The William Holmes Blog

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The New York Times and CBS News are confirming a story we had already heard that Cheney is determined to suck the U.S. into a shooting war with Iran, provoked through back channels with Israel, if he can’t force that policy on Bush any other way. We are in greater danger of the strategic debacle in the Middle East spinning even more wildly out of control every day that Congress does not confront the monstrous malignancy in the office of the vice president in particular.

ACTION PAGE: http://www.usalone.com/cheney_impeachment.php

Vote yes, or else vote no. Nearly 60,000 have already. It could save all of our lives. It could save YOUR live, all of it. Help turn the National Cheney Impeachment Poll into a national phenomenon. That’s where we are going with this. We can do it with your help. All we have to do is get enough people to say he SHOULD be impeached, and he will be impeached.

The situation is so extreme that The New York Times published an editorial yesterday, and we quote from just some of its conclusions below. How can anyone read these words of alarm and not be at LEAST motivated to at express an OPINION? They are finally speaking out. How about you? Please note, destruction of official vice presidential records is a CRIME, and that’s just the latest!

DICK CHENEY RULES
New York Times Editorial
June 3, 2007

The Associated Press reported that Mr. Cheney’s office ordered the Secret Service last September to destroy all records of visitors to the official vice presidential mansion right after The Washington Post sued for access to the logs. That move was made in secret, naturally. It came out only because of another lawsuit, filed by a private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, seeking the names of conservative religious figures who visited the vice president’s residence

This disdain for accountability is distressing, but not surprising. Mr. Cheney has had it on display from his first days in office, when he refused to name the energy-industry executives who met with him behind closed doors to draft an energy policy.

In a similar way, Mr. Cheney seems unconcerned about little things like checks and balances and traditional American notions of judicial process. At one point, he gave himself the power to selectively declassify documents and selectively leak them to reporters. In a recent commencement address, he declaimed against prisoners who had the gall to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States.

Mr. Cheney is the driving force behind the Bush administration’s theory of the unitary executive, which holds that no one, including Congress and the courts, has the power to supervise or regulate the actions of the president. Just as he pays little attention to old-fangled notions of the separation of powers, Mr. Cheney does not overly bother himself about the bright line that should exist between his last job as chief of the energy giant Halliburton and his current one on the public payroll.

From 2001 to 2005, Mr. Cheney received deferred salary payments from Halliburton that far exceeded what taxpayers gave him. Mr. Cheney still holds hundreds of thousands of stock options that have ballooned by millions of dollars as Halliburton profited handsomely from the war in Iraq.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this message to everyone else you know.

Cindy Sheehan | The Opposite of Good Is Apathy
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010606Q.shtml
Cindy Sheehan: Hold your vigils and marches in relevant places, such as
war-mongering, local congressional offices. So many senators and
congresspeople come to mind. Or, in front of a recruiting station. Or
federal buildings. Or military bases. Then, instead of going home and
cracking open a beer or uncorking a bottle of wine, sit down and say,
“We aren’t leaving until you call for an immediate end to the
occupation of Iraq.” Put your butt on the line for humanity. Change
will not happen until we make it happen. We can’t make change happen by
wishing or praying that it will happen. We actually have to do
something.

(Supreme Court)

(McCain Amendment)

