

On January 25, 2008 I announced my candidacy for U.S. House of Representatives in the VA 4th Congressional District as a Democrat.

Currently, I am working on collecting 1500 signatures to satisfy the ballot access requirement. We need volunteers to help gather signatures as well as do literature drops and assist with fundraising.

My primary issues are:

Impeach Cheney/Bush
Single Payer National Healthcare (HR 676)
Restore Constitutional Law
Repeal the Patriot Act
Cancel NAFTA/WTO
"Green Jobs" and "Green Energy"
Worker's Rights
Full Equality Marriage Rights
Fair Taxes
End the Death Penalty

Please visit my Web site at http://www.andreamiller.us

Welch Whitewash: We Still Don't Know What That Aug. 30 Nuke Incident Was About

dlindorff — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:59:33 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

A new report on the August 30 incident in which six nuclear-armed advanced cruise missiles were effectively “lost” for 36 hours, during which time they were, against all regulations, flown in launch position mounted on a pylon on the wing of a B-52H Stratofortress, from Minot AFB in North Dakota across the continental US to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, has left unanswered some critical questions about the event.

Directed by retired Air Force Gen. Larry D. Welch, the task force’s Report on the Unauthorized Movement of Nuclear Weapons found plenty wrong with the way the US military handles its nuclear weapons, but appears to have dealt lightly with the specific incident that sparked the inquiry—only giving it a few paragraphs.

According to the report, when nuclear-capable missiles are placed onto a pylon assembly (in the case of the B-52, these pylons can hold six missiles), procedures call for a clear distinction to be made as to whether they are armed with nuclear weapons or with dud warheads. In the storage bunker, pylons with dud warheads are supposed to be encircled with orange cones like those used by highway repair crews, and placards announcing that the warheads are duds are supposed to be hung on all four sides. This reportedly was not done, leaving no distinction between one pylon containing six nuclear-armed missiles, and two others that had missiles carrying nukes.

A second failure was in record keeping. According to regulations for handling nuclear weapons, every step in moving a nuke requires written verification and manual checking. When the weapons were taken from storage racks and installed on the missiles, there should have been written records, including the serial numbers of each warhead. When a breakout crew moved the nuclear-armed missiles on the pylon and passed it to a convoy crew for removal from the storage bunker to the airfield for mounting on the plane, there was supposed to be a visual verification of the warheads by the convoy crew, and another written record of the transfer of ownership. When the convoy crew handed over the pylon to the crew chief for mounting on the plane, there was supposed to be another warhead verification check by the crew chief and another written record. Finally, the aircrew was required to verify the payload, warhead by warhead.

Reportedly, none of these steps were taken. In other words, there was a failure to check the payloads of the missiles not just once but at every step of the way—an astounding breakdown in controls and procedures, which at a minimum suggests that the US nuclear arsenal is as vulnerable to theft, extortion and nefarious misuse as those in the former Soviet Union or in Pakistan—not a pleasant thought.

A third failure, more systemic, which was identified in this latest report, was a general decline—even a breakdown—in the decades-long tradition of high standards and professionalism in the US nuclear force itself. The Strategic Air Command, which oversaw all nuclear equipment, has been eliminated, and command and control of nuclear weapons have been integrated into the regular forces, right down to the storage of nuclear devices themselves, which are now routinely kept together with conventional warheads—a recipe for disaster not just because of the kind of confusion that allegedly led to the Aug. 30 incident, but also because of the possibility of accidents in which a non-nuclear device could detonate, scattering nuclear debris. Furthermore, the report documents that the nuclear force, once a prime career choice for advancement-minded military professionals, has become a dumping ground for mediocrity—a place where military personnel go to be forgotten. Pilots of B-52s, for example, no longer even get nuclear certified—so unlikely is it that they will be called upon to fly nuclear missions, the report states.

The report is a catalog of failure and ineptitude, and should lead to a complete overhaul. But it is also failure itself.

This is because as disastrous as the picture it paints of America’s nuclear forces and handling procedures may be, the report also ignores the big questions that remain about the recent incident which led to the Welch investigation in the first place. Primary among these questions is why, if all the various teams that handled the six nuclear-tipped Advanced Cruise Missiles up at Minot, from the guards and handlers in the storage bunker to the pilots, failed to note that the warheads on the missiles were nukes, was the ground crew that went out onto the tarmac to service the plane after it landed at Barksdale able to spot them and identify them as nukes almost immediately upon arriving at the plane?

