November of 2006, Citizens of this Nation elected a new Congress. This Congress must indeed be 'new'. The first step in the time to come, the most necessary step of all, is for America to put in place new legislators. It is time for the people to stop being afraid. We need not fear that without the 'same old faces' something terrible will occur. Terrible things are going to occur whether we re-elect the same failed figureheads, or whether we introduce new blood. Neither choice will effect the FACT that rough times are ahead as well as behind us. The introduction of a new congress, however, would give America the opportunity to change direction. A new House of Representatives is especially key, with new majority and minority party leaders. With such a House in place, the Citizens of this land could finally press for the impeachment proceedings this country so desperately needs. A new Senate is particularly important as the Senate will serve as the forum in which proceedings would be held. We simply cannot allow people like Bill Frist, people who have proven time and again to have absolutely NOTHING in common with the average citizen, and who is consistently wrong on almost every major issue, to continue to lead our Senate. We cannot allow a man who does not understand the limits of legislative power, to legislate. Do not forget that this is the same Bill Frist who intervened in the LIFE/DEATH decision of the Shiavo's, a matter you and I would be most offended at, should the law attempt to interfere with our own personal family decisions.

There are MANY GOP candidates that follow in complete lockstep, as they head committees (Arlen Spectre and Lindsey Graham for example). What purpose could such blind loyalty serve to America? At the far end of the GOP spectrum, we have a few Senators like John McCain, who appear on the surface to represent everything that is important to their constituents. They appear strong and able, powerful and wise. And then they bow down and lick the boots of those who have just removed that foot from their asses. McCain betrayed himself when he hugged and kissed the President and lent him his 'support' after Bush and Rove took personal shots at McCain's wife and children in the primaries. After such a betrayal of ones own family and self, how can a man be trusted not to betray his state or his nation? He cannot be trusted to do either one. He has proven this also in his recent tenure by allowing 'Presidential Signing Statements' (decrees holding zero legal weight) to over-ride his torture bill. McCain has endangered us all by allowing the President to continue these programs using the NSA, CIA, and our own US Army Soldiers. These policies violate not only US Law but Geneva, and International Humanitarian Law. All of the GOP, from Frist to McCain in the Senate, and from Hastert to Foley in the house, and everyone in between must go.

We as citizens must regain control of our congress. We must install average citizens, people of good conscience and good community standing, people like Francine Busby, and Barrack Obama. We must learn to trust ourselves to lead us, as our founding fathers intended. They trusted us to do this job, it is time now for us to begin to trust ourselves. We the people need to elect and appoint legislators that are from our own body politic. We need workers, union officials, natural leaders trapped behind desks. The time to rise is now. The time to act is nearly upon us. We must once again bring the Congress under control of the citizenry, and we must never allow for corporate control to sway the views of our legislators again. We have seen what this version of the capitalist caste system does to our society, and I for one have had enough. Are you with me on these things readers? Have you had enough of lobbying and the purchasing of freedoms in the face of horrendous crimes using your tax dollars and the 'position of power' you gave these people? From the responses raining into my inbox from across this nation, I believe you are with me on this, readers. This November, the first and most important step in the road ahead will come. It is time for us to install a new Congress, for of and by the people.

The new Congress will have it's work cut out for them, and we the people will also have a great burden to bear in making certain that our new leaders carry out the next several steps on the road to recovery. The message must be clear, it must be supported by the mainstream and grassroots press, that should the constituents be disobeyed, that representative will be dismissed, permanently from the congress in the following election cycle. Citizens must also understand their power to dismiss an elected official at any time, for any crime. These offices are too important for petty crime and dominance issues to interfere with the work that must be accomplished on behalf of the citizens. We must stand behind the statement, that we have had enough of the joke: 'Politicians are all crooks and liars', and that we don't believe it has to be this way. We need to hold our new leaders accountable at every turn, for their actions on our behalf, and we must keep our imperatives ever-present within the minds of our officials and their staff members.