The Senate amendment to the new Defense Appropriations Act would explicitly prohibit the U.S. government from subjecting those in its custody to cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment or punishment. It’s pretty straightforward stuff. Yet despite a rousing 90-9 vote for its passage, there are still dark forces at work trying to subvert the intent of this measure, the language of which must survive the conference committee in the House of Representatives. If the morality perverters have their way, there will be a carve-out to exempt the CIA from this prohibition. They are seeking this with the express knowledge that sadists (acting under the color of CIA authority) have been responsible for the horrific abuses which made necessary further action and clarification of existing law. This exemption would in fact turn the measure on its head to AUTHORIZE torture by a particular agency, diametrically contrary to the amendment’s intent. They might as well appoint a “Torture Czar” and make it a cabinet level position. Actually, for all practical purposes we already have a torture czar . . . it’s the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney. Yes, it is Cheney himself who is PERSONALLY pressuring the conference committee to rescind the McCain amendment in this way (just as he was pressuring CIA analysts in the cooking of the justification for war with Iraq). It has been Cheney himself who has taken a lead role from the beginning, talking in 2002 about the need to revive the “dark arts.” Since they could no longer keep the abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and elsewhere classified, they have prosecuted a couple of selected patsies for these crimes, while their agency handlers right up through the chain of command have continued in their unconscionable ways. This is not to let the president himself off the hook. In the first place there is Bush’s own overreaching lust for absolute dictatorial power. Indeed, his longtime attorney and ally, Alberto Gonzales, put his name on the infamous Jan 25, 2002 memo, referring to the Geneva convention as “quaint.” But what many people do not realize is that the heart of that reprehensible legal pretzel job was drafted by David Addington, the staff attorney closely associated with Dick Cheney. And would anybody like to guess Mr. Addington’s current title in the White House? That’s right. He just replaced the indicted “Scooter” Libby as Cheney’s Chief of Staff. There isn’t a “talking head” out there not drinking their own “talking points Kool-Aid” who believes the Fitzgerald investigation is remotely close to being finished. If anything, the allegations in the Libby indictment, which identify Cheney as the one who specifically advised Libby that Valerie (Plame) Wilson worked under the covert wing of the CIA, suggest that the Vice President is at least one of the big game that the Special Counsel is still pursuing. The tight-lipped Fifth Amendment-type reactions given by Cheney in the aftermath of the indictment to explain his own role in the leak scandal do nothing to dispel the intrigue. Instead the administration is circling the torture-advocate wagons even tighter with the promotion of Addington, while the shadow of Traitorgate continues to darken over their heads. Especially now, with the chickens of treason coming home to roost in the nest of the chicken hawks themselves, this is the last time in history for the authors of torture as official American policy to be allowed to push for largesse for even wider atrocities. We must all immediately contact our senators and members of the House of Representatives who might have influence on the conference committee to demand that the overwhelmingly approved language of the McCain amendment remain intact in the final Defense Appropriations Bill.

ACTION FORM: (McCain Amendment)

We must also recognize that this is profoundly related to the selection of a replacement for Harriet Miers as Supreme Court nominee. Remember — one of the talking points of the neocons (before they turned on her for not being sufficiently and demonstrably loyal to their causes) was that she would support the president’s policies in the deceptively dubbed “war on terror.” But the universal common denominator of all Bush appointees is their submissive endorsement of the unlimited expansion of the president’s power to do whatever he likes in defiance of Congress and even the people themselves. In his own confirmation hearing Roberts refused to say (among other things) whether the Congress would have the power to stop a war if the president ignored their authority. That case might come before him, he argued, as if he knew something we didn’t. And it most certainly will if Bush is not stopped from making any more such appointments. Roberts and his ilk will not legislate from the bench (as if that were the boogie man to be feared). No, instead they will UN-legislate from the bench, perhaps even to remove the McCain language from American law by court order on the grounds that it would interfere with the power of the president to play God. Remember also that in his first day on the bench of the high court Roberts left the sheep’s clothing in his chambers to ask aggressively why they should not overturn the TWICE-expressed will of the people in the Oregon “Right to Die” case. For all of these reasons we must demand that the next nominee to the Supreme Court be a true moderate and a true nonpartisan. One of the truly beautiful things about Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is that the American people can look at his work and agree that it will be based entirely on the facts and the law. Even opposing attorneys of those he has indicted must concede that he is unwavering in his fairness and his integrity, favoring neither side by any inherent bias. We can demand no less from the next justice to be appointed to the Supreme Court.

ACTION FORM: (Supreme Court)

If we all speak out, we can remove the Vice President from his position as the torture czar. It’s not as if he doesn’t have enough other black hats to wear; he’s already serving in the capacity of treason czar as it is. Sheriff Fitzgerald is working on that last one. The rest is up to we the people. or to get no more simply email to no_more@trotm.com

A proposal is working its way through Congress that would deter thousands of advocates and stop them from educating voters about the issues. This provision to the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act (H.R. 1461) would “gag” non-profits from all voter outreach activities if they want to receive grants from the Affordable Housing Fund.

This means that groups who help low-income voters with affordable housing would lose their federal funding if they try to teach those same people to help themselves, by making informed voting choices at the polls.

If House members are successful in attaching the gag order, it is likely Congress would move to restrict the political speech of other non-profit organizations that receive federal funds.

Don’t let Congress put a chokehold on free speech by organizations. Urge your Representative to oppose the gag language.