After all, the personnel at Minot knew they were handling weapons in a bunker, and coming from a bunker, that stored nuclear weapons, and so should have been on alert to the possibility. The crew at Barksdale, however, had absolutely no reason to expect nuclear weapons. Not only was the delivery of these cruise missiles to Barksdale part of a long, on-going routine process of ferrying the obsolete weapons in for decommissioning and destruction. In addition, for the last 40 years, it has been against military rules to fly nuclear weapons over domestic airspace except in specially outfitted military cargo planes. That is to say, prior to this incident no B-52 or other bomber has carried a nuclear weapon in launch position over US territory since 1967!

Given that history, one has to assume that the warheads on those six missiles on the pylon must have been literally screaming out that they were nukes, for the ground crew to have noticed.

Surely Gen. Welch and his colleagues should have addressed the question of why those Barksdale workers were so easily able to spot the “mistake” while, allegedly, no one in the chain of possession of the weapons at Minot managed to do it.

The position of the report was clearly, from the start, that this whole thing was a mistake. That is to say, it’s conclusion was foreordained. But we should know from the incredible, bald-faced lie about the reason for shooting down a spy satellite last week—that it posed an environmental and health threat because of a relatively small 1000 lb. fuel tank containing toxic hydrazine fuel that allegedly could make it to earth and then pose a health threat—that Pentagon explanations are often dishonest, or deliberately confusing. (Hyrdazine is no more dangerous than many toxic chemicals, and for someone to seriously be put at risk, he or she would have to walk up to the smoking tank after it hit earth, and hang around the noxious vapours breathing them in for some time—something few people would be likely to do. Moreover, the probability of an explosive fuel tank making it through searing re-entry to ground without bursting and releasing the material harmlessly in the upper atmosphere was always negligeable. The explanation for the $60-million missile shot was clearly a cover-up of a Pentagon scheme to test its space-warfare capability without having to admit what it was doing.)

Could the Minot nuke incident have been something other than a mistake?

A careful reading of the Welch report—both what it says and what it fails to say—has to leave that question unanswered.

Recall that back in August and September, the Bush/Cheney administration was, as it is now, ratcheting up the talk about an attack on Iran over its nuclear activities and over its alleged support for insurgent attacks on American troops in Iraq. While the military top brass, as well as the secretary of defense are known, for the most part, to oppose such plans, there certainly are some, particularly within the Air Force, who have a higher opinion of the effectiveness of airpower,

Recall too that in the weeks and days prior to and immediately following the Aug. 30 Minot nuke incident, no fewer than six airmen associated with Minot, Barksdale and the B-52 fleet died either in vehicle accidents or alleged suicides. One of the two suicides involved a Minot airman whose job was guarding the base’s nuclear weapons storage facilities. The Welch report doesn’t even mention this strange cluster of deaths—none of which has even been investigated by the military, according to local police and medical examiners contacted.

Could someone at the top level of government—perhaps the Vice President, who is particularly belligerent towards Iran—have attempted to set up an alternative chain of command to “spring” a few unaccounted for nukes for use in some kind of “false flag” or rogue operation that, were it to succeed, could set a war against Iran in motion? Barksdale AFB, it should be noted, bills itself as the main staging base for B-52s being sent overseas for Middle East duty.

The way the Aug. 30 incident came to light, which was thanks to Air Force whistleblowers who contacted a reporter at the Military Times newspaper publishing office—makes such an idea seem at least plausible. Clearly, some uniformed personnel were so upset at what happened that they were willing to risk their military careers to go outside of the chain of command and alert the public in the only way they knew how. Clearly too, they were so distrustful of their superiors, right on up to the office of the Secretary of Defense, that they did not consider taking their information to anyone within the Pentagon.

Maybe it’s asking too much to expect a retired general, tasked to investigate this incident by the Secretary of Defense who himself was appointed by the White House, to look into such a theory, which after all if true would represent an act of treason. And yet, the failure of this report to at least explore the idea makes it into something of a cover-up.

The obvious answer here is that Congress should be holding public hearings into the incident, and asking these tough questions. Incredibly, this has not happened. The Democratic-led Congress, here as in virtually every issue that has come before it (with the exception of steroids in professional sports!), has ducked its responsibility. In this case Congress has been content to let Air Force officials, behind closed doors, offer them information about the incident—which is a far cry from holding hearings where the officers would be grilled under oath about what they know.

Given this gutless and irresponsible behavior by legislators who, I am sure, would be holding high-profile hearings had the same kind of incident occurred in Russia, China, or Pakistan, we are left having to hope that someone with real knowledge of what happened at Minot will come forward and tell the story to a reporter.