First and foremost, we must focus upon the removal of our current executive Administration in its entirety. The crimes of the President, Vice-President and their Cabinet are abundant and clear. They have been outlined in this Column for almost a year now. Those working beneath them who have not already resigned or been fired for correct disobedience, have demonstrated through their actions that their loyalty lies to these men, rather than to the people of our nation. Our new congress, once the House has gathered up the (already gathered) evidence and convened hearings of Impeachment, and the Senate has reviewed this evidence in hearings, and come to the obvious conclusion that these crimes amount to treason, must then appoint a new Executive, to serve on behalf of the people for the remainder of the present term. This Executive must choose a new cabinet, paying particular attention to the position of Attorney General. This position must be held by a member of the law enforcement community that understands that there are more laws in this nation than merely the federal ones. In fact, constitutional matters notwithstanding, ALL state laws take precedence within their borders over federal laws that contradict. Read the 10th Amendment more closely if you don't understand that, Mr. Gonzales. The new Attorney General must also realize that the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, are the highest laws of the land, and that no federal law, short of an actual Amendment to the Constitution has the legal authority to supersede these documents.

Our New Executive Administration must then, as soon as possible, nominate a representative to the United Nations that actually has a skill set that contains diplomacy. Our first act, as a people with a true representative leadership, must be a formal apology at the United Nations, for the crimes of our current Administration. We as Americans must be strong enough to hold our present administration accountable for the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, which violated International Law on several fronts. We must hold our Intelligence Chief, Donald Rumsfeld, accountable for the horrific abuses of human life ordered by him, that were conducted at Abu Graib, and other secret prisons throughout the Middle East and Europe. We, the people of the United States of America, must do this, we must hold our leaders accountable, and move forward in the right direction. To continue blindly down this path, without the support of any other nation in the UN Security Council is most assuredly political suicide. We would be following in the footsteps of Hitler's Germany to ignore the unanimous voice of the world in opposition to our current leaders' quest for Empire. More importantly, we would likely face the same consequences, at the hands of the combined forces against us. We must hold ourselves to the light of truth, no matter how much it may hurt or embarrass us, and take responsibility for what we have allowed to occur. Only from this taking of responsibility can we as a nation truly begin to heal the wounds we have inflicted upon the world throughout the past 6 years. It will take us much time to regain the trust of the international community, of this there is no doubt, but we must begin to walk this path if we are ever to get to the end of it. This is the the road I see before us.

We must immediately, and unconditionally, surrender Iraq. That's right. I spent a lot of time thinking about just what word to use there, and I chose 'surrender' for a damned good reason. It may not sound like an honorable thing in general, the word 'surrender', and the right will surely call me a coward for using the word at all. I am no coward. I am a man who understands that we have taken something through force that is not ours. This we must surrender, if those we have wronged are ever to recover from our intrusion, and if we ourselves are ever able to recover our honor as a nation among nations.

It is true that our administration has made an enormous mess of the middle east. It is a fallacy to believe that the United States can fix the situation. We have created a power vacuum, in which we currently sit. Our leaders fear who will fill the void when we do withdraw. Our leaders assume they have some choice in the matter, just as they assume they have some choice in the privacy rights of Americans. These leaders are wrong on all counts. Just as it is the American Public that has the true voice in privacy rights for Americans, it is the Iraqis who will ultimately determine the rule of law in Iraq. Our presence there does absolutely nothing to encourage democracy, in fact, our presence there itself prohibits the nation of Iraq from moving forward in it's natural evolution towards the next national leadership. We stand in the way of their people, even as they hurl rocks and bury I.E.D.s to drive us out of what is rightfully theirs. In a way, this situation has the potential to become worse than Vietnam, in that nobody in Iraq actually asked us in in the first place. There is no loyal Southern region, begging us to stay and defend them. Everyone, Kurds in the North included, wants us to leave. If we truly honored the people of Iraq, we would do just that. This, as we all know, must eventually be the road ahead.

On the homefront, we must cease and desist the war that has been declared against American Citizens by the Executive Branch. The warrantless wiretapping, the persecution of journalists, the abusive treatment of protesters, all must come to an end. The citizens of this land are not the enemy of the United States, we ARE the United States. The President is not the United States, Presidents come and go. We, the people, according to our own rights and laws, established and govern this land. We are this nation itself, and together we stand against all who would divide us. We are many colors, many sizes, and many shapes. We are different ages, and from different backgrounds, with different levels of education. We are the people, and we will not be persecuted in our own land against the letter of our constitution. Citizens will fight these battles in the courts for certain, if not further. We must. This is the road ahead.

On the gulf coast, we must cease giving hurricane relief money to commercial development programs, and dedicate it instead to rebuilding quality housing for those who lost everything in the disasters there. We must develop low cost housing that is not only of a high enough quality to withstand future hurricanes, but affordable enough to be purchased and/or leased to homeless residents. We must destroy the molded and infectious bacteria ridden FEMA trailers and pre-flood homes still in service. We must take into account the people of the city, as we should have done long before we rebuilt their superdome. Louisiana, Mississippi, and other coastal areas need our help. We must, as American Citizens, see to their needs. Our time of need will one day come, and our country cannot allow itself to be divided by tragedy. Just as the the attack upon the twin towers struck a blow to all of America, so indeed did the Hurricane, the Levee Collapse, and the Flood. We must help these citizens restore their city to it's former glory, and help our nation to recover to it's full economic and humane capacities. This is the road ahead.

