Constitution

From Alexandria to Zuccotti Park: They've Been Destroying Books For 2,000 Years

Richard Eskow — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:24:48 -0500

Fahrenheit 451: The temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns.

They're back.

But then, they've never gone away. The Book Killers have always been with us. Before recorded history they were with us, murdering the scholars and storytellers and mystics of every tribe they ever conquered.

They were there when Great Library burned in Alexandria 2,000 years ago. They destroyed the library known as the House of Wisdom when the Mongol Empire invaded Baghdad in 1258. They say the invaders took the books from every ruined library in Baghdad and piled them into the Tigris River, to serve as a bridge for their soldiers and chariots.

They say the river ran black with ink for years.

In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq with an indifference, incompetence, and arrogance that led to anarchy in the streets. There was widespread rioting, vandalism, and looting of priceless ancient antiquities and manuscripts. The National Library burned, and the flames lit the skies for miles around.

Seven centuries later, the great library of Baghdad died again.

Always before it had been like snuffing a candle. The police went first and adhesive-taped the victim's mouth and bandaged him off into their glittering beetle cars, so when you arrived you found an empty house. You weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only things!

- Fahrenheit 451

Now the book assassins have come to Wall Street. They removed the people and property from Zuccotti Park, destroying or damaging thousands of books in the process. Occupiers and Supporters brought the surviving books to a press conference this week. They were "torn, wrinkled, coverless and even mangled," as Gianna Palmer reported for McClatchy. "Among the books visible on the table were a leather-bound copy of the Bible, a collection of Chinese mythology and a volume of selected poems by Allen Ginsberg."

Bloomberg hasn't apologized. In his press conference announcing the raid he wore the same arrogant look of self-satisfaction that humanity has seen for thousands of years. It was the face of every Mongol chieftain, every Roman centurion, every officious book-destroying official that has ever lived.

Bloomberg and his compatriots would undoubtedly be horrified at any comparison to these vandals and barbarians. If Bloomberg ever does deign to apologize, which might only happen if there's enough political pressure, he'll undoubtedly say it was an accident.

And since things really couldn't be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don't scream or whimper, as this woman might begin to scream and cry out, there was nothing to tease your conscience later.

But it was no accident. As Captain Ray Lewis explained to Piers Morgan, police procedure demands that receipts be provide for any personal property that is confiscated. The property must then be stored carefully. Negligence is no defense for the destruction of any property. And a society that values knowledge should be especially horrified at the destruction of books.

Bloomberg and his minions ignored police procedure. His police, aided by a private militia, disregarded property rights that are safeguarded for any suspected criminal.

But then, they knew they weren't dealing with criminals. They were dealing with something much more threatening to their system: Independence.

You were simply cleaning up. Janitorial work, essentially ... Who's got a match!

Rights are inalienable, which means they can't be sold or transferred. Somebody should tell that to Bloomberg and any other politicians. It means you can't designate a public area as "privately owned" and then retroactively suspend civil liberties there. Somebody ought to give Mayor Bloomberg a copy of the Constitution.

I'm sure the Occupiers would have been happy to lend him theirs.

Rights are also indivisible. If you discard one or two of our legal safeguards, you've discarded them all. Nobody gets to decide how many of our freedoms we're allowed, when or where they may be granted or denied. That's not freedom at all.

Books in the Occupy Library were literally treated like garbage. Their owners were finally allowed to reclaim their shredded remains - at the Sanitation Department.

But that shouldn't be a surprise. Bloomberg and his forces were already treating the Constitution like trash and police manuals like toilet paper. Why behave any differently toward a library? After all, Bloomberg and his peers must have been furious at what they would have considered the arrogance, the impertinence, of Zuccotti Park's residents. A library? A library is for a community!

And we decide who is a community and who isn't, say the Book Killers.

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind.

Even worse, books contain ideas. And information. You only have to read one or two of them to realize how transparently Mayor Bloomberg is lying - about human rights, or about the cause of the financial crisis of 2008. One of the Occupy movement's great victories has been the unmasking of Michael Bloomberg, who until now had been the false face of a "centrist" mythology designed to hide the corruption behind today's politico-economic dynasty.