For the record, I’m ready and waiting, pen in hand...

________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition. His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The Air Force Cover-Up of that Minot-Barksdale Nuclear Missile Flight

dlindorff — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:24:39 -0400

“It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”
---Pentagon official

There is something deeply disturbing about the Air Force’s official report on the Aug-29-30 “bent spear” incident that saw six nuclear warheads get mounted on six Advanced Cruise Missiles and improperly removed from a nuclear weapons storage bunker at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, then get improperly loaded on a B-52, and then get improperly flown to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana—a report that attributed the whole thing to a “mistake.”<--!break-->

According to the Air Force report, some Air Force personnel mounted the warheads on the missiles (which are obsolete and slated for destruction), and another ground crew, allegedly not aware that the missiles were armed with nukes, moved them out and mounted them on a launch pylon on the B-52’s wing for a flight to Barksdale and eventual dismantling. Only on the ground at Barksdale did ground crew personnel spot the nukes according to the report. (Six other missiles with dummy warheads were mounted on a pylon on the other wing of the plane.)

The problem with this explanation for the first reported case of nukes being removed from a weapons bunker without authorization in 50 years of nuclear weapons, is that those warheads, and all nuclear warheads in the US stockpile, are supposedly protected against unauthorized transport or removal from bunkers by electronic antitheft systems—automated alarms similar to those used by department stores to prevent theft, and even anti-motion sensors that go off if a weapon is touched or approached without authorization.

While the Air Force report doesn’t mention any of this, what it means is that if weapons in a storage bunker are protected against unauthorized removal, someone—and actually at least two people, since it’s long been a basic part of nuclear security that every action involving a nuclear weapon has to be done by two people working in tandem—had to deliberately and consciously disable those alarms.

Since the Air Force report does not explain how this hurdle to unauthorized removal of the six nukes could have been surmounted by “mistake,” the report has to be considered a whitewash, at best, or a cover-up.

That leaves us speculating about what actually happened, and about who might have authorized the removal of those nukes from storage, and why the Defense Department would be covering up the true story. We know that the loading of nuclear-armed missiles or bombs onto an American bomber has been barred since 1991, even for practice and training purposes. We know also that the carrying of nuclear weapons by bombers flying over US airspace has been banned for 40 years. So if the evidence suggests strongly that the removal of the nukes from the bunker was done intentionally and with some kind of authorization from higher authorities, then the loading of nukes onto the plane, and the flight of those nukes to Barksdale have to also be assumed to have been authorized.

This possibility has been dismissed out of hand by the Air Force and Defense Department. The very idea is, in fact, not even discussed in the Air force report released in mid-October.

Yet we are left with the unresolved question of how the weapons could have been moved out of the bunker accidentally.

The Air Force has not been forthcoming about the automated alarm protections on American nuclear weapons, refusing to confirm or deny that they even exist. But we can know that they are in place for several reasons. One is that since writing about this incident in the current edition of American Conservative Magazine ("The Mystery of Minot," Oct. 24, 2007 ed.) and in several online venues, I have been contacted by several active-duty and retired military people who have assured me that such electronic protections are in place. A second is that an article in the Oct. 31 issue of the New York Times, reporting on the early completion of a project by the National Nuclear Security Administration, to secure Russian nuclear weapons, said that the measures implemented at 25 classified sites on 12 Russian nuclear bases included “measures that have long been part of American efforts” to secure nuclear weapons, and that these included “alarm and motion detection systems,” as well as “modern gates, guard houses and fighting positions, “ and also “detectors for explosives, radiation and metal.”

Ask yourselves, would American nuclear weapons be equipped with lesser security systems than those that the NNSA is providing for Russian weapons?

Of course not!

And yet we’re asked to believe that some low-ranking ground crew personnel at Minot AFB simply walked out of a nuclear weapons bunker with six nuclear armed Advanced Cruise Missiles, not knowing what they were carrying, and labored for eight hours to mount those missiles and their launch pylon on the wing of a B-52 strategic bomber without ever noticing that they were armed with nuclear weapons. We’re asked to believe that none of those electronic alarms and motion sensors built into the system went off during that whole process.

When I mentioned the automated alarm and motion sensors to Lt. Col. Jennifer Cassidy, a public affairs person at the Department of the Air Force, and asked her how the movement of the six nukes could have occurred without those alarms being disabled, she said, “It’s an intriguing question, and it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”

` As it should.

