these scum are NOT disagreeing about what % of GDP goes to defense vs. health vs. education vs. roads

THEY WANT EVERY DIME GOING IN THEIR POCKETS,

and

they want US  --- ALL OF US -- living like all the peeee-ons of India, or Mexico, or Brazil, Or Nigeria

the affluent sell outs of congress with a -D after their names can delude themselves that they're playing strategery -- they obviously can't add and subtract,

cuz if they could, or if they had to, they'd see that the fascists want to subtract those sell outs from the ranks of the affluent and add the sell outs to the ranks of the peeee-ons.

politics is about NOT who writes the better tome gets to the better prep school, better college, better grad program, better paper pushing policy position.

try Machiavelli or Richard III or 1984 if you need to understand this crowd.

And I guess I have to say what I said to anti-impeachment people back in January, who felt it would be a "distraction" from all the other things the Congressional Democrats needed to do-- what better things are they doing with their time?  Enforcing their own subpoenas?  Not so much.  Restoring habeas, or even trying to in such a way as to score political points and make the Republicans look bad?  Non.  Preventing abortions like the FISA "fix" from coming to the floor and passing?  Uh, no.  Defunding the war, or otherwise limiting Bush's warmaking ability?  Quite the opposite, in fact.  Opposing the run up to war with Iran?  Heck no, they are signing on to resolutions declaring acts of war on the part of Iran.

But, when I think about 2009, I think about more than the war. I think about the federal judges and Supreme Court justices that will be appointed in the next four years. I think about the crime bills and draconian sentences that will result with another Republican President and Congress.

I want the Dems to win in 2008 for those issues and I think they need our help. I'm going to work for that rather than impeachment.

But, I respect that others feel differently and thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and passion on the issue here.

No.

First Watergate, then Iran/Contra.

Now all of this?

No.

The rule of law depends on bringing them to justice.

Anything less, and the country is gone, no matter what money puppet 'wins' in '08.

Just joking- ha, ha!!!

There can be no impeachment.

Its off the table.

On the floor.

What motivations do they have to do anything differently? The Iraq occupation will not end, and none of the bullsh*t will stop, unless the Democrats become paralyzed with fear that they will lose congress and the presidency.

Never Give An Inch. Vote for them when they deliver, not when they just make empty promises to deliver.

Hillary has already said she expects the occupation to continue at least until 2013, and refuses to commit to killing the FISA bill.

Votes and contributions are the only leverage people have over them.

And they are counting on people not using it... out of fear of the greater of two evils. In other words they are selling fear. Same tactic the rethugs used so successfully.

If people don't use the only leverage they have, the exactly who is doing the capitulating?

It's a rock and a hard place situation, to be sure. But when you're between a rock and a hard place, choosing one or the other traps you.

That leverage is the only thing people have that can force a paradigm change. They know it. And they are certain that not enough people will use it.

It will not matter if the Democrats win the presidency and a Congressional majority without having been first forced to end the occupation of Iraq, reverse the FISA amendment, and a few other things. Do away with the MCA would also be a good start.

Calling for impeachment is a waste of time. It is not going to happen. You need Nancy Pelosi onside for it to have any hop whatever. She is adamant that will not do it.

If there was any chance whatever that she could be convinced to put impeachment back on the table, the occupation would ALREADY be over, and the FISA Amendment never would have seen the floor of the house. Congressional approval ratings would be at all time highs instead of all time lows, and the Democrats would be well on their way to not only a landslide next year, but to a sea change in the political paradigm that would last for a generation or more.

That kind of paradigm shift can still be accomplished, however. But only through voters taking matters into their own hands and USING power and the leverage they have. to FORCE the Democrats to win by delivering on Iraq, on FISA, and on the dismantling of constitutional liberties, in spite of themselves. The question of Supreme Court appointees will naturally become a moot point if this is done.

Islamabad, Pakistan - In a telephone address to lawyers in Pakistan's capital, the ousted chief justice of the Supreme Court urged them today to continue to defy the state of emergency imposed by the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

"The lawyers should convey my message to the people to rise up and restore the Constitution," the chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, told dozens of lawyers on speakerphone at a meeting of the Islamabad Bar Association before his cellphone line was cut. "I am under arrest now, but soon I will also join you in your struggle."

Today, the second day of protests, the police arrested 50 lawyers in the eastern city of Lahore and clashes broke out between hundreds of lawyers and Pakistani police officers in Multan, about 200 miles to the southwest. On Monday, in Lahore and other cities, thousands of lawyers protested, with many beaten by baton-wielding police officers and then thrown into police wagons. By the end of that day, about 2,000 people had been rounded up by the authorities, among them 500 to 700 lawyers, according to lawyers and political officials.

