In my last email to you, I wrote how your support for our efforts to hold impeachment hearings for Vice President Cheney has helped us get some attention from the mainstream media. My editorial was recently published in the Philadelphia Inquirer and newspapers from coast to coast have covered our success. 175,000 supporters have now signed up at WexerWantsHearings.com and the number continues to build.

Over the past weeks, I have put significant financial resources behind this effort, including advertising, multimedia, blog ads, and technical support for WexlerWantsHearings.com. Thank you to the hundreds of people who have already generously supported the cause.

Now, with your help – I want to expand this effort.

With your support I want to make a major Internet advertising buy on Google that will guarantee that for the next two weeks, every person that looks up “Dick Cheney” on Google sees an advertisement for our petition. With your help we can own “Cheney” on the web.

In addition, I want to publish blog ads, such as you see to the right, throughout the web to galvanize Americans in support of our cause. (You may have to right mouse click and select “Download Pictures” to see the ad).

It is time to reach beyond those that are regular readers of the political blogs, and expand the number of people mobilized to help push for impeachment hearings. The truth is that the number of Americans who support our efforts is immense and we need to do everything possible to reach out to them and maximize our strength.

I cannot do this without your support, so click here if you’d like to contribute to our work.

When Congress reconvenes on January 15th I will deliver the hundreds of thousands of names we have collected to my colleagues on the Judiciary Committee and I will do everything I can do to convince them to support immediate impeachment hearings. I will also be entering all of the collected names into the Congressional Record and present them to the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

The mainstream media has not done enough to cover this effort but with your help we will force the issue into the national dialogue.

Click here if you’d like to help sponsor this effort.

We must now redouble our efforts to ensure that Vice President Cheney and the Bush Administration are held accountable.

In order to continue funding this effort we need your help. Please consider making a financial contribution to help us expand our advertising advocating impeachment hearings for Vice President Dick Cheney. Your help will go a long way toward stopping the out of control Bush Administration.

Click here if you are willing to contribute today.

Thanks for your help and keep up the fight!

Congressman Robert Wexler

Thanks for your email. I’m glad to be able to report that we have made a lot of progress over the last year.

A bill introduced and passed in the first week of the new Congress (H.R. 2) brought the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands under U.S. minimum wage law. That increase, which was signed into law in May 2007, means that workers there now make $3.55 an hour, and the minimum wage will continue to rise in the CNMI until their wage equals that of the U.S. mainland and other territories.

Last month, the House of Representatives passed legislation that will end the broken local immigration program in the CNMI. The legislation the House approved (H.R. 3079) brings the CNMI within the federal immigration system. By applying federal immigration law to this territory, the legislation will put a stop to the CNMI’s over-reliance on imported guest workers, and will start to stem the flow of smuggling. The agreement which established the political union between the U.S. and the CNMI specifically granted the U.S. Congress the right to extend U.S. immigration laws, but the Republican congressional leadership repeatedly blocked efforts to do so.

I hope that helps. Thanks again for your interest.

Ben

______________________________________________
Ben Miller, Legislative Director | Rep. George Miller (D-CA)
ben.miller@mail.house.gov | 202.225.2095 | http://www.house.gov/georgemiller/

http://www.johnedwards.com/news/press-releases/20080104-record-breaking-contributions/

I do wish someone would post some $ numbers, but I understand they probably don’t want to invite comaparisons to Obama’s contributions over the same period of time.

Lawsuit claims legal opinions led to mistreatment, illegal detention

MIAMI – Convicted terrorism conspirator Jose Padilla sued a key architect of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies Friday, claiming the official’s legal arguments led to Padilla’s alleged mistreatment and illegal detention at a Navy brig.

The lawsuit claims that John Yoo, a former senior Justice Department official, wrote several legal memos that led President Bush to designate Padilla as an enemy combatant shortly after the U.S. citizen was arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on suspicion of involvement in an al-Qaida plot.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22509544/

Thank you! I am so tired of hearing people talk about the race and gender of the candidates as if it were either a positive or a negative. It should be a non-issue. What matters is their records and their characters.

And yes, yes, I understand that having a Black person and a woman as top contenders for the office of President can and perhaps should be taken as a positive sign, but at the end of the day gender and skin colour are not what make someone worthy or non-worthy.

SO, I am not alone in have this point of view. Thinking in the long term is not what Americans do well, if at all. It is a difficult slog to fathom how “we” can break this march to a strange new world.

Neo-fascism in America

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7553.htm

And is he expecting to do well in South Carolina? He should, I would think. (Haven’t seen a poll from there in a while / probably missed it.)