Billionaires sometimes endow libraries, but they don't want people creating their own. Knowledge is power, and power must be centralized. The centralization is well underway. As the book publishing industry shrinks, that power will be concentrated in the hands of fewer and larger corporations.

At this rate, the "Firemen" in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 will soon be obsolete. So will Bloomberg's batallions. Soon a faceless bureaucrat or corporate lackey will be able to destroy every single copy of any "unauthorized" book - instantly, simultaneously, and permanently - with a single electronic command.

"It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed."

Have you seen the video clips of the Mayor announcing his crackdown? It's the look of a man who was, as Southern aristocrats used to say, "taking his pleasure with his social inferiors." But some pleasures extract a high price on the soul.

In the end it doesn't matter whether the destruction of Zuccotti Park's library was "deliberate," or just the byproduct of a vandal's disrespect for the written word. Either way it showed us the values of the Bloomberg Administration. We've seen those values for 2,000 years.

Books were destroyed in Alexandria? Too bad, but we needed to burn the waterfront. Books were destroyed in Baghdad? Too bad, but we needed a bridge. They're all the same, these Book Killers. When it comes to the written word, their indifference and contempt reveals their brutality and hatred.

Destroying books is the instinctive act of tyrants and their servants. Subconsciously or consciously, they're driven by a desire to crush the minds of others, the awareness of others, the memory of others. Most of all, they're driven by a desire to destroy their own awareness and memory, because deep inside themselves they know what they're doing is wrong.

The Book Killers. Every time they destroy a book, they destroy a piece of themselves. They can ruin the physical objects, but they can't ruin the spirit that creates them, reads them, and shares them.

The Book Killers. In every age, they return. They come back to destroy the books, and they often succeed. But they never kill the minds, the memories, or the insights behind them. They can never kill knowledge, or passion, or justice, or wisdom. They're always trying, but they always fail.

And in the end, that's why they always lose.

Mr. President, Adjourn The Congress And Fill Vacancies

Dave Johnson — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:53:48 -0500

Republicans are threatening a scheme to block yet another part of the government - the NLRB, this time - from functioning, for the purpose of enriching the 1% while driving even more of us out of the middle class. Senate Republicans are participating in this scheme by blocking approval of any nominees to fill vacancies. The President has the Constitutional power to solve to this problem: adjourn the Congress and appoint people to keep government operating. That's called governing.

Here's what's going on. By law, the job of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is "to protect the rights of employees and employers, to encourage collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labor and management practices, which can harm the general welfare of workers, businesses and the U.S. economy."

The NLRB has to have at least 3 board members to function. Currently they are down to that minimum of 3. A current board member, a Republican, is threatening to quit, bringing the number below three, in order to prevent the NLRB from being able to do its job of protecting working people from being exploited by the power of the giant corporations. Senate Republicans have vowed to block ANY nominees to fill the vacancies, period, in order to keep the number on the board below the required minimum and therefore keep the agency from operating.

NY Times: Republican Might Quit Labor Board,

The labor board’s sole Republican member, Brian E. Hayes, has threatened to resign to deny the N.L.R.B. the three-person quorum it needs to make any decisions, according to board officials. Mr. Hayes has made his threat expressly to block the Democratic-dominated board from adopting new rules to speed up unionization elections, which the board’s other current members, both Democrats, intend to pass Nov. 30.

This is not politics, this is not bipartisanship, this is intentional obstruction to keep the government from operating. It is being done as pay-for-play; giant, powerful corporations are paying Republicans cash to obstruct the government from operating, so they can reduce wages and benefits and send even more jobs out of the country, and make more money for the 1%.

What the President Must Do

The government is being prevented from operating as intended by law and Constitution. The President must use his executive power to govern -- to administer the agencies of government, keeping it operating in the service of We, the People. The Constitution gives him the power -- and therefore the responsibility -- to do so.

