Dear 53rd Congressional District Impeachment Committee,

Below is our scheduled meeting with Rep. Davis. The conference room at Rep. Davis’ office will only accommodate 5 representatives from our group. If we don’t have enough room for everyone who wants to come or if some people are not able to go that day I can present Rep. Davis with a written statement from each person who can not go to the meeting. Our meeting time gives us 20 minutes with Rep. Davis.

I need to send Ms. Poole a list of who will be attending the meeting. I have forwarded this message to all the people who e-mailed me with an interest in representing Democrats .Com asking for impeachment (12 people). Please send me back a note saying if you can attend the meeting with the representative or will send me a written statement. If you say you are going to be at the meeting be sure that you can actually be there. I have attended many meetings with representatives in the past and always someone says they will be there and then doesn’t show up. This is disrespectful to the representative and diminishes our message.

If more than 5 people are available to attend I will withdraw my name and let someone else go and contact the 5 people who can go to determine who will lead. I am not a democrat and feel uncomfortable representing Democrats.com. I have no problem doing it if there are not 5 democrats who can go but if there are it would be better to have the group led by a registered democrat.

I’m not sure how to better impress on Representative Davis the absolute necessity of impeachment at the meeting other than expressing our opinions. I’m open to ideas on how to do this. For myself, I can’t see how anyone does not see that impeachment is the only correct course of action so making the argument seems superfluous to me. Somebody please help me with this!!

Any other questions or comments please send to my email hmpeace@cox.net.

Peace, Hugh

________________________________________
From: Poole, Jessica [mailto:Jessica.Poole@mail.house.gov]
Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 1:13 PM
To: 'hmpeace@cox.net'
Subject: Meeting with Congresswoman Davis

This is to confirm your meeting with Congresswoman Davis.

Date: Friday, January 26, 2006
Time: 3:30pm
Location: 4305 University Ave., Ste. 515, San Diego, CA 92105

Thank you. We look forward to seeing you.

Sincerely,

Jessica Poole
Deputy District Director
Office of Congresswoman Susan A. Davis
4305 University Ave., Ste. 515
San Diego, CA 92105
619-280-5353 ph
619-280-5311 f

Dear 53rd Congressional District Impeachment Committee,

Our group met with Rep. Davis today and no one was satisfied with her response to our request for her to support impeachment. I believe the group made an excellent case for impeachment and an impassioned plea for action. The legal requirement of the Congress to act when a President acts outside of his/her authority was clearly made and understood. A call for her specifically and congress as a whole to obey their sworn duty to protect the Constitution was clearly stated and restated.

Our association with Democrats.com was clearly stated at the beginning of the meeting and Democrats.com’s plan to present congress with one million signatures of support for impeachment was stated along with the information that the plan called for every representative to be visited by a delegation from Democrats.com. One member of our group challenged Rep. Davis to give us a number of how many signatures from her constituency were required to convince her to support impeachment. Rep. Davis declined to give a number.

Rep. Davis stated that she, and the Democratic leadership, felt that impeachment hearings would prevent congress from doing the real work of congress like supporting healthcare reform and other progressive agendas. She also indicated that she felt there was not enough time to work through an impeachment process. These arguments were strongly refuted by our group.

I wish we could have been able to convince Rep. Davis to change her position but I am still pleased with our efforts. We made it clear that impeachment is our priority and that we were not going to stop our efforts until we are successful.

Thanks to all who helped make this meeting a disappointing success. I have asked the other members of the group who attended to add their comments to this page so everyone can be heard and so my impression of the meeting is not the only one expressed.

Peace,

Hugh Moore

This message posted on the 53rd Congressional District Impeachment Committee blog on Democrats.com

Hi,

I'm Carl Manaster and today I was elected to head our CA53 CICD. I encourage anyone from the 53rd to get involved. And if you're not from the 53rd - please get involved in your own district.

I believe we can do this. Susan Davis does not currently think that impeachment is appropriate; she thinks she can do more good for the country and her district by focusing on other matters. I think she's mistaken, and I think she is susceptible to serious persuasion; I intend for our group to make that case. We're doing it with petitions, of course, and we will do it with dialogue. The modern history of serious, meaningful impeachment starts and ends with Richard M. Nixon, and the lessons I draw from the nation's experience during his impeachment are that we can accomplish a great deal - more, in fact - on other fronts while impeachment proceeds apace.

