BY TOM TOMORROW
Rick Perlstein tells a dreadfully sad story involving his grandmother and Fox News, here.
There really are no words for people who make it their life’s work to encourage Americans to hate and fear each other. By contrast, some days it seems like it’s only anti-American America-haters like us who actually like other Americans.
BLURG: Borrowed from here.
On Friday John Conyers appeared at an event in San Diego. While speaking there he said that he would support the introduction of articles of impeachment if three additional members of Congress ask him to do so. (He seemed to say he meant in addition to the 13 current co-sponsors of Kucinich’s bill H.Res. 333 regarding Cheney.)
Below is a transcript of Conyers’ remarks. Video should be available soon.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: Call Conyers at 202-225-5126 and ask him to start hearings on the impeachment of Dick Cheney. Phone your own Congressmember at 202-224-3121 and ask them to co-sponsor H.Res. 333 and express their support for impeachment to Conyers.
CONYERS: Now, let me close with this one suggestion, is that I need some Members of Congress to come to me and say Mr Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, I heard you were out in San Diego, and they really put it to you, and you made commitments that we don’t know if you were just saying… saying something to get out of that hotel alive (laughter) or were you, or were you serious and here’s what we need to do. We need to have three Members of Congress from anywhere come and say, “Congressman, if you, if you are willing to support an inquiry into a resolution of whether there had been acts of impeachability conducted by the Vice President of, and the President of the United States, that could lead to High Crimes and Misdemeanors, then we will join you if you introduce such a resolution”…
QUESTIONER: We do have House Resolution 333.
CONYERS: I’m talking about more. Look. And so let us see how many people would be willing to back us up…
I want to examine and put forward as we move along a close, critical examination of all of the benefits and the costs involved in making this momentous decision. Um. It’s easy to say that this is, this is a no brainer. It’s, the logic is all on one side, and I wish that were so. If it were so, you would be here congratulating me for doing what you had been asking me and others to do for so long.
So let’s think soberly about it. I have to think about the future. I have to weigh what this, the impact of this is going to be. And, by the way, you probably know, that there is such a thing as the retroactive impeachment process…If you introduced the resolution of impeachment after the person is gone.
Robert Parry’s new book Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush is now on sale. I just ordered it, and I hope you’ll consider doing so too and maybe even sending Parry’s website some money. Parry is one of America’s greatest investigative journalists, and has really put himself on the line to do the work he does.
AND: Check out Parry’s recent piece, “If the Democrats Want to Win…”
Arthur Silber contrasts the organized conservative outcry that stopped the immigration bill with progressive fecklessness, especially on Iran:
Over the last few years, I have never heard anything similar on the liberal shows. Never. Not about the Military Commissions Act (see both “‘Thus the World Was Lost'” and “America, Now Without the Revolution”), not about the Roberts, Alito or Gonzales nominations, not about ending the immoral and criminal occupation of Iraq — and not about preventing an attack on Iran.
Not on any of these issues. Never. Nor have I ever seen a similar kind of effort on the liberal and progressive blogs. Never. Every once in a while, the liberal blogs will urge action on perhaps on a single day, maybe two — and then the issue vanishes until some new development (not brought about by the bloggers themselves) might catapult it into public consciousness again. Such tactics are sporadic, severely limited in time and scope, very infrequent, and completely ineffective.
I hesitate to say that the conservatives who worked so hard to defeat the immigration bill are “serious” about their ideas. That word grants them a stature that is entirely undeserved, particularly since the reasons for their opposition are so viciously ignorant. But I will acknowledge that they care about their ideas and that they are committed to them, in a way that it appears liberals and progressives are not.