Posted on 05/22/2007 12:34:52 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Democratic Party leaders have taken no steps to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, so a group of political activists is bringing the urgency of impeachment to the people.
National and local voices for impeachment led a town hall meeting Monday evening at the Memorial Union.
Debra Sweet, a Madison native and national director of World Can't Wait, a New York-based group promoting impeachment, said the country needs to break out of politics as usual.
"Impeachment is not exactly politics as usual. Many, many people across this country feel utterly locked out about how to change anything right now in terms of the political process," she told about 250 people in Great Hall.
Not only did Bush get the country into an illegitimate and illegal war in Iraq, she said, but he violated FISA -- the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- which requires a warrant be issued before surveillance is conducted.
"Everyone in Congress knows that Bush openly violated the FISA law, he told us that he violated it. These are impeachable offenses. There is no question about that. The political will for impeachment can only come from one place, the people," Sweet said.
The articles of impeachment, she said, can be written overnight on a cocktail napkin.
"What's lacking is the political will," she said, noting that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took the extraordinary step six months ago of saying that impeachment is off the table.
John Nichols, associate editor of The Capital Times and author of the book, "The Genius of Impeachment," traveled around Vermont talking about impeachment with the country's most famous war protester, Cindy Sheehan. There are now 41 towns in Vermont that voted to impeach the president.
In April, Vermont state senators voted to call for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney, saying their actions have raised "serious questions of constitutionality." The nonbinding resolution is believed to be the first in the country.
Nichols said he is disappointed that Wisconsin hasn't followed suit.
"Why hasn't Madison, Wisconsin, the radical hotbed of America, blah, blah, blah voted to impeach the president and vice president of the United States?" he asked, encouraging the audience to pressure the Madison City Council to do just that.
"Let's get this on the City Council's agenda and let's get it done," he said.
Nichols said he worries about the president and vice president leading the country into a war with Iran, "a war that can only end in nuclear holocaust."
While the Congress of the United States debates benchmarks and timelines, Nichols gave his own timelines:
"Every 10 minutes an Iraqi dies in this war. Every 10 hours an American dies in this war. Every 10 days $2 billion are taken out of the U.S. Treasury and poured into the pockets of Halliburton and the other war criminals of this conflict. That is the timeline we should be discussing," he said, drawing a standing ovation.
"The failure to impeach damns this country to a darker future," Nichols said.
Monday, Democracy for America, a pressure group within the Democratic Party, launched www.impeachgonzales.org, a national Web site collecting petitions to pressure Congress to impeach Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In the first hour that it was up, more than 20,000 people signed the petition.
Organizers believe that by the end of the week they will have more than a million signatures and they are ready to go to Congress and force the issue, Nichols said.
"This is no longer the fringe. This is the core of the Democratic Party... The fact is, impeachment is coming to the mainstream and it is coming just in time," he said.
David Swanson, co-founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition pushing for impeachment, and a part-time consultant for Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, showed up to the forum wearing a T-shirt that said "Impeach Bush & Cheney."
A successful movement requires spreading the word in fun and creative ways "that make the dull-sounding work of restoring our Constitution" enjoyable and productive, Swanson said.
"Based on the few polls that we have, we know that those of us who want impeachment are a majority or very close to it," he said. "That should give us all the confidence we need to make impeachment happen."
A January Zogby poll commissioned by Swanson's group showed that Americans, by a margin of 52 to 43 percent, want Congress to consider impeaching Bush if he wiretapped American citizens without a judge's approval.
But it's not enough to be a majority -- it also has to feel like a majority, he said. One of the ways to do that is to wear a T-shirt like Swanson's everywhere you go, he said, adding that the shirts are available on the Web site www.impeach07.org.
"I've been wearing the shirts for two years and I can count on one hand the negative comments I've had," he said, noting that some of those encounters led to productive conversations. On the other hand, he has had thousands of positive comments, compliments and shows of support.
"If we push hard enough we can make impeachment happen," Swanson said.