Today I started reading John Nichols' The Genius of Impeachment; I hope to relay relevant portions to our Representative over the next several days.

About me: I am a relative newcomer to politics and to activism; I have been a liberal all my life and usually vote Democratic, but preferred to leave the muck of politics to others. That hasn't been working out so well. In 2004 I moved to Canton, OH to volunteer full-time for four months on Jeff Seemann's Congressional campaign and later on the Kerry campaign (we lost). I participate a little on Daily Kos and raised over $18,000 on my ActBlue page for the '06 election (we won!); I also became precinct captain for my precinct and most recently was elected on the Progressive Slate to be a delegate to the California Democratic Party.

Hi Hugh,

Thought you might be interested in the following (in case you had yet to see it).

Hope all's well.

Cheers,

Barry

http://www.harpers.org/TheCaseForImpeachment.html

The Case for Impeachment
Why we can no longer afford George W. Bush Posted on Monday, February 27, 2006. An excerpt from an essay in the March 2006 Harper’s Magazine. By Lewis H.
Lapham.

A country is not only what it does—it is also what it puts up with, what it tolerates. —Kurt Tucholsky

On December 18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr.
(D., Mich.) introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it to form “a select committee to investigate the Administration’s intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment.” Although buttressed two days previously by the news of the National Security Agency’s illegal surveillance of the American citizenry, the request attracted little or no attention in the press—nothing on television or in the major papers, some scattered applause from the left-wing blogs, heavy sarcasm on the websites flying the flags of the militant right. The nearly complete silence raised the question as to what it was the congressman had in mind, and to whom did he think he was speaking? In time of war few propositions would seem as futile as the attempt to impeach a preside nt whose political party controls the Congress; as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee stationed on Capitol Hill for the last forty years, Representative Conyers presumably knew that to expect the Republican caucus in the House to take note of his invitation, much less arm it with the power of subpoena, was to expect a miracle of democratic transformation and rebirth not unlike the one looked for by President Bush under the prayer rugs in Baghdad. Unless the congressman intended some sort of symbolic gesture, self-serving and harmless, what did he hope to prove or to gain? He answered the question in early January, on the phone from Detroit during the congressional winter recess.

“To take away the excuse,” he said, “that we didn’t know.”
So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, “Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?” when the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that “somehow it escaped our notice” that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.

A reason with which it was hard to argue but one that didn’t account for the congressman’s impatience. Why not wait for a showing of supportive public opinion, delay the motion to impeach until after next November’s elections? Assuming that further investigation of the President’s addiction to the uses of domestic espionage finds him nullifying the Fourth Amendment rights of a large number of his fellow Americans, the Democrats possibly could come up with enough votes, their own and a quorum of disenchanted Republicans, to send the man home to Texas. Conyers said:

“I don’t think enough people know how much damage this administration can do to their civil liberties in a very short time. What would you have me do? Grumble and complain?
Make cynical jokes? Throw up my hands and say that under the circumstances nothing can be done? At least I can muster the facts, establish a record, tell the story that ought to be front-page news.”

Which turned out to be the purpose of his House Resolution 635—not a high-minded tilting at windmills but the production of a report, 182 pages, 1,022 footnotes, assembled by Conyers’s staff during the six months prior to its presentation to Congress, that describes the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq as the perpetration of a crime against the American people. It is a fair description.
Drawing on evidence furnished over the last four years by a sizable crowd of credible witnesses—government officials both extant and former, journalists, military officers, politicians, diplomats domestic and foreign—the authors of the report find a conspiracy to commit fraud, the administration talking out of all sides of its lying mouth, secretly planning a frivolous and unnecessary war while at the same time pretending in its public statements that nothing was further from the truth.[1] The result has proved tragic, but on reading through the report’s corroborating testimony I sometimes could counter its inducements to mute rage with the thought that if the would-be lords of the flies weren’t in the business of killing people, they would be seen as a troupe of off-Broadway comedians in a third-rate theater of the absurd. Entitled “The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War,” the Conyers report examines the administration’s chronic abuse of power from more angles than can be explored within the compass of a single essay. The nature of the administration’s criminal DNA and modus operandi, however, shows up in a usefully robust specimen of its characteristic dishonesty. * * * That President George W. Bush comes to power with the intention of invading Iraq is a fact not open to dispute.
Pleased with the image of himself as a military hero, and having spoken, more than once, about seeking revenge on Saddam Hussein for the tyrant’s alleged attempt to “kill my Dad,” he appoints to high office in his administration a cadre of warrior intellectuals, chief among them Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, known to be eager for the glories of imperial conquest.[2] At the first meeting of the new National Security Council on January 30, 2001, most of the people in the room discuss the possibility of preemptive blitzkrieg against Baghdad.[3] In March the Pentagon circulates a document entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oil Field Contracts”; the supporting maps indicate the properties of interest to various European governments and American corporations. Six months later, early in the afternoon of September 11, the smoke still rising from the Pentagon’s western facade, Secretary Rumsfeld t ells his staff to fetch intelligence briefings (the “best info fast...go massive; sweep it all up; things related and
not”)
that will justify an attack on Iraq. By chance the next day in the White House basement, Richard A. Clarke, national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, encounters President Bush, who tells him to “see if Saddam did this.”
Nine days later, at a private dinner upstairs in the White House, the President informs his guest, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, that “when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.”