In the MidWest, the American Heartland, we must restore the auto industry, and the work/production force that once thrived there in the not so distant past. Humans will forever require transportation, to ignore this is to condemn cities like Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati. We as citizens must provide financial incentives through our federal tax dollars to reward the auto industry for making decisions that help these areas and these citizens. Further, we must financially penalize those companies that choose profit over the American Citizens that make them run. We must take it into our own hands, through private enterprise and the constant consensus voice of the people, to push the Auto manufacturers into the future of world travel. This is the road ahead, and we will pave it.

We must, as a people, once a new congress has been installed, convene an independent investigation into the cause of the events which transpired on 9.11.01. We, as a people, must know the truth. We must find the answers to why the towers fell. These answers should necessarily hold with the physics and mathematics involved in the actual scenario that unfolded that day. We must know what happened to WTC 7. This building fell, without ever being struck by an airliner. It was neither struck by either of the towers, as they collapsed inwards upon themselves in what appeared to all viewing to be a controlled demolition, while human beings where still standing in the windows deciding whether or not to jump to their deaths or stay to be consumed by fire. We must know the truth of what struck New York City and the Pentagon that day. We must know what happened to the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. We, as a people, for the sake of our children, and for those victims who were directly affected, owe the world an accurate history of the events of that day. We stand today with no rational explanation. The 'official story' doesn't hold up to physics, and many of the supposed hijackers are to be found among the living today, in Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.

This same 'official story' claims that the best video footage of the strike on the Pentagon came from a gas station anti-theft camera several hundred yards away from the event, that only captured 5 frames of video due to the exposure settings. We as a people must recognize this for the nonsense that it is. We have surveillance even today on the Kremlin. Do we not? Of course we do. We've got video, audio, and radar. We've got the CIA covering every major defense agency in the world. Of course we do. Don't kid yourselves, fellow Americans. Will you willfully choose to believe that we do not have video, audio, and radar surveillance constantly over our own Central Command Center, otherwise known as the Pentagon, that funny shaped building at the very heart of our nations capital? I don't buy it for a moment, and neither should you. The evidence of what struck the Pentagon that day exists. We are simply not allowed by the Pentagon to see it for 'national security' reasons. The FBI, to this day on their most wanted list, do not list Bin Laden in connection with 9.11.01. Their stated reason, as reported in numerous papers and confirmed by this author, is that they have no evidence connecting Bin Laden to the attacks of that day. Our President, concerning Bin Laden, is on the record saying, "You know, I just don't spend that much time on him anymore..." We must, as a people, find the truth. We must appoint the leaders who will convene an independent and competent investigation into 9.11. This is the road ahead.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the path does not end here. I could go on for hours and hours establishing different platforms on how I would like to see our country healed, but none of this is truly up to me to decide anyway. This choice is up to the people, the citizens of this land. All I can do is to call upon you, to reflect upon some of what has transpired to bring us to this point, where we have lost our rights to privacy, and our freedoms to protest, speak, and report the news. We stand here, occupiers of two sovereign lands, contemplating the invasions of several others, and threatening everyone with the light of a thousand suns, as if we were the singular gods of such obscene power. We stand at this juncture, facing a choice, fellow citizens. We have the right to throw off our current government, and to establish a new body of congress this November. We have the power to take back control of our country, and to curb our path before it leads to mutually assured destruction on behalf of the foolish pride of our present Executive. We have the power to earn back the respect of other nations, by taking responsibility as a nation for the wrongs we have done to the global community, and to withdraw from inflicting further damage upon the innocent. We have the power to bring our men and women, stationed on the other side of the world, back home to defend this nation and their families, as they should have been all along. We have that power, you and I fellow readers, and the time will soon be here to decide.

There are many paths ahead of us, as a nation. I've outlined merely one of them here. It is a vision I seem to share with thousands if not millions of other Americans, and I thank you for taking the time to see it with me. The choices, in the end, are in your hands. Trust in yourselves. Believe in America, the land of free men and women of all colors, shapes, and sizes.

This is just one road, outlined. With your support, readers, this could well be the road ahead.