` So why isn’t it making the hair stand up on the back of the necks of members of Congress?

Incredibly, to date, there has been no demand for public hearings into this frightening incident.

Congress appears ready and willing to accept the Air Force whitewash at face value: It was an accident. It won’t happen again.

That is not good enough!

We need honest answers to some hard questions. Among them:

* Who disabled the alarm systems on those weapons and on the bunker itself?

* Who mounted six nuclear weapons on the noses of six cruise missiles and put those missiles onto a B-52 launch platform?

* Who authorized them to perform this operation?

* Who moved the armed weapons out of the Bunker at Minot AFB and mounted them on the wing of a B-52 bound for Barksdale AFB? (Barksdale, it should be noted, bills itself as the main staging base for B-52s being flown to the Middle East Theater.)

* Were the six missiles flyable? Were they fueled up and ready to fire, or were they not fueled at the time of the Minot-Barksdale flight?

* Was there targeting information in the missile’s guidance computers and if so, what were those targets?

* What happened to the three military whistleblowers who blew the whistle on this incident and reported it to a journalist at the newspaper <em>Military Times?</em>

* Why hasn’t the Air Force or the FBI investigated the 6-8 untimely deaths including three alleged suicides, one of a Minot weapons guard, one of an assistant defense secretary, and one of a captain in the super-secret Air Force Special Commando Group, as well as alleged fatal vehicle “accidents” involving four ground crew and B-52 pilots and crewmembers at Minot and Barksdale? Could any of this strange cluster of deaths have been related to the incident? The Air Force “investigation” didn’t even mention these incidents, and my investigation, reported in the Oct. 24 issue of the magazine American Conservative, found that none of the police investigators or medical examiners in those incidents had even been contacted by Air Force or other federal investigators.

The Secretary of Defense appears to have been upset about this incident. Secretary Robert Gates ordered an unprecedented stand-down of all air bases in mid-September to check out and account for the entire nuclear inventory, and a general was dispatched immediately to Minot after the discovery of the wayward nukes on August 30 to investigate what had happened. Following a subsequent Air Force investigation, 70 people at Minot and Barksdale AFBs were removed from their posts and decertified from handling nuclear weapons, including five officers, one of them the Minot base commander.

* But a base commander does not have the authority to order nuclear weapons to be loaded on a plane and flown. So who issued that order and why has no one at a senior level in Washington been sacked?

There is speculation that the order may have come via an alternate chain of command.

Vice President Dick Cheney is known to be pressing within the administration for a war with Iran, to be launched before the end President Bush’s second term of office. According to some reports, Cheney has even, on his own authority (or lack thereof), urged Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, in hopes that Iran might retaliate, thus drawing the US into a war.
Could the nation’s war-mongering VP have used his neo-con contacts in the Defense Department or some of the Armageddon-believers in the Air Force to bypass the official chain of command and spring those nukes from their bunker?

Was there a plan to use one or more of those nukes—W80-1 warheads that can be calibrated to detonate with an explosive power ranging anywhere from 150 kilotons down to just 5 kilotons—against Iran? The Advanced Cruise Missile, a stealth weapon almost impossible to spot on radar, is designed to be launched from a remote location by a B-52, and then to fly close to the ground to its target, using terrain maps and GPS guidance. It is also designed to penetrate hardened sites, such as Iran’s nuclear processing and research facilities.

Or was there a plan for a so-called “false-flag incident, “where a small nuke—made to resemble a primitive weapon of the type a fledgling nuclear power might construct—might be detonated at a US target abroad, or even within the US?

These are terrible and terrifying questions to have to ask, but when you have six nuclear weapons go missing, when the military investigation into the incident is so clearly a whitewash or cover-up, and when you have a vice president who is openly pressing for an illegal war of aggression against a nation that poses no threat to the US, and who, in fact, appears to be conducting his own treacherous foreign policy behind the back of the president and the State Department, they are questions that must be asked, and that demand answers.

In a couple of weeks, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, is planning on calling for a Privilege of the House vote in Congress on moving his Cheney impeachment bill (H Res. 333) to a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee, where it has been stalled by House Democratic leaders since being filed last April 24. Such a hearing should demand answers from the vice president and his staff about his treasonous efforts to push the country into yet another war in the Middle East. It should also grill Air Force personnel about the true nature of the Minot nuclear incident.

Every member of the House of Representatives should have to take a stand on this issue.

The Democratic House leadership, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, can be expected to try to table Kucinich’s privilege motion, which would prevent such a vote.