By November 13, 2001, the Taliban have been rousted out of Kabul in Afghanistan, but our intelligence agencies have yet to discover proofs of Saddam Hussein’s acquaintance with Al Qaeda.[4] President Bush isn’t convinced. On November 21, at the end of a National Security Council meeting, he says to Secretary Rumsfeld, “What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq?...I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.”

The Conyers report doesn’t return to the President’s focus on Iraq until March 2002, when it finds him peering into the office of Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, to say, “Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.” At a Senate Republican Policy lunch that same month on Capitol Hill, Vice President Dick Cheney informs the assembled company that it is no longer a question of if the United States will attack Iraq, it’s only a question of when. The vice president doesn’t bring up the question of why, the answer to which is a work in progress. By now the administration knows, or at least has reason to know, that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, that Iraq doesn’t possess weapons of mass destruction sufficiently ominous to warrant concern, that the regime destined to be changed poses no imminent threat, certainly not to the United States, probably not to any country defended by more than four batteries of light artillery. Such at least is the conclusion of the British intelligence agencies that can find no credible evidence to support the theory of Saddam’s connection to Al Qaeda or international terrorism; “even the best survey of WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile and CW/BW weapons fronts...” A series of notes and memoranda passing back and forth between the British Cabinet Office in London and its correspondents in Washington during the spring and summer of 2002 address the problem of inventing a pretext for a war so fondly desired by the Bush Administration that Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain’s MI-6, finds the interested parties in Washington fixing “the intelligence and the facts...around the policy.” The American enthusiasm for regime change, “undimmed” in the mind of Condoleezza Rice, presents complications.

Although Blair has told Bush, probably in the autumn of 2001 , that Britain will join the American military putsch in Iraq, he needs “legal justification” for the maneuver—something noble and inspiring to say to Parliament and the British public. No justification “currently exists.”
Neither Britain nor the United States is being attacked by Iraq, which eliminates the excuse of self-defense; nor is the Iraqi government currently sponsoring a program of genocide. Which leaves as the only option the “wrong-footing” of Saddam. If under the auspices of the United Nations he can be presented with an ultimatum requiring him to show that Iraq possesses weapons that don’t exist, his refusal to comply can be taken as proof that he does, in fact, possess such weapons.[5]

Over the next few months, while the British government continues to look for ways to “wrong-foot” Saddam and suborn the U.N., various operatives loyal to Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld bend to the task of fixing the facts, distributing alms to dubious Iraqi informants in return for map coordinates of Saddam’s monstrous weapons, proofs of stored poisons, of mobile chemical laboratories, of unmanned vehicles capable of bringing missiles to Jerusalem.[6]

By early August the Bush Administration has sufficient confidence in its doomsday story to sell it to the American public. Instructed to come up with awesome text and shocking images, the White House Iraq Group hits upon the phrase “mushroom cloud” and prepares a White Paper describing the “grave and gathering danger” posed by Iraq’s nuclear arsenal.[7] The objective is three-fold—to magnify the fear of Saddam Hussein, to present President Bush as the Christian savior of the American people, a man of conscience who never in life would lead the country into an unjust war, and to provide a platform of star-spangled patriotism for Republican candidates in the November congressional elections.[8] * * * The Conyers report doesn’t lack for further instances of the administration’s misconduct, all of them noted in the press over the last three years—misuse of government funds, violation of the Geneva Conventions, holding without trial and subjecting to torture individuals arbitrarily designated as “enemy combatants,” etc.—but conspiracy to commit fraud would seem reason enough to warrant the President’s impeachment. Before reading the report, I wouldn’t have expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don’t know why we would run the risk of not impeaching the man. We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country’s good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world’s evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation’s wealth on what t urns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies. In a word, a criminal—known to be armed and shown to be dangerous. Under the three-strike rule available to the courts in California, judges sentence people to life in jail for having stolen from Wal-Mart a set of golf clubs or a child’s tricycle. Who then calls strikes on President Bush, and how many more does he get before being sent down on waivers to one of the Texas Prison Leagues? * * * The above is a brief excerpt from the complete essay, available in the March 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine. -- Impeach Bush