It was unclear how Chief Justice Chaudhry, who was fired on Saturday and is under house arrest, was able to gain access to a cellphone. He and other lawyers said they hoped to re-create the protest campaign they carried out this spring when the lawyers mounted big rallies in major cities after General Musharraf had removed Chief Justice Chaudhry from the Supreme Court bench. General Musharraf's popularity plummeted during the protests, and Mr. Chaudhry was reinstated after four months, invigorating the Supreme Court and the general's opponents.

What issues would those be, exactly?  And I will ask again, what progress are Democrats making on ANY of those issues, whether in substance or in terms of optics, while they are saving themselves all this time by not pursuing impeachment?  I'm dead serious-- make your case for how well spent the time is, and how much less they would accomplish if they were spending it on impeachment.  I guess we would not have gotten that minimum wage hike, and that would have been a real shame.

Now, I don't dispute that it is important for Democrats to hold onto and hopefully increase their majorities in congress, to make it harder to Pubs to obstruct their efforts in the future. And I don't dispute that this has to be a top focus of Democratic members of congress and their supporters. But not in their official capacities as members of congress. Their political obligations to themselves and their party should not be affecting what their do in their moral and ethical obligation as legislators.

Rather, I think that a much more compelling reason to oppose impeachment is that it is highly unlikely to succeed at this point, and it would distract from other, more viable legislative efforts, especially passing progressive legislation (most of which would get vetoed, of course, but some of which might get overriden, as happened yesterday in the house for the first time, and nearly all of which could be used against Pubs in the '08 election), conducting aggressive oversight (that includes contempt citations when warranted), and defunding the war.

Impeach Cheney. The vice president has run utterly amok and must be stopped.
Under Dick Cheney, the office of the vice president has been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented giant oak. In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify.
Take the vice president's preposterous theory that his office is outside the executive branch because it also exercises a legislative function. The same can be said of the president, who also exercises a legislative function in signing or vetoing bills passed by Congress. Under Cheney's bizarre reasoning, President Bush is not part of his own administration: The executive branch becomes acephalous. Today Cheney Chief of Staff David Addington refused to renounce that reasoning, instead laughably trying to diminish the importance of the legal question at issue.
The nation's first vice president, John Adams, bemoaned: "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived; and as I can do neither good nor evil, I must be borne away by others and meet common fate." Vice President John Nance Garner, serving under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, lamented: "The vice presidency isn't worth a pitcher of warm piss." In modern times, vice presidents have generally been confined to attending state funerals or to distributing blankets after earthquakes.
_____________

_______________
Then President George W. Bush outsourced the lion's share of his presidency to Vice President Cheney, and Mr. Cheney has made the most of it. Since 9/11, he has proclaimed that all checks and balances and individual liberties are subservient to the president's commander in chief powers in confronting international terrorism. Let's review the record of his abuses and excesses:
The vice president asserted presidential power to create military commissions, which combine the functions of judge, jury, and prosecutor in the trial of war crimes. The Supreme Court rebuked Cheney in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Mr. Cheney claimed authority to detain American citizens as enemy combatants indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay on the president's say-so alone, a frightening power indistinguishable from King Louis XVI's execrated lettres de cachet that occasioned the storming of the Bastille. The Supreme Court repudiated Cheney in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.
The vice president initiated kidnappings, secret detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of suspected international terrorists. This lawlessness has been answered in Germany and Italy with criminal charges against CIA operatives or agents. The legal precedent set by Cheney would justify a decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to kidnap American tourists in Paris and to dispatch them to dungeons in Belarus if they were suspected of Chechen sympathies.
The vice president has maintained that the entire world is a battlefield. Accordingly, he contends that military power may be unleashed to kill or capture any American citizen on American soil if suspected of association or affiliation with al-Qaida. Thus, Mr. Cheney could have ordered the military to kill Jose Padilla with rockets, artillery, or otherwise when he landed at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, because of Padilla's then-suspected ties to international terrorism.
Mr. Cheney has championed a presidential power to torture in contravention of federal statutes and treaties.

I love the fact that the Repugs forced this into the Judiciary committee. This will finally show us how the Democratic leadership and it's minions have defrauded the public and undermined the constitution just as Bushco has done. They will be forced to expose the fact that they too have no clothes.

There is not enough support in Congress to pull impeachment off. There is one year until elections. Impeachment from a weak position would become the Democratic election theme. A big loser in every way.

1. doomed to failure., and
   
2. distract attention from the important issues at hand.

concentrate on winning the white house, and solidifying an insurmountable majority in both houses, then maybe consider going after bush and cheney.

Cheney and Bush are not guilty of any impeachable crimes.   That is why the dems aren't pursuing impeachment.

Even if they where (which they aren't) like Clinton it would develop into a political fire fight so the dems are smart to avoid it.

Article 3 is extremely thin (sabre-rattling against Iran).