According to costofwar.com, the people of Wisconsin have spent $6.8 billion on the occupation of Iraq, he said. Instead, the state could have provided 330,744 students with four-year scholarships to public universities, according to the Web site.
When Swanson asked if there were any college students in the room, four hands went up. "We need to get college students in this room," he said.
Looking into the crowd, former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ed Garvey, the fourth of the evening's speakers, said he saw people who believe they can bring about change.
"I am sick and tired of people telling me that there are more important issues than the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. What the hell are they?" he said.
Buzz Davis of the Wisconsin Impeachment/Bring Our Troops Home Coalition, who organized the forum, said his group has collected more than 5,000 names on impeachment petitions for Bush, Cheney, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for "high crimes and misdemeanors."
The event will be broadcast at 7 p.m. Thursday on WYOU/Cable channel 4.
5. It will suck the air out of the room when their eventual candidate tries to get elected. Just imagine the spinning that Hillary or Obama would have to do to avoid looking like they support such nonsense.
Or, in the alternative, look how much endorsing impeachment would do to sink their campaigns, when the public is sick of it after 4-6 months.
keeps the lunatics in their own party diverted and out of the wayThat's exactly what this is. They're given this hopeful toy to play with so they'll stay out of the way and (hopefully, in the mind of the rat leaders) won't cause too much trouble for the hypocritical rat leadership as they go through their hypocritical posturing throughout the day.
I agree and have said so to these people. They are using the same tactics and rhetoric as the Moonbat left. Sometimes when I read their posts I have to check what site I’m on.
People tend to not read the definitions section, but that's where one should always start.
"Electronic surveillance" as it pertains to the law with bold sections to show the reason why the NSA actions, as billed, don't fit the law:
(1) the acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any wire or radio communication sent by or intended to be received by a particular, known United States person who is in the United States, if the contents are acquired by intentionally targeting that United States person, under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes;
(2) the acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any wire communication to or from a person in the United States, without the consent of any party thereto, if such acquisition occurs in the United States, but does not include the acquisition of those communications of computer trespassers that would be permissible under section 2511 (2)(i) of title 18;
(3) the intentional acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any radio communication, under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes, and if both the sender and all intended recipients are located within the United States; or
(4) the installation or use of an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device in the United States for monitoring to acquire information, other than from a wire or radio communication, under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes.
...and anything that does not fit that very specific definition is not subject to that law. The NSA non-flap has been billed as "listening in on INTERNATIONAL calls between known or suspected terrorists overseas and either someone else overseas or someone in the U.S....but the communications were trapped outside the U.S.
The law does not apply if the billing is true and even if it DID apply, there's that whole "under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy" part....good luck to them in proving that a person calling a known terrorist overseas has a REASONABLE expectation of privacy.
Well see, here’s the problem. It’s one thing to say “Bush Lied” to a bunch of Moonbats. It’s another to say it in an official manner, when you know he didn’t.
Voting, Ms. Sweet. Might be something you ought to think about.
That dog won’t hunt.
What a bunch of hate-filled losers!
What happened with Kucunich filing Articles of Impeachment against VP Cheney? Anyone know?
Can I vomit now??? Where were these people when Clinton’s wild thing was on the loose....
Sorry, can’t spare a square...
Hey! I’m only 10 miles south of ‘Madistan’ so make it a ‘surgical strike,’ would ya? ;)
Go ahead and impeach Bush & Cheney...and the rest of the Congress too. Maybe they can impeach themselves.
I know some Community College teachers in Wisconsin.
Many of the students require courses in remedial reading. The Constitution is beyond them.
Our pal John Nichols is the Marxist editor of ahem Wisconsins's leading PROGRESSIVE newspaper as it proclaims right under the title. It's always amusing when these "news" items fail to reveal the political leanings of the people involved in the articles. The Cap-Times is the main reason newspapers are called rags. That's the only reason it's worth is to use as one. Or maybe something else.
Sorry, can’t spare a square...
I get that to ..... very funny
makes me wonder what sort of things are floating around in some of these freepers heads ...
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