By Dave Lindorff

When journalists are caught lying outright, they can be fired, and can even find their careers terminated. Take Janet Cooke, the Washington Post reporter who made up a story about a young drug user. A decade after her firing, she was earning $6/hour as a Liz Claiborne clerk in a department store. Or consider Stephen Glass, who famously made up stories at the New Republic. He landed on his feet as a fiction writer, but his journalism days are over.

So what to do about George Bush and his gang of fabulists, who now, thanks to a study by the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, stand shown to have lied to Congress and the American people 935 times in what the two organizations say was "part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

Help us with ImpeachForPeace.org's Minneapolis A-28 event! We will spell out "IMPEACH" with canoes on Saturday morning, April 28th, and again with bedsheets that evening. Be a part of this effort to tell the world that the Twin Cities are serious about impeachment!

DoD Report Appears to Confirm Downing Street Memo By Jason Leopold
A long-awaited report on the veracity of pre-war Iraq intelligence has found that a secretive policy shop exaggerated the Iraqi threat, providing the White House with cherry-picked information about links between Iraq and al Qaeda. The shop, operating out of the Pentagon, was set up by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Its goal was to lay the groundwork for a pre-emptive military strike against Iraq. The report would appear to confirm British intelligence assertions that surfaced in a document widely referred to as the Downing Street Memo that the facts against the threat posed by Iraq were being fixed around the Bush administration's policy leading up to the invasion of Iraq... (more)

Well, it only takes a moment to help convince Nancy Pelosi to Impeach Bush/Cheney..

Pelosi most likely said impeachment was "off the table" to remove any appearance of conflict-of-interest that would arise if she were thrust into the presidency as a result of the coming impeachment.

What we need to do is to pressure Pelosi not to interfere with impeachment maneuverings within her party. Sending her Do-It-Yourself impeachments legitimizes her when she is forced to join the impeachment movement in the future.

I was doing some end of year email clean-up and came across this William Pitt interview with incoming House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers shortly after the release of the "Conyers Report". Curious how things have "changed" after just a few months...

..."Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.)... has released a 350-page report titled "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance." Within the pages of this report lies the hard, ugly truth of our sorry situation...." (more)

It's the equivalent of another Downing Street Memo... Huge news!, but I've found only ONE MSM news report of it in this country, "Ex-British expert on Iraq says intel overstated". And Google News returns ZERO matches for that one news report! Imagine that.....

Diplomat's suppressed document lays bare the lies behind Iraq war
The Government's case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. A devastating attack on Mr Blair's justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain's key negotiator at the UN, has been kept under wraps until now because he was threatened with being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act... (more)

House Democrats have issued their broad general outline of goals titled "A New Direction for America" saying "Our goal is to restore accountability, honesty and openness at all levels of government. To do so, we will create and enforce rules that demand the highest ethics from every public servant…Honest leadership is not a partisan goal. It is the key to a stronger union. We must all work together to put together the progress of all Americans ahead of the special interests of the few."

ACTION PAGE: http://www.peaceteam.net/aumf.php

The history of the last four years has proven that the Bush administration cooked intelligence and lied to obtain the original Authorization for Use of Military Force ("AUMF"), which was then immediately abused to launch an unprovoked and unwarranted invasion and indefinite occupation of Iraq. Yet, even as the strategic disaster in Iraq lurches further out of control day by day, the Bush administration is still talking about even more irrational plans to light a bigger powder keg in Iran. As reported by Seymour Hersh, Cheney arrogantly stated just before the elections that even were the Democrats to take back the Congress they would find some way around any legislative restrictions to pursue their insanity option in Iran.

Well we DID take back Congress. And the first thing Congress must do to reassert adult control over the petulant White House is to cancel the 2001 AUMF. Not only was it used to justify preemptive imperialism in Iraq, it has been trotted out incessantly since to excuse the illegal domestic wiretaps, the program of torture and secret detentions in violation of the Geneva convention, and every other manner of defiance of Congress and the federal courts since. It was NOT an authorization to unilaterally violate the Constitution, but it has been taken as such, and accordingly it MUST go.

By Stephen Lendman

The political firmament shook briefly post-November 7 raising hopes change would follow the Republicans' "thumpin'" at the polls and the Democrats regaining control of both houses of Congress for the first time since the GOP sweep in 1994. Presumed new House speaker Nancy Pelosi stopped the tremors making it clear no substantive change will be on the table when when the 110th Congress convenes on January 3. Instead, she announced to those paying attention it'll be business as usual (as it always is) as she intends to work with the president in a spirit of bipartisanship and not be "obstructionist" even though Republicans for past 12 years never returned that courtesy or even made a pretense of doing it.

Pelosi made it clear the Democratic victory will be just another betrayal of the electorate that sent her and the Democrats a strong message it voted for a mandated populist anti-Bush, anti-war agenda it won't get. It's always for the same reason - because those controlling the political process in Washington owe their allegiance to the interests of wealth and power that select and fund them and of which these officials are a part. The Democrat (anti-populist) Leadership Council (DLC) made that position clear when it participated in a November 10 post-election made-for-television spectacle in the Oval Office so the whole world could watch their new congressional leadership line up in a shameless public display of partnering with a criminal enterprise in the White House posing as a legitimate government they've been complicit with all along. Should anyone understanding how things work in Washington have expected anything else?

From Bob Parry at consortiumnews.com:

Time to Talk War Crimes The Nuremberg trials after World War II established universal rules against aggressive wars, principles that George W. Bush willfully violated by invading Iraq. A newly disclosed memo from January 2003 reveals Bush's contempt for these fundamental rules of international behavior as well as his plans to trick the public into accepting his actions. The evidence now is increasingly clear that in a world where might did not make right, Bush and his advisers would be in shackles at the Hague facing war crimes tribunals.