Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Today is the launch of ImpeachCheney.org. It’s an effort by Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films and a big coalition of progressive organizations to try to put the impeachment of Cheney on the national agenda in a serious way. (I’m currently doing some work for After Downing Street, which is part of the effort.)

The first step is for as many people as possible to sign the Impeach Cheney petition. Then before long there will be further news, including fancy national spokespeople and further actions to take for those who want to get more involved. Those with blogs can start by posting these logos on their site.

So I strongly encourage you to go sign the petition now. In all of American history, has there ever been a government official who deserved impeachment more than Dick Cheney? Let’s get our act together and do it.

Last year Johns Hopkins researchers produced a study estimating that 650,000 Iraqis had died as of July, 2006 as a result of the U.S. invasion. The organization Just Foreign Policy has now created a very rough new estimate, based on the original study, of deaths to the present day. The number they came up with is just under one million.

For more information on the new estimate, including an explanation of how it was created, see here.

AND: The number of civilian deaths is different from the total deaths, but nonetheless this poll from last February is highly disturbing:

The number of [civilian] Iraqis killed, however, is much harder to pin down [than US deaths], and that uncertainty is perhaps reflected in Americans’ tendency to lowball the Iraqi death toll by tens of thousands.

Iraqi civilian deaths are estimated at more than 54,000 and could be much higher; some unofficial estimates range into the hundreds of thousands…

Among those [Americans] polled for the AP survey, however, the median estimate of Iraqi deaths was 9,890.

I strongly encourage you to sign this Moveon petition:

“Congress must force Vice President Cheney to respond to its subpoenas. If he continues to obstruct justice and disregard the rule of law, Congress has no choice but to begin impeachment proceedings against him.”

The fact that Moveon has gotten to this point is significant. The Democratic leadership listens to them, because they have to—and Moveon rarely moves too far away from the Democrats. Sign this and send it to everyone you know. Push Moveon to keep going.

Funny.

(Thanks to Matt for pointing this out.)

Any attempt to impeach George Bush and/or Dick Cheney would obviously need the support of Rep. John Conyers, given that he’s Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. (If you’ve forgotten since the exciting days of the Clenis, articles of impeachment are considered in the Judiciary Committee first, and then if approved go to the full House for a vote. If a majority support any of the articles, the official is impeached—the equivalent of an indictment. The articles are then sent to the Senate, where a two-thirds majority is needed to convict and remove the official from office. Nixon never even made it to impeachment; just having three articles of impeachment approved by the Judiciary Committee was enough to get him to resign.)

But frustratingly for those (of us) who believe we desperately need to ITMFA, Conyers has been unwilling to come out in favor of impeachment. Whether this has been because of pressure from the Congressional leadership or reasons of his own, it’s meant that impeachment has been essentially dead in the water. By contrast, if Conyers changed his mind, it would make impeachment a serious possibility.

So…I’m pleased to pass along this absolutely completely unverified rumor from the comments section of DailyKos yesterday morning. I doubt this is accurate, and in any case we’ll probably know one way or another for sure tomorrow. But given this country was founded in a burst of possibly unwarranted optimism about human capability, I don’t see any harm in believing this for at least a few hours:

I’m not sure if this is correct place, but the aide I just spoke to in Congressman Conyer’s office told me that Rep. Conyers is now in support for Impeachment.

I asked her what Rep. Conyers’ stance is concerning Impeachment of president george w. bush and vice president richard b. cheney and she said and I’m quoting:

“Congressman Conyers supports Impeachment of the President and Vice-President.”

I’m not sure if this is going to actually mean anything, but this is what I was just told by Conyers’ office less than 5 minutes ago.

I also asked her if I could quote her and she said “yes”. Let us hope this is a good sign.

Happy July 4th!