By it's nature the Out Of Iraq Bloggers Caucus is, as our tagline describes,  a "coalition of the willing", not a top down organization speaking with one voice, but a gathering place for bloggers united in opposition to the Iraq occupation, each with their own motivations, each with their own ideas on how the occupation can be ended.

I want to talk today about my own views, and also about a short conversation I had yesterday about whether and about how the Iraq occupation could be ended - but first I want to provide some background against which to express my own thoughts. I also hope here to encourage other OOIBC members to post their thoughts. I speak only for myself here. OOIBC is a subset of a much larger "coalition of the willing", a microcosm of the tens of millions of people who, expressing, in the words of Keith Olbermann "the collective will of the nearly 70 percent of Americans who reject this War of Lies", in the 2006 midterm elections repudiated the Republican party and I think George W. Bush's foreign policies, and swept the Democratic Party into a Congressional majority on the strength of one single issue, one overwhelming mandate.

A mandate they have since, in my view, grievously insulted the people who gave them the Congressional power they now hold by ignoring.

Keith Olbermann described that mandate more clearly than anyone else, I think, in his May 23, 2007 "Special Comment" MSNBC broadcast:

[editor's note, by andgarden] Crossposted from Daily Kos

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Today Reuters brings us a standard issue article about the working relationship between the Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. There are interesting tidbits here and there about their mutual frustration with one another. The issues, such as Pelosi's failed attempt to install John Murtha as House Majority Leader and Reid's "the war is lost" musing, have been well covered elsewhere.

At the end, however, there is an important acknowledgment of the single most important factor keeping the approval ratings of Congress low: Iraq.

A poll by the Pew Research Center has since heartened the Democrats, finding that half those questioned remain happy the party took over.

The survey found Americans less than thrilled with Pelosi or Reid, however. Only 35 percent approved of Pelosi's job performance, while 37 percent disapproved. Just 21 percent approved of Reid while 33 percent disapproved.

"The biggest thing is the public's frustration with Iraq," said pollster Andrew Kohut. "People expected them to achieve things, they expected them to achieve a way out of Iraq."

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while i was thrilled to see another self-loathing traitor-to-his-own kind hypocrite taken down, i'm increasingly appalled by the police still rounding up homos.

i was kind of stunned to read the arrest report and see how little the senator actually did. you can arrest someone for tapping his foot, making shoe-to-shoe contact and swiping his hand?

i have no doubt that craig was signalling he wanted sex, but that's the whole point of inuendo and suggestion, right? you can suggest your thoughts without actually expressing them, so you can find other people interested in the love that dare not speak its name without actually speaking its name.

Crossposted from Daily Kos

In his latest front page entry, Markos quotes Dick Durbin saying that he will likely be unwilling to vote against the new supplemental funding the George Bush has requested.

Even opponents of the war, as Durbin calls himself, find themselves likely to vote for the extra money, he said. "When it comes to the budget, I face a dilemma that some of my colleagues do," he said.

He voted against the war "but felt that I should always provide the resources for the troops in the field," Durbin said. "But it's now reached a point where we have got to change the way we appropriate this money."

Though he said he is likely to approve the increased request -- it would accompany a pending request for an additional $147 billion in war funding -- Durbin said he would work to attach conditions to it that would require troops to begin coming home in the spring.

In other words, Dubin plans to do nothing.

Recent history tells us that we should not be surprised. Nor, indeed, should we look for the Senate to end the war.

Cross posted from Daily Kos in slightly modified form at Big Tent Democrat's suggestion. Thanks for giving me the opportunity, Jeralyn. You run an excelent site.

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This week Big Tent Democrat discussed Ron Brownstein's review of Matt Bai's new book, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, saying

Brownstein is a very good reporter and observer, but it seems to me he accepts some [of Bai's] conclusions that are faulty.

By coincidence, I read Michiko Kakutani's review of Bai's book in the New York Times just before Big Tent published his observations, and took issue with a similar problem.

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I wrote this yesterday, but held off posting until today.  