The United States Constitution: Article II: The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

Unfilled Vacancies? Constitutional Solution: Recess Appointments

The Constitution anticipates circumstances when the government needs appointments filled on order to operate, and spells out what the President's job is that happens. This clause didn't imagine that members would actually block all nominations as part of a pay-for-play scheme to keep the government from operating, but it applies to the need to fill unfilled vacancies.

Article II Section 2: The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

The Constitution demands that the President keep the government running as intended under the law, by filling vacancies even when they can't be approved by the Senate.

Adjourn And Appoint

The President can make -- in fact has the responsibility to make -- recess appointments. So as part of this scheme-for-pay to keep the government from operating, House Republicans have been playing a silly game that makes it seem as if the Congress is not in recess, when it is in recess. The Constitution anticipated such a circumstance and offers a simple way to fix this.

Article II Section 3: ...he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper;

The Senate is controlled by Democrats, all they have to do is declare they disagree with the House and want to adjourn, and the President can adjourn them both and make appointments. The President not only has the power to do this, he has the responsibility to do this.

Mr. President adjourn the Congress and appoint the necessary NLRB members, judges, etc to get this government back in operation for We, the People.

On Monday Morning Philosophy, Or, Founders Tell America: “You Figure It Out

fake consultant — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 23:57:07 -0400

In our efforts to form a more perfect Union we look to the Constitution for guidance for how we might shape the form and function of Government; many who seek to interpret that document try to do so by following what they believe is The Original Intent Of The Founders.

Some among us have managed to turn their certainty into something that approaches a reverential calling, and you need look no further than the Supreme Court to find such notables as Cardinals Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia providing “liturgical foundation” to the adherents of the point of view that the Constitution is like The Bible: that it’s somehow immutable, set in stone, and, if we would only listen to the right experts, easily interpreted.

But what if that absolutist point of view is absolutely wrong?

What if the Original Intent Of The Founders, that summer in Philadelphia…was simply to get something passed out of the Constitutional Convention, and the only way that could happen was to leave a lot of the really tough decisions to the future?

What if The Real Original Intent…was that we work it out for ourselves as we go along?

“…you see, all the majesty of worship that once adorned these fatal halls / was just a target for the angry as they blew up the Taj Mahal…”

--From the song “Gasoline”, by Sheryl Crow

The reason this is coming up today is because I’ve been writing a lot about Social Security lately, and I keep getting comments from folks who see no Constitutional foundation for such a program.

To sum up what I often hear, if there is nothing in the Constitution that specifically provides for Social Security, then, if it’s to be done at all, it’s something that should be left to the States. (The 10th Amendment is used to reinforce this point.)

A lot of these folks, from what I can see, hearken for a simpler time, a time when America had no “foreign entanglements” or National Banks…a time when men of the soil worked their farms with no fear of Debt or The Taxman….a time when government worked best by using local wisdom to deal with local problems.

In other words, we’re basically having the same arguments over the shape of this Government that Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were having in 1787—and for those who don’t recall, Hamilton won, which reflects the reality that we don’t all live on farms and hunt turkeys and Indians, and that State Governments are just as capable of ignorance and foolishness and greed and blind hate as any Federal Government.

To reinforce their arguments “fundamentalists” fall back on some version of the Original Intent theory, which basically assumes the Constitution was written by men who miraculously created a perfect document, and that all the answers to today’s problems would be found by simply allowing the Original Intent to shine through.

I’m here to tell you that couldn’t be more wrong—and to prove my point you need only consider the Civil War.

Despite what you might have heard in Virginia, the Civil War really was about slavery, and the reason we had that fight in the 1860s was because there was no way the question could be settled at the Constitutional Convention.

Those Founders who supported ending that “peculiar institution” were never going to convince slaveowning Founders to give up their property, and as a result of the desire to get a Constitution drafted that could be ratified by “the various States” there were compromises made, including the 3/5ths Compromise and Article Four’s requirement to deliver fugitive slaves to their owners upon demand, which resulted in the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850.

The Intent Of The Founders, on the question of slavery, was to let time work it out.

The same kind of “let time work it out” thinking led us to Article 1, Section 8, and the “general welfare” clause.

Congress is empowered to enact legislation that provides for the “common defense and general welfare of the United States”…but there is no specific interpretation of what the phrase means (in fact, there is no glossary at all for the Constitution, which means there are plenty of other examples of, shall we say, "unclear phrasing").

Since there is no specific reference as to how Article 1, Section 8 and the 10th Amendment are supposed to interact or what the Founders’ Intent might be, we are again forced to apply our own interpretations, over time, to figure out how to resolve the inevitable conflicts.

We had to do that because, even as there were proponents of a Federal system, there were plenty of Delegates at the Convention who wanted nothing to do with a strong central government. They wanted to keep a system in place that resembled what we had under the Articles of Confederation, where the Federal Government had no ability to compel the payment of taxes and States had the choice of whether to “accept” Federal laws…or not.

Over time, of course, we’ve come to realize that having one air traffic control system, and not 50, was a good idea, and that funding things like disaster response on a national level makes sense, even if Texas wants to go it alone or something, and we probably all agree today that if States are willing to allow 12-year-old factory workers to work 16-hour days, then Federal child labor laws are a reasonable thing to make that stop—and all of this progression of history is happening because the Original Intent was to let the future figure out where the 10th and Article 1, Section 8 would “find their center”.

The Original Intent Of The Founders, apparently, was that white men who did not own property, women, and those not pale and fair and of European descent had no reason to be involving themselves in the affairs of government, as that was the list of who was not allowed to vote at the time we began our experiment in democracy; over time we’ve seen fit to change that—and at every step along the way there have been Cardinals of Interpretation ready to tell us that with each change we were doing violence to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution as they knew the Founders would have intended it to be.

Am I entitled to create or possess any form of pornography because the First Amendment prevents Congress from abridging free speech, or is the general welfare furthered by allowing society to protect itself from the exploitative effects of pornography by limiting or banning completely the production or possession of certain materials that are considered unacceptable?

The Founders seem to have offered no obvious intent when they created this conflict, which makes sense, because the possession of child pornography didn’t really exist as an issue in 1789.

I’m guessing that today we are not anxious to have each of the 50 States adopt their own rules (after all, who knows what some crazy State might do?)—but they did put that “general welfare” clause in Article 1, Section 8, and over time, our view of Constitutional law has come to accept the compromise that the Founders could not have foreseen.

The fact that the Supreme Court resolves these kinds of conflicts at all was not laid out in the Constitution, nor was the fact that the Federal Government’s powers are superior to those of the States; it took the 1803 Marbury v Madison and 1819 McCulloch v Maryland rulings to figure out, when there are multiple claims of liberty, which were to be put ahead of the others.

Can you guess why?

That’s right, folks: it was because they had Delegates at the Constitutional Convention (and States who had to ratify the finished product) who did not want to give the Court or a Federal Government that kind of power, and the only way to get something passed was to sort of “leave things open” and let time work it out.

Here’s an example of how one of the Founders tried to tried to kill the “Original Intent” argument before it even got off the ground: James Madison, who kept the only known complete set of notes during the Constitutional Convention never released those notes during his lifetime (he’s also credited with being the principal author of the document, possibly because his were the best notes).

Why did he do that? It appears to be because that Founder’s Intent was to make the Constitution’s words stand on their own, without his notes to frame the debate—and in fact the document had been in force for almost 50 years before those notes saw the light of day.

The Cardinals of the Supreme Court, some of whom claim they can divine Original Intent for any and all situation, are hoping that you’ll forget that they really serve to resolve disputes where the intent of the Founders seems to collide with the intent of the Founders—and all of that brings us right back to Social Security.

It is true that the Constitution, as it was written in 1789, does not contain the words “you may establish Social Security”—but it is also true that there were no words that would allow anyone who is not a white male to vote, or to prohibit the ownership of slaves.

