At least last week's "this is not an impeachment" hearing in the House Judiciary Committee did something real. It proved that any so called "Progressive" who remains a member of the Democratic Party is part of the problem, not the solution.

Yes, Obama is naked!!! (beneath his nice suit)

And yes, Tucker is an arsehole and McCain=Brittney. Whatever.

Now that Ive got your attention, PLEASE click the #!%$%!!$!#&^$#!! Kucinich impeachment Petition.... or pass it on, comment to show you did, that you cared, that you didnt care but did your duty... just put some attention on it.

I see Newt got a million sigs on a petition for drilling. Yet Dennis has ONLY a few hundred thousand for saving the republic! How pathetic. There is a deadline at the midnight hour - tonight!

If you are only with difficulty making time to get through every bit of the 6-hours of Not-Yet-Impeachment hearings last Friday, I was skimming over, and highly recommend, the LiveBlog of the hearings by AfterDowningStreet.org's David Swanson.  What few people know, and may never know, is there was high drama in that room.  A sense of the proceedings can be gained rapidly by skimming over David's notes, who was in the room.  A recent panel of Democracy Now discusses how newspapers across America are losing circulation and ad revenue.  If this kind of stuff was reported in the newspapers, people would be snatching them up and the problem solved.  

Let's face it: the impeachment of a law-breaking president is sexy, and sells papers.

Next steps on impeachment, please sign Dennis Kucinich's petition which he will be delivering to his colleagues before he takes his next step...

Just got this in the old inbox, and was glad to have this community to pass it along to -- in between bouts of work (three jobs) and the Obama campaign this site helps me to feel like I have a stake.

My personal feelings aside, I'm sure Dennis would like some backup for his pushback against the un-Constitutional excesses of the failed Bush regime.

Excerpts and link after the jump.

Cross posted at StopPoliticalCalls.org

UPDATE:  Cleveland Plain Dealer did a story today on this.

Dennis Kucinich, the ex-Mayor of Cleveland and current Member of Congress, is desperate to get the American people to support his call to have hearings on possible impeachment of President GW Bush.

While he can use virtually any communication tool he wishes to use - direct mail, press, tv, internet, email, etc.. - he may want to hold off on continuing to make robo calls in California.  The fine is $500 per incident.

Today, StopPoliticalCalls.org, received 100's of official complaints from our members about robo calls that Kucinich is making into the state of CA urging them to support his call for hearings on impeachment.

After more than three years of grassroots pressure from true patriots like you, Congress finally took step 1 towards impeaching George W. Bush for his High Crimes by holding a "non-impeachment hearing" last Friday.

Witnesses led by Dennis Kucinich, Elliot Adams, Rocky Anderson, Bob Barr, Vincent Bugliosi, Bruce Fein, Maurice Hinchey, and Elizabeth Holtzman presented an overwhelming case for impeachment. Watch the individual videos and the wrap-up by American News Project.

Most of the Democrats who attended the hearings were excellent. If one of these is your Representative, or if you contributed to their campaigns, please call 202-224-3121 to thank them for supporting impeachment: Dennis Kucinich, Robert Wexler, Tammy Baldwin, Keith Ellison, Maurice Hinchey, Sheila Jackson-Lee, and Hank Johnson.

How is it that a congressman feels perfectly OK to impugn and mock Congress but not the Executive?

Could it be because a congressman really is in the employ of the Executive and not the Congress?  Yes it could.

And if so, what might be the President's goal?  

Read on....

During Panel 1, Representative Kucinich (D-Ohio) presented his three bills regarding the articles of impeachment for Shrub for the consideration of the Judiciary Committee. He asked his colleagues in Congress to honor our oath to support and defend the constitution.

These hearings are currently being shown on C-Span 1 TV

Links:C-Span 1 - follow link on home page

Other links

KPFA & Pacifica Radio will air Friday's hearing from 9:00AM - 1:00PM EDT streamed live at pacifica.org and kpfa.org and on the air at KPFA (Berkeley), KPFK (Los Angeles), KPFT (Houston), and others TBD.

Important Note: Please do NOT recommend this diary. Instead recommend the
Mothership here.

See Panel 2 speakers below the flip

This morning approximately 110 people lined up outside Rayburn 2141 hoping to get into the hearing. We were initially told that there were 40 seats available to the public, but ultimately only SIXTEEN people were allowed inside. There were two overflow rooms, both of which were rendered standing room only as staffers and interns also attended in force. There has been one hallway arrest so far. Here are Laurie Arbeiter from World Can't Wait and Jenny Heinz of CodePink, who both came down from NYC to attend the hearing.

During Panel 1, Representative Kucinich (D-Ohio) presented his three bills regarding the articles of impeachment for Shrub for the consideration of the Judiciary Committee. He asked his colleagues in Congress to honor our oath to support and defend the constitution.

These hearings are currently being shown on C-Span 1 TV

Links:C-Span 1 - follow link on home page

Other links

KPFA & Pacifica Radio will air Friday's hearing from 9:00AM - 1:00PM EDT streamed live at pacifica.org and kpfa.org and on the air at KPFA (Berkeley), KPFK (Los Angeles), KPFT (Houston), and others TBD.

Important Note: Please do NOT recommend this diary. Instead recommend the
Mothership here.

See Panel 2 speakers below the flip

House Judiciary Committee Hearing on Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitations
10:00am EDT

This will be shown on C-Span 1 TV

Links:  C-Span 1 - follow link on home page
   From afterdowningstreet.org:

KPFA & Pacifica Radio will air Friday's hearing from 9:00AM - 1:00PM EDT streamed live at pacifica.org and kpfa.org and on the air at KPFA (Berkeley), KPFK (Los Angeles), KPFT (Houston), and others TBD.

The House is not in session today, but the big goings-on will be in the House Judiciary Committee.

• Watch online
• Listen online

Today's the day House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers has set aside for a hearing granted in response to the demands of Dennis Kucinich for hearings on the impeachment resolutions he's introduced over the course of the past few months: H. Res. 333 and H. Res. 799, impeaching Dick Cheney, and H. Res. 1258 and H. Res. 1345, impeaching George W. Bush.

The hearing, scheduled for 10:00 A.M. in Room 2141 in the Rayburn House Office Building, is not styled as an impeachment hearing. That's something Conyers and his staff have studiously avoided. It is instead titled a hearing on, "Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitations." As we'll see later, this designation could impose some real substantive limitations on the ability of Members and witnesses alike to discuss such critical matters as what constitutional provisions actually set the boundaries of executive power, and what Bush may have done to warrant their invocation. But other than that...

Chairman Conyers wasn't originally inclined to hold any kind of hearing related to Kucinich's resolutions, but a combination of factors eventually made that an untenable position -- though unfortunately none of those factors likely reflect any newfound interest among most Members of Congress in actually impeaching either Cheney or Bush. But with three of Kucinich's four resolutions all referred to Conyers' committee by actual roll call votes on the floor rather than by the usual process of designation by the Speaker in consultation with the parliamentarian, treating those referrals as mere pro forma designations and letting the bills die of neglect (as is the chairman's prerogative) became more difficult to do.

In addition, the cosponsorship of some of those resolutions by members of the Judiciary Committee (Tammy Baldwin, Robert Wexler, Luis Gutierrez, Steve Cohen, Keith Ellison, Shiela Jackson-Lee, Maxine Waters), and especially the explicit pressure for hearings by Wexler, Baldwin and Gutierrez, made it impossible to maintain the position that there was no interest among the membership in having those hearings.

Finally, there was the tactic eventually employed to greater effect by Kucinich, taking advantage of the rules permitting any Member of the House to bring a resolution directly proposing impeachment to the floor at any time as a highly privileged motion, and forcing the Speaker to designate a time within two days after the motion is noticed for its consideration. That gave Kucinich the ability to threaten, after his Cheney resolutions were ignored by the Judiciary Committee, to follow up his first Bush resolution with a second one if the Committee didn't act within 30 days. In theory, he could have threatened an even shorter timeline for the second one, or indeed to bring one every single day until he got what he was looking for. But with that being clear to everyone, granting the hearing (but refusing to call it an impeachment hearing) must certainly have seemed the simplest solution. Especially if you can schedule them for a Friday when there are no votes in the House, so that fewer people will want to stick around to participate or follow along.

So who are the witnesses at this non-impeachment hearing?

Witness List

Panel I:

Hon. Dennis Kucinich
U.S. House of Representatives
10th District, OH

Hon. Maurice Hinchey
U.S. House of Representatives
22nd District, NY

Hon. Walter Jones
U.S. House of Representatives
3rd District, NC

Hon. Brad Miller
U.S. House of Representatives
13th District, NC

Panel II:

Hon. Elizabeth Holtzman
Former U.S. House of Representatives
16th District, NY
Department of Justice

Hon. Bob Barr
Former U.S. House of Representatives
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
7th District, GA

Hon. Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson
Founder and President
High Roads for Human Rights

Stephen Presser
Raoul Berer Professor of Legal History
Northwestern University School of Law

Bruce Fein
Associate Deputy Attorney General, 1981-82
Chairman, American Freedom Agenda

Vincent Bugliosi
Author and Former Los Angeles County Prosecutor

Jeremy A. Rabkin
Professor of Law
George Mason University School of Law

Elliott Adams
President of the Board
Veterans for Peace

Frederick A. O. Schwarz, Jr.
Senior Counsel
Brennan Center for Jutice at NYU School of Law

Interesting. Jeremy A. Rabkin is a Constitutional Law professor who doesn't appear to have a law degree. It's by no means impossible to teach ConLaw without one. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. GMU Law. Gee, I wonder who suggested him?

Panel I looks interesting too. Walter Jones is a name I wouldn't have expected to see there, though I know he's been both rather remorseful about the Iraq war and outspoken about it, since his long ago "freedom fries" days. Hinchey has been very vocal in the past with questions about the process by which DOJ claims to have "authorized" the NSA's illegal domestic spying program. Kucinich, of course, is Kucinich. And Brad Miller will be there to discuss two pieces of legislation he's introducing to address the Bush "administration" power grabs: one to authorize the Congress to ask the courts to appoint a special prosecutor in cases when the DOJ refuses to press contempt of Congress charges, and one to require notice to Congress when the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issues an opinion advising the executive that it may ignore statutory law (though I suppose we might wonder why they wouldn't ignore that law, too).

Finally, a note on what not to expect: the "L word." Many people watching the hearings will wonder at some point why no one is just coming out and saying Bush lied. There's extensive precedent in the House against "personal abuse, innuendo, or ridicule of the President."

Personal abuse, innuendo, or ridicule of the President, is not permitted. Under this standard it is not in order to call the President, or a presumptive major-party nominee for President, a "liar" or accuse him of "lying". Indeed, any suggestion of mendacity is out of order. For example, the following remarks have been held out of order: (1) suggesting that the President misrepresented the truth, attempted to obstruct justice, and encouraged others to perjure themselves; (2) accusing him of dishonesty, accusing him of making a "dishonest argument", charging him with intent to be intellectually dishonest, or stating that many were convinced he had "not been honest"; (3) accusing him of "raping" the truth, not telling the truth, or distorting the truth; (4) stating that he was not being "straight with us"; (5) accusing him of being deceptive, fabricating an issue, or intending to mislead the public; (6) accusing him of intentional mischaracterization, although mischaracterization without intent to deceive is not necessarily out of order. [Notes omitted]

And here's something that may cause a bit of trouble:

Although wide latitude is permitted in debate on a proposition to impeach the President, Members must abstain from language personally offensive; and Members must abstain from comparisons to the personal conduct of sitting Members of the House or Senate. Furthermore, Members may not refer to evidence of alleged impeachable offenses by the President contained in a communication from an independent counsel pending before a House committee, although they may refer to the communication, itself, within the confines of proper decorum in debate. [Notes omitted]

I'm not sure what kind of latitude is permitted in a hearing that's convened solely because of a pending proposition to impeach the president, but which purports not to be on that subject, but even the above rule doesn't appear to leave a lot of room for, you know, actually discussing what it is that people will be there to discuss.