I have yet to hear Chris Matthews or anyone else apply the same scrutiny to the Obama campaign as the Clinton Campaign. Of course they have as mentioned above ignored him. The Obama campaign has been on full throttle spinning OBama as the “agent of change”, “hope”, the “anti war-candidate”. Where is the proof?

Could not be the fact that Obama skipped town on the Kyl Lieberman amendment, at a critical time when he could have demonstrated that he is the “anti war-candidate” by standing firm against the cakewalk zealots and saying NO NO NO to their agenda with Iran based on unsubstantiated claims about Iran. No OBama played it safe…Obama has abstained voting on some where around 180 pieces of legislation as his spin machine repeated that he was some “agent of change” Show me the proof.

HIllary is Ai Pac woman and is too much of a warmonger, although I respect her more for taking a stand even though she lost me when she voted for the Kyl Lieberman amendment.

Edwards learned from his bloody 2002 war resolution vote, he is the only one who brought up the neo-cons who lied our nation into this war based on a “pack of lies”

I will not vote for someone because they are a woman, black, or white. I vote on issues, lessons learned, and real change. I will not hold the fact that Edwards is white and male against him.

I am looking for real change….Not Spin

Micheal Moore, Ralph Nader, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbing,, Harry Bellafonte are all supporting Edwards. NOt that I need the famous to tell me how to vote..but if you do these are a few of the folks standing behind Edwards

Perhaps the map was a teaching aid of the oil executives, to point out to Cheney why the plan was a bad one. Saddam Hussein was in fact the oil industry’s perfect client – a guarantor of stability and profit.

Now the details of how a few thousand Sternists and Irgunists – with support of others – threw a hundred thousand British troops out of Palestine – a tiny place compared to Iraq and Afghanistan, with at the time a total population – Arabs and Jews – of a couple of million, is not common knowlege, it was certainly well known to Wolfowitz, Feith, Wurmser, Abrams, Kissinger and others, not least Cheney. Perhaps they did not credit the Iraqis with the talents of Shamir and Begin, but Iraq is on a completely different scale, and the American troops hardly more numerous than the British in Palestine. After Bremer’s disbanding of the army and police, de-Baatification, failure to secure ammunition dumps, and so on and on, there was no possibility of any result other than an effective insurgency.

If we had wanted the oil we would have done a deal with Saddam Hussein, or let him leave the country, as he offered to do. Or, having invaided, we would have done what Gen. Garner said was essential – not disbanded the army and police, or removed the Baath – who were in large part the technocrats who made the country run.

Chaos was conciously created. Iraq was completely destroyed. There are millions of Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria – the Arab world has been set back a generation. Civil liberties in the United States were severely curtailed. The positing of Islam as the replacement to the Communist threat successfully accomplished. The notion of a ‘Peace Dividend’ well and truly buried. The national security state is secure. In a post the other day Glen Greenwald cites figures to the effect that American military spending is at a level of 623 billion dollars a year, and the entire rest of the world combined, 500 billion. Yet Clinton and Obama both propose to increase that spending. Obama will increase the size of the military by nearly one hundred thousand. And the racism seen in the occasional post here – not to mention the barbarity of Guiliani’s commercials, hardly elicits comment.

In the very long term oil might be a consideration – the people responsible for all of this think in much longer terms than most of us usually do. If Iraq is broken up, in fifteen or twenty years who knows how the Middle East might look. But the short term goals, and in my view the main goals, have been substantially met.

I’m glad to hear you’ve changed your mind about Edwards, Susan. I was taken aback about a month ago at the negativity and rumors that were here about him. Just what the corporate types work at…and want us to believe. That the public will buy into their swill. Can’t have anyone who thinks for himself and says he’ll do what Edwards says he wants to do. Not sure how he’d do it exactly. But he must know people would (try to) hold him to his campaign promises at least. How refreshing for any candidate…besides Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich…to give one damn about the working class and their concerns.

There’s just so much corruption to wade through to get there, though. It’s hard for me not to just know in my heart it’s a next to impossible task to clean it all up.

Thank heavens for the John Mearsheimers and the Steven Walts courageously speaking the truth, despite the known consequences.

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani says he’d like Dick Cheney to be his V.P. God help us.

One of few documents pertaining to Cheney’s “energy” meeting prior to the war was a a detaled map of oil infastructure in Iraq.

One of the goals in Afganistan was the oil road, to wit they “hired” a former exec from UnicCal, Hamid Karzai.

Prior to the Afgan war they were negotiating with the Taliban for the same.

What other goals do you speak of?