Congress, acting with the authority to provide for the general welfare, took Roosevelt’s proposal and enacted it into law. The Supreme Court, in 1937, took up the question of whether the 10th Amendment prevented Congress from enacting Social Security with a series of three rulings, and here’s part of what they had to say:

Counsel for respondent has recalled to us the virtues of self-reliance and frugality. There is a possibility, he says, that aid from a paternal government may sap those sturdy virtues and breed a race of weaklings. If Massachusetts so believes and shapes her laws in that conviction, must her breed of sons be changed, he asks, because some other philosophy of government finds favor in the halls of Congress? But the answer is not doubtful. One might ask with equal reason whether the system of protective tariffs is to be set aside at will in one state or another whenever local policy prefers the rule of laissez faire. The issue is a closed one. It was fought out long ago. When money is spent to promote the general welfare, the concept of welfare or the opposite is shaped by Congress, not the states. So the concept be not arbitrary, the locality must yield. Constitution, Art. VI, Par. 2.

So there you go: the next time someone tells you that a program like Social Security is unconstitutional because of Original Intent, be very, very, suspicious, and keep in mind that the Constitution was written, intentionally, with the idea that a lot of problems were simply going to be kicked down the road to future generations of Americans.

Constitutional Delegates, after all, were politicians, and if there is one thing that politicians love to do it’s to kick a problem down the road so that something can get done today.

The history of the last 225 or so years has been a long journey down a long road that took us past slavery and Reconstruction and suffrage and Jim Crow, and to assert, as the Cardinals of the Court do, that all those questions were answered that summer in Independence Hall is to be either amazingly blind or deliberately untruthful—and the fact that they get to dress in robes and sit behind something that looks quite a bit like an altar doesn’t change that even one little bit.

FULL DISCLOSURE: This post was written with the support of the CAF State Blogger's Network Project.

What Thomas Jefferson Said about Elena Kagan and Juvenile Life Without Parole

Eric Lotke — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:25:25 -0400

Today’s news is the Supreme Court decision that juveniles cannot be locked up without possibility of parole for offenses committed while juveniles (in this case, a very clumsy store robbery by a 16 year old with a crowbar).

Yesterday's news was the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.

Between them come all kinds of accusations about judicial activism and judges rewriting the constitution.

One more thing. Also between these events I visited the Jefferson Memorial with some family in Washington, DC. Here’s what's inscribed on the wall. Jefferson’s own words:

"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

Jefferson is entitled to an opinion about constitutional intent. He was there.

Clifford Johnson

Clifford Johnson — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:10:14 -0500

Renee Guillory

Renee Guillory — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:50:36 -0500

William Shirley

Fred Brighton — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 09:40:15 -0400

Retired engineering technician, I am a father of two, married for 25 years(this time). I am a sculptor living in upstate New York, a progressive, fond of democracy and would like to see America try it sometime before I die. I hate liars and bigots and think insanity or incompetence should be grounds for impeachment. I think the American Empire is crumbling (good) and if the world will help us reform our nation we should shoot for a real democracy, not a republic, not a representational democracy, but a true one person one vote, everybody votes, every vote is counted.
I have lived in the Southwest, the Northwest and the Northeast and seen several wars go by and several seriously screwed up administrations. I now spend my time at home, writing, gardening, working in the studio on my art and advocating for my son and the thousands of brain injured individuals around the country. We are getting tens of thousands more out of the Iraq invasion and occupation and America does not have the ability to help them deal with their injuries. I know many of them will end up in prison or dead because we don't have a health care system, we have health care companies and they do everything on the cheap. For eight years I have fought for my son and the best I have managed is he no longer is injured by the people who are charged with helping him. This country needs an enema.

saint tnias

saint tnias — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:29:29 -0400

Annie Kreider

Annie Kreider — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 08:13:33 -0500

Testimony to New Hampshire Legislature Supports Impeachment of Bush-Cheney

STUART HUTCHISON — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:56:46 -0500

New Jersey Impeach Groups
117 Chestnut Drive • Wayne • NJ 07470-5639
ImpeachThem.com • NJPOP.org • DailyImpeachAction.com • Strike08.com
• info@impeachthem.com •
973 • 694 • 5035