2/14/2007

Dear Rep. Davis,

I have copied below part of an article from Harpers magazine (03/06) which records an interview with Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.). The article asks why he researched an impeachment resolution when the House was controlled by the Republican Party. His response was that he didn't want Congress to be able to say we didn't know. I believe he meant the Republican members as they were in control and did nothing to stop the atrocities committed by President Bush.

However, the same now holds true for the Democratic Party. You have no excuse. The evidence has been put in front of you and your lack of action makes complicit with the president's actions. You can now count yourself as another of the world's TERRORISTS. I do not apologize for the rhetoric because at this point you are just as guilty as President Bush and Congressman Conyers has stated so.

For myself, I couldn't live with myself if I didn't take action. How do you?

In the past I would always end my letters by thanking you for your service. I can no longer do so.

Hugh Moore

An excerpt from an essay in the March 2006 Harper's Magazine. By Lewis H. Lapham.

“To take away the excuse,” he said, “that we didn’t know.”
So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, “Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?” when the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that “somehow it escaped our notice” that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.

A reason with which it was hard to argue but one that didn’t account for the congressman’s impatience. Why not wait for a showing of supportive public opinion, delay the motion to impeach until after next November’s elections? Assuming that further investigation of the President’s addiction to the uses of domestic espionage finds him nullifying the Fourth Amendment rights of a large number of his fellow Americans, the Democrats possibly could come up with enough votes, their own and a quorum of disenchanted Republicans, to send the man home to Texas. Conyers said:

“I don’t think enough people know how much damage this administration can do to their civil liberties in a very short time. What would you have me do? Grumble and complain?
Make cynical jokes? Throw up my hands and say that under the circumstances nothing can be done? At least I can muster the facts, establish a record, tell the story that ought to be front-page news.”

Dear Rep. Davis,

I’ve copied below an article that demonstrates President Bush’s commitment to a “progressive agenda!” When I met with you to ask you to support impeachment of our president you stated that you did not want to jeopardize the possibility of working on a progressive agenda with the republican administration. I questioned your reasoning by pointing out that President Bush will veto any progressive movement so not impeaching him will only hurt a progressive agenda. You did not agree with me.

Now that you have seen President Bush’s budget proposal do you still think you can work with him on a progressive agenda?

I’m expecting an announcement of your support for impeachment very soon. The president is clearly not going to work WITH YOU.

Hugh E Moore
4674 Boundary Street
San Diego, CA 92116-3206
619-793-5397

Maybe We Deserve to Be Ripped Off By Bush's Billionaires

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com
Posted on February 20, 2007, Printed on February 21, 2007 http://www.alternet.org/story/48278/

While America obsessed about Brittany's shaved head, Bush offered a budget that offers $32.7 billion in tax cuts to the Wal-Mart family alone, while cutting $28 billion from Medicaid.

"Now, after she shaved her head in a bizarre episode that culminates a months-long saga of controversial behavior, it's the question being asked by her fans, her foes and the general public: What was she thinking?"-- Bald and Broken: Inside Britney's Shaved Head, Sheila Marikar, ABC.com, Feb. 19

What was she thinking? How about nothing? How about who gives a shit? How's that for an answer, Sheila Marikar of ABC news, you pinhead?

I'm not one of those curmudgeons who freaks out every time that Bradgelina moves the war off the front page of the Post, or Katie Couric decides to usher in a whole new era of network news with photos of the imbecile demon-spawn of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. I understand that we live in a demand-based economy and that there is far more demand for brainless celebrity bullshit than there is, say, for the fine print of the Health and Human Services budget.