Today, in response to the Senate's subpoena for documents relative to the warrantless wiretapping, the Office of the Vice President came forth with a letter, laying out some objections and such, and asking for more time to respond, but also giving some tidbits of information, in the form of something commonly called a "privilege log".  That's something lawyers use to tell their adversary about the existence of, and the minimal amount of substance they can get away with regarding, documents or information sought in discovery.  Let's look at what Deadeye told us about, today.

The other day, in response to requests from Congressional committees having oversight (ahhh, subpoena power) during his recent testimony, FBI Director Mueller provided Chairman Conyers with a redacted copy of his notes on the "Program X" scandal, Gonzo and Card making a late-night visit to the hospital bed of then-AG Ashcroft to try to weasel him into signing off on the Program, Ashcroft's condition and meetings with Card and Gonzo, his meeting with the Preznit, and the threat of mass resignations at the top of DoJ and the FBI.  These documents have generated quite a bit of commentary and analysis, e.g., here at emptywheel's,  here at TPM (linking to Wired), here at Kos, here at TPMM, and lots of other places, too.

[Cross-posted at ProgressiveHistorians, Daily Kos, My Left Wing, Open Left, and Booman Tribune.]

In the first installment of this series, I introduced the concept that our impeachment system is fatally flawed.  In the second installment, I provided evidence of this contention by discussing all eighteen historical cases of federal impeachment.  Now, it's time to draw some conclusions.

Of the eighteen impeachments that have taken place since the U.S. Constitution was adopted, we need not concern ourselves with the three men who resigned rather than face full trials in the Senate.  In addition, three of the fifteen remaining impeachment defendants would not have gone to trial under today's laws: William Blount and William Belknap, who were not technically under the Senate's jurisdiction at the time impeachment proceedings reached that body, and the insane John Pickering, who would have been removed from the bench under infirmity laws adopted in 1919 rather than being impeached.

[Cross-posted at ProgressiveHistorians, Daily Kos, My Left Wing, Open Left, and Booman Tribune.]

In Part I of this series, I explained the purpose behind these diaries: to explore the failed mechanism of federal impeachment and suggest ways to fix its flaws.  Yesterday, though, we examined only the instances where impeachment worked: nine cases handled according to protocol, with appropriate outcomes and streamlined processes.  Today, we'll look at the flip side of the coin: nine cases where impeachment was inappropriately politicized or should never have occurred at all owing to procedural errors or a lack of other removal methods.

As mentioned in the previous installment, my major source for the following is this PBS timeline; other sources include this U.S. Senate article, and this collection of documents from JusticeLearning, though I've consulted additional sources (including Wikipedia and JSTOR) and my own memory where necessary.

[Cross-posted at ProgressiveHistorians, Daily Kos, My Left Wing, Open Left, and Booman Tribune.]

I'm one of the few bloggers out there who doesn't believe we should be pushing for impeachment of President Bush -- even though I think he's clearly committed impeachable crimes.  My reasoning is not based on Bush's guilt or innocence, but on the fact that impeachment as a mechanism is broken and needs significant repair before it can be viewed as a legitimate means of removal from office of any public official, much less a U.S. President.

People who say there are few precedents for impeachment don't, with respect, know what they're talking about.  It's true that only three Presidents have been impeached by the U.S. Congress; but limiting impeachment to that set ignores the fact that federal impeachment has been tried no less than eighteen times since our country's founding; its victims have included, in addition to the three Presidents, a United States Senator, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, a Secretary of War, a U.S. Commerce Court Judge, and eleven U.S. District Court judges.  Meanwhile, a large number of federal officials who clearly committed impeachable offenses were not impeached for one reason or another.  At least one prominent political criminal was not able to be impeached: Vice President Aaron Burr, whose treasonous acts were committed in the last month of his term and who was subsequently tried for treason after he had been out of office for two years.  Others who got away include Iran-Contra mastermind Caspar Weinberger and Teapot Dome malefactor Albert B. Fall.  We'll come back to these impeachments-that-never-were in Wednesday's final installment.

Ira Chernus, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has written probably the most sobering article I've yet seen about the prospects for the Iraq occupation, and what can be expected from Democratic presidential candidates.

Introducing the new line of GOP talking dolls.  All you have to do is yank their pull string.