It is amazing that the Republican controlled Corporate Media and the Republican controlled federal and state governments have been able to control the flow of information vital to American Democracy by abusing positions of power. Examples can be found at all levels of government and in the media.

The Bush Administration engaged in blatantly criminal behavior by wiretapping millions of American citizens without a court order. Bush has called the program limited but a NSA Whistleblower and admitted source for the New York Times story that exposed the illegal program stated in an ABC news story that millions of citizens were likely involved. The wiretapping orders and the disinformation on the scale of the program came directly from Bush and Cheney.

Bush and Cheney ignored the law by claiming governmental powers that simply do not exist. The type of “powers” claims made by Bush have been made before and reviewed by federal courts. They were found to be not supported by law.

New Zogby Poll Shows Majority of Americans Support Impeaching Bush for Wiretapping

By a margin of 52% to 43%, Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he wiretapped American citizens without a judge's approval, according to a new poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition that supports a Congressional investigation of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

The poll was conducted by Zogby International, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company. The poll interviewed 1,216 U.S. adults from January 9-12.

The poll found that 52% agreed with the statement:

"If President Bush wiretapped American citizens without the approval of a judge, do you agree or disagree that Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment."

43% disagreed, and 6% said they didn't know or declined to answer. The poll has a +/- 2.9% margin of error.

In the wake of the Alito hearings, mainline pundits are calling his nomination a done deal. Alito didn’t spew obscenities or green bile. He didn’t admit that he’d reverse Roe v. Wade or vow to proclaim George Bush Lord Emperor. Rehearsed and coached by committee member Lindsay Graham (and by some of the same lawyers who justified Bush’s NSA wiretaps), he instead spoke deferentially and humbly about respecting legal precedent and separation of powers, while Republican committee members made him out to be a mix of Solomon and Mother Teresa. Much like Clarence Thomas during his hearings, Alito dodged the tough questions with evasions and platitudes, suffered convenient memory lapses on areas he couldn’t dodge, and justified controversial past stands by saying he was just trying to be a team player. We know little more about him than before--except about his capacity to dissemble.

In the wake of the Alito hearings, mainline pundits are calling his nomination a done deal. Alito didn't spew obscenities or green bile. He didn't admit that he'd reverse Roe v. Wade or vow to proclaim George Bush Lord Emperor. Rehearsed and coached by committee member Lindsay Graham (and by some of the same lawyers who justified Bush's NSA wiretaps), he instead spoke deferentially and humbly about respecting legal precedent and separation of powers, while Republican committee members made him out to be a mix of Solomon and Mother Teresa. Much like Clarence Thomas during his hearings, Alito dodged the tough questions with evasions and platitudes, suffered convenient memory lapses on areas he couldn't dodge, and justified controversial past stands by saying he was just trying to be a team player. We know little more about him than before--except about his capacity to dissemble.

Meanwhile, in a galaxy far away, former Congresswoman Liz Holtzman, who sat on Nixon's impeachment committee, just wrote that Bush's defiance of the law through illegal wiretapping, lying about the reasons for going to war, and

The FBI was probably tapping Edward Said's phone right up to the day he died in September of 2003. A year earlier, when he was already a very sick man, Said was scheduled to speak at an event at the Kopkind Colony summer session near Guilford, Vt. The morning of Friday, August 2, the day he was scheduled to arrive, John Scagliotti picked up the phone at the Colony's old farmhouse and found it was dead. He went to a neighbor to report the fault.

"Within half an hour," Scagliotti remembers, "there was a knock at the front door, and there was a man who said, 'I hear you have phone problems,' he said. Now I am a gay man. I know what a phone service repairman is meant to look like. In the Village, the phone man is a gay icon. Tool belt, jeans, work shirt, work boots. This man has a madras shirt, Dockers slacks, brown loafer shoes. He goes to an outside junction box, and a few minutes later, the phone is working. Off he goes."