But that was before this week. I awoke this morning in New York City to find Britney Spears plastered all over the cover of two gigantic daily newspapers, simply because she cut her hair off over the weekend. To me, this crosses a line. My definition of a news story involves something happening. If nothing happens, then you can't have "news," because nothing has changed since the day before. Britney Spears was an idiot last Thursday, an idiot on Friday, and an idiot on both Saturday and Sunday. She was, shockingly, also an idiot on Monday. It will be news when she stops being an idiot, and we'll know when that happens, because she'll have shot herself for the good of the planet. Britney Spears cutting her hair off is the least-worthy front page news story in the history of humanity.

Apparently, from now on, every time a jackass sticks a pencil in his own eye, we'll have to wait an extra ten minutes to hear what happened on the battlefield or in Congress or any other place that actually matters.

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

Not only does it make many of Bush's tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what's interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans to pay for them.

Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

Some other notable estimate estate tax breaks, versus corresponding cuts:

* Cox family (Cox cable TV) receives $9.7 billion tax break while education would get $1.5 billion in cuts
* Nordstrom family (Nordstrom dept. stores) receives $826.5 million tax break while Community Service Block Grants would be eliminated, a $630 million cut
* Ernest Gallo family (shitty wines) receives a $468.4 million cut while LIHEAP (heating oil to poor) would get a $420 million cut

And so on and so on. Sanders additionally pointed out that the family of former Exxon/Mobil CEO Lee Raymond, who received a $400 million retirement package, would receive about $164 million in tax breaks.

Compare that to the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which Bush proposes be completely eliminated, at a savings of $108 million over ten years. The program sent one bag of groceries per month to 480,000 seniors, mothers and newborn children.

Somehow, to me, that's the worst one on the list. Here you have the former CEO of a company that scored record profits even as it gouged consumers, with gas prices rising more than 70 percent since January of 2001. There is a direct correlation between the avarice of oil company executives and the increased demand for federal aid for heating oil programs like LIHEAP, and yet the federal government wants to reward these same executives for raising prices on the backs of consumers.

Even if you're a traditional, Barry Goldwater conservative, the kinds of budgets that Bush has sent to the hill not only this year but this whole century are the worst-case scenario; they increase spending generally while cutting taxes and social programming. They commit taxpayers to giant subsidies of already Croseus-rich energy corporations, pharmaceutical companies and defense manufacturers while simultaneously cutting taxes on those who most directly benefit from those subsidies. Thus you're not cutting spending -- you're just cutting spending on people who actually need the money. (According to the Washington Times, which in a supremely ironic twist of fate did one of the better analyses of the budget, spending will be 1.6 percent of GDP higher in the 2008 budget than in was in 2000, while revenues will be 2.6 percent of GDP lower). This is something different from traditional conservatism and something different from big-government liberalism; this is a new kind of politics that transforms the state into a huge, ever-expanding instrument for converting private savings into corporate profit.

That's not only bad government, it's bad capitalism. It makes legalized bribery and political connections more important factors than performance and competition in the corporate marketplace. Beyond that, it's just plain fucking offensive to ordinary people. It's one thing to complain about paying taxes when those taxes are buying a bag of groceries once a month for some struggling single mom in eastern Kentucky. But when your taxes are buying a yacht for some asshole who hires African eight year-olds to pick cocoa beans for two cents an hour ... I sure don't remember reading an excuse for that anywhere in the Federalist Papers.

I also don't remember reading much about this year's budget. It was a story for about half a minute when it came out two weeks ago. It barely made TV newscasts, and even when it did, only the broad strokes made it on air. There was some fuss about the Alternative Minimum Tax and a mild uproar over the fact that the 2008 budget failed to account for estimates of the costs for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But overall, the budget was a non-starter as a news story. As it does every year, it takes a back seat to hot-button issues like gay marriage, the latest election scandal, etc. Already, the 2008 election presidential campaign has gotten far more ink than the 2008 budget. As entertainment, bullshit politics always triumphs over real politics.

Here's the thing about the system of news coverage we have today. If the Walton family, or Lee Raymond, or the heirs to the Mars fortune actually needed the news media to work better than it does now, believe me, it would work better. But they have no such need, because the system is working just fine for them as is. The people it's failing are the rest of us, and most of the rest of us, apparently, would rather sniff Anna Nicole Smith's corpse or watch Britney Spears hump a fire hydrant than find out what our tax dollars are actually paying for.

Shit, when you think about it that way, why not steal from us? People that dumb don't deserve to have money.

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone .