Over 1,000 protesters spell out 'IMPEACH!' on beach in Pelosi's district

On Saturday, over one thousand protesters occupied the sands of San Francisco's Ocean Beach – part of new Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's district – in order to spell out the message "IMPEACH!"

"America is a great country," Brad Newsham, a local cab driver and author who organized the event, stated in a press release. "But President Bush has betrayed our faith.

"He mislead us into a disastrous war, and is trampling on our Constitution.," Newsham continued. "He has to go. Now. I hope Nancy Pelosi is listening today."

San Francisco's ABC affiliate KGO TV covered the protest, and a video can be seen at its web site.

"Do you think the country has the stomach for another impeachment?" asked ABC7's Noel Cisneros.

"I think we don't have the stomach for another two years of Bush," protester Dan Brook responded.

While the station's legal analayst noted that "you can't impeach a president for incompetence," he does think "the strongest legal case against Mr. Bush would likely be for the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretaps of millions of American telephone calls."

"Section 1809 of the FISA Act provides that any public official who engages in a wiretap, without authorization, is guilty of a felony – I think it's beyond a reasonable dispute that President Bush violated that statute," said former prosecutor Dean Johnson.

A 2006 Zogby poll taken one year ago, commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition that supports a Congressional investigation of Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003, found that 52 percent of Americans 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?"

In that same poll – which had a margin of error of 2.9 percent – 43 percent disagreed, and 6 percent responded that "they didn't know or declined to answer."

The beach event had originally been scheduled on December 10th's "Human Rights and Impeachment Day," as reported earlier by RAW STORY, but "dangerous surf conditions" led to its "forced postponement" until Saturday.

More photos, including the aerial shot featured above taken by John Montgomery, can be seen here, while other photographers' work can be seen here, and here.

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