Statement by Stuart Hutchison Regarding HR 24, Commence Impeachment Against President Bush and Vice President Cheney — 19 February 2008, to the New Hampshire Legislature State-Federal Relations and Veterans’ Affairs Committee

Chairman Roberts, honorable Legislators, thank you for your courtesy and time in permitting me to address you. My name is Stuart Hutchison, and my family lives in Wayne, New Jersey. I organize for New Jersey Impeach Groups – ImpeachThem.com, a statewide organization with chapters in the north, central and south regions of my state. Our membership numbers between 800 to a thousand people, and like Betty Hall and so many of your fellow residents here, we’re dedicated to the passage in the legislature of our Garden State, of a resolution to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

As you know, your passage of HR 24 will trigger Rule 603 from Thomas Jefferson’s Manual of Parliamentary Practices, which constitutes the official rules of the United States House of Representatives. In our analysis, Rule 603 was a kind of loophole Jefferson created with great deliberation, as he pondered an important question:

“What recourse can there be when a president decides he wants to be king — or as we say in modern times — a dictator? What further is to be done when there presents a federal legislature that is become so decadent, or jaded, or bribed and corrupt — or fearful, that it’s no longer responsible to the voters who elected them to serve the people of the United States?”

Rule 603 says that a legislature can pass a resolution for impeachment, and your resolution adopts the form of “A Petition” that is, in Jefferson’s word, transmitted to the congress as a direction by the State of New Hampshire that the U.S. House commence impeachment proceedings against the President and the Vice President.

Jefferson’s Rule 603 has never been invoked to impeach a president, but it was used to impeach a federal judge in Florida in 1903, referred to as the Hinds Precedents, section 2469. The Rule applies in line with the Constitution article for the impeachment of a judge — a Civil Officer — as well as a president and vice president. The legality of the implementation or invocation of Jefferson’s Rule is straightforward and should be indisputable; it’s the law in the Parliamentary Rules and Practices of the U.S. House, and is as such part of our Constitution. When you pass the Resolution to Commence Impeachment in New Hampshire, I believe politicians in the United States House will have a hard time obstructing what most Americans will consider to be an obvious requirement. At the end of the day, it’s the pressure from you and fellow patriots that will bring impeachment.

What is the will of the people of the United States? If we are to believe the polling, a vast majority of Americans believe impeachment must commence. 95% of Americans do not trust President Bush to resolve the Iraq war successfully. Only 19% of Americans believe we’re on the right track. As of last night at 8 o’clock, in a poll asking the question, “Should Bush be impeached,” MSNBC records 587,955 votes cast, and of that total a stunning 89% of the respondents — 523,280 people say the president should be impeached, with only 53,504 people, just 9.1% of the total, saying Bush should not be impeached. All the references I am making are cited and linked at our web site, ImpeachThem.com. Now people who don’t like the numbers say it’s not a scientific poll. My answer is that when you accumulate numbers of such a huge scale as that, you can consider the totals to be a fairly reliable indicator of public sentiment. Another poll, by the organization Impeach Bush, cites 995,313 votes to impeach. One last indication is the poll conducted by Robert Wexler, congressman from Florida, in which 229,462 people stated they want hearings on the impeachment of Dick Cheney. These are all significant numbers, and they reflect only the tip of the iceberg where the peoples’ alarm about the Bush administration is concerned.

Our people were betrayed by a president who lied us to war. President Bush knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before he launched the invasion on March 19th, 2003. This is documented by the writer Sydney Blumenthal, available on our web site, from his article in Salon magazine. Making a deliberate and conscious lie in order to justify a war against another sovereign country is of itself an impeachable offense.

And what are the repercussions of this criminal action by the president and vice president? I daresay that on September 12th, 2001, our country enjoyed the sympathy and support of almost every person on our planet; today we are the most despised country in the world. The cost of the war is almost unimaginable:

       — 3,963 American service people dead, including 69 people from my state and 21 people from yours. There are 135 suicides of service people in Iraq, and over 100,000 people wounded — these are Defense Department statistics;
       — Over 1,100,000 Iraqi dead since the invasion;
       — We’re at $496-billion in the cost of fighting the Iraq war, just days away from a half-trillion dollars.