Americans should demand that Pelosi and other Democratic leaders let Kucinich’s privilege motion go forward, and should insist that every member of Congress put their position on the line. Every American should demand that their representative to Congress support the start of impeachment hearings on Vice President Cheney.

We need to know if the Vice President’s office was behind the flight of those six warheads.

We need to know in what other treasonous, conspiratorial actions the Vice President has been engaged in his unremitting effort to expand the war from Iraq and Afghanistan into Iran.
------------------------

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative reporter and political columnist. His latest book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Links to Watch PBS' Bill Moyers on Impeachment w/ John Nichols and Bruce Fein

Chip — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 12:02:05 -0400

Here's the LINK to watch Bill Moyers' introduction report on Impeachment with John Nichols and Bruce Fein.

To watch the discussion with John Nichols and Bruce Fein, LINK and tap "Watch video." There's a second part, too.

According to Gallop's Confidence in Institutions survey, Americans' approval of Congress is at an all-time low, 14%.

I could be wrong, but I bet it has something to do with the American public, who favor impeachment for Bush at 46% and for Cheney at 58%, being FED UP with a bunch of politicians who are too busy sucking on the corporate lobbyists' teats than to do their sworn, constitutional duty.

Of course, I could be wrong...but if Pelosi and Reid won't do the people's business by fulfilling their sworn oaths to support and defend the Constitution, THEY should be impeached!

IMPEACH REID AND PELOSI!

Senate Panel Cuts Off Funds for Cheney’s Office

Chip — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:21:29 -0400

U.S. Senate panel moves to cut off funding for Cheney in flap with Dems over executive order

WASHINGTON: Senate Democrats moved Tuesday to cut off funding for U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's office in a continuing battle over whether he must comply with national security disclosure rules.

A Senate appropriations panel chaired by Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin refused to fund $4.8 million in the vice president's budget until Cheney's office complies with parts of an executive order governing its handling of classified information.

At issue is a requirement that executive branch offices provide data on how much material they classify and declassify. That information is to be provided to the Information Security Oversight Office at The National Archives.

Cheney's office, with backing from the White House, argues that the offices of the president and vice president are exempt from the order because they are not executive branch "agencies."

The funding cut came as the appropriations panel approved 5-4 along party lines a measure funding White House operations, the Treasury Department and many smaller agencies.

Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said Cheney's office was flouting requirements that it comply with the reporting requirements on classified information.

"Neither Mr. Cheney or his staff is above the law or the Constitution," Durbin said. "For the vice president to believe that he has no responsibility to meet this requirement of the law is a dereliction of duty."

The tempest originally attracted widespread media attention after Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman charged that Cheney's office's had originally argued to the Archives that it did not have to comply with the order because it was not "an entity within the executive branch."

The vice president is also the president of the Senate, able to vote to break ties and preside over the chamber, though he is not eligible to sponsor legislation or participate in debates.

Cheney's office, Waxman said, also blocked the archives from doing an onsite inspection of his office to make sure classified information was being properly protected.

Republicans on the Senate panel said Durbin was going overboard in using Congress' power of the purse to try to force Cheney to conform with the order.

Such a step, said Republican Sen. Sam Brownback would set a terrible precedent in relations between the executive and legislative branches of government, which have historically let each other set their own budgets.

"This is going to further erode any sort of working relationship back and forth," Brownback said. "This is a patently bad idea."

The House of Representatives last month narrowly rejected a comparable attempt by Democrats to cut off funding for Cheney's office.

On Tuesday, two panel Democrats — moderates Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska — registered discomfort with Durbin's move, though they backed him when Republicans forced a vote.

Brownback said the executive order does not apply to Cheney's office because it is not an agency. But Durbin insisted that Cheney's office is explicitly covered because the order applies to "any other entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information."

Replacement for Sen. Thomas does not have to be Republican

richardmathews — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:59:35 -0400

Is Governor Freudenthal (D-WY) actually required to pick a Republican to replace Sen. Craig Thomas (R-WY)?

State law says so, but it may violate the U.S. Constitution. So says University of California law professor Vikram Amar writing for findlaw.com. Professor Amar is also a former clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun.

See the arguments, vote in a poll, and participate in the discussion at
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/6/6/71141/06254

You will also find a sample letter there to send to Governor Freudenthal to ask him to consider all of his options.

Impeach Gonzalez - Watch the Video, Sign the Petition?

Chip — Tue, 22 May 2007 05:17:09 -0400

Who Cares? Why Does It Matter?