All of these precedents, though intended to govern debate on the House floor, will likely be applied similarly to questioning and testimony in the Judiciary Committee. So you may have to get your fix of the "L word" from the press conferences afterward. And depending on what kind of stink, if any, Republicans raise and how Conyers deals with it, most of the other words you want to hear, too. Fair warning.

The hearings will be available via streaming video at the House Judiciary Committee website, and Pacifica Radio's coverage begins at 9:00 am EDT, and will be streamed live at pacifica.org and kpfa.org and on the air at KPFA (Berkeley), KPFK (Los Angeles), KPFT (Houston), WBAI (New York), and others TBD.

In the Senate, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:

Convenes: 9:15am

9:15 am Immediately following the prayer and pledge, the Senate will proceed to up to 2 Roll Call Votes in relation to the following:

• Motion to invoke cloture on S.3268
• If cloture is not invoked on S.3268, motion to invoke cloture on the House message with respect to H.R.3221, the Housing legislation.

10:00am Filing deadline for all 2nd degree amendments [see this discussion of the different types of amendments] to S.3268, the Energy Speculation bill.

The Senate will likely stay in session over the weekend to finish any post-cloture debate on the above bills, and perhaps begin the process of getting the "Coburn Omnibus" (S. 3297) to the floor for next week.

The Iraq War is like the Korean War. An Iran War would be like the Vietnam War. It would be the nail in the coffin to our economy and would likely spawn a new war protest movement as martial law and the police state rises.

Willie Nelson stated on the radio that he is wanting to organize a free concert for 9/11 truth, impeachment of Bush, and Iran War protest.

I think a focus on an Iran War protest would be the least controversial and cause it to grow into a total Woodstock 2008. I heard confirmation that Willie Nelson wants to have the broader appeal of an anti-war concert.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich has led the fight for impeachment since April 2007, when he defied Speaker Pelosi and courageously introduced 3 Articles of Impeachment (H.Res. 333/799) against Vice President Cheney. On June 10, Kucinich defied Speaker Pelosi again and introduced 35 Articles of Impeachment (H.Res. 1258) against President Bush.

When Pelosi refused to allow hearings on any of the 38 Articles of Impeachment, Kucinich returned to the floor of Congress to introduce one more Article of Impeachment against President Bush (H.Res. 1345).

Just posted on YouTube:

SIGN the PETITION: Go to: http://www.kucinich.us

A new day in American Democracy dawn this Friday!!

Committee on the Judiciary Hearings

07/25/2008 Full Committee 10:00 A.M.
in 2141 Rayburn House Office Building

Hearing on: Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitations

By Direction of the Chairman

This Friday, John Conyers will hold a hearing in response to Dennis Kucinich's resolution to impeach Bush.  If you will be in the metro Washington area, show your support by attending this important meeting.  

Contact your Congressman and ask him or her to go.  

In Maya Schenwar's Interview With Rep. Dennis Kucinich for Truthout.org, Dennis pointed out:

The case for war was based on fraud. That's the core charge in this impeachment resolution. And it just takes one article to be able to force the administration and the president to the consequences of their deceit.

(This is actually a repost from some months ago, but I put so much time into hunting down the appropriate photos, I decided to repost it; besides, I'm depressed about not being able to make it to NN this year, so I wanted to post something light to cheer myself--and perhaps others--up a bit)

Several months back, Canadian Noise posted an Oscar-themed diary which speculated on the casting for a filmed version of the 2008 Presidential race.

Unfortunately, the diary didn’t get much notice, but I thought it was such a fun idea that I ran with it, and came up with the following. The only rule I made for myself is to take it seriously—no cartoon characters, no dead actors; all of the choices have to be current, professional film or TV actors. Feel free to toss your own ideas into the ring; I know that I’m way off on at least some of my choices, but what the hell...

I think the ghosts of the past are shouting at us as loud as they can.