Would $500-billion be enough to raze every American slum and be able to replace it with decent new housing? Would it be enough to fund mass production of zero-polluting electric cars, buses and trucks? Would it be enough to fix every public supported hospital? Would it be enough to pay for a comprehensive single-payer health plan that would offer excellent terms for doctors and excellent health for all our citizens, comparable to the best health care system in the world, which is in France?

More to the point, would that kind of money assure complete comprehensive care for every American service person, every single veteran, forever? If people are willing to die in service to our country, shouldn’t they get everything they need in order to lead a productive life in dignity after their service years?

Let’s pause just a second to consider what a soldier must feel: you’re on your 5th tour of duty in Iraq, when you see a private mercenary from a company like Blackwater, and you know the mercenary is paid ten times as much money as you earn as a service person in our country’s military, and the mercenary’s being paid with your tax dollars, dedicated by an administration that sent people to battle, but was unwilling to buy the proper armor for your vehicles and the proper body armor that can save your life. It must make you pretty bitter when a friend is wounded or killed needlessly. It should make you want to impeach.

As if all that’s not enough, we suffer an administration that conducts illegal wiretaps of U.S. citizens, monitors all email and phone calls, and engages in torture in violation of our constitution and international law. Not content with that, they did away with habeas corpus, a concept that’s nearly 900 years old, older than the Magna Carta, and the foundation of all democracy. Our president and vice president have given themselves the power to gather everyone of us here in this room, put us in trucks and take us away to be confined, without any of our families and loved ones knowing where we are, with no phone calls permitted, and where we can be tortured and “disappeared” forever.

That is un-American, and it’s sure not free. We consider our country is in a state of crisis today, right now, and the Bill of Rights and our entire constitution are hanging by a thread. Worse, the evidence now available shows that both presidential elections in 2000 and 2004 wore stolen, and therefore we do not even enjoy democracy in our United States. Our great country is transformed now into an oligarchy in which all of us are ruled by those few in the top tenth of one percent of our population.

What’s to be done? The first thing is to impeach and remove Bush and Cheney from office for their high crimes and misdemeanors. But we know that getting rid of the bad guys is not enough when they control our election process. We must get rid of all electric vote machines and have hand-counted paper ballots. To that end we support a Voters’ Bill of Rights, which I ask you to distribute to the legislature.

We consider Betty Hall to be a great patriot in the tradition of our greatest founder, Thomas Paine. Along with one of the greatest congressmen in history, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, Ms. Hall stood up when no one else would, in an act of great courage, to set our nation right again.

Last, I’m pleased to tell you that yesterday we received the following message from the great artist, humanitarian and former President of the Screen Actors Guild, EDWARD ASNER:
“There are many regrets that I'm not a citizen of New Hampshire and a member of its Legislature, but my chief regret tonight is that I'm not allowed to vote for Betty Hall's House Resolution 24 to commence impeachment procedures in the U.S. Congress. At our founding, New Hampshire was essential. At our preservation, it is even more so. Vote to restore our unique democracy.”

You do not measure patriotism by the size of the flag outside the car dealer or the burger joint, or by the stickers on cars. The measure of patriotism is in our treatment of the least among us, and in an overriding, abiding concern for our commonwealth.

We suffer a war-like administration; the president and vice president like war, but Americans are not a war-like people, we are a peace loving people.

None of you would be here if you did not feel an obligation to serve the people. Now it’s time to rise to your obligation, because you, all of you here, have in your hands the ability to save our United States. Let your love of your family and our great commonwealth be your guide, and you will be remembered in history as the body that said, “We are a nation of laws, and we must insist that the laws be followed, and no person is above the law.”

Let it be said of you, they made the bold move to restore justice and reclaim democracy throughout the USA.

This is your obligation. Our country and our constitution compel you to act now, for the sake of New Hampshire, for the sake of our United States, and for the sake of our world. The line in Dylan’s song goes, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” Time is running out, and I implore you to move now to shine your light to vanquish that darkness. I implore you to act today, before it’s too late. Thank you.