Two US state legislatures (Illinois and California) have introduced (though not yet passed) resolutions that would apparently force the US congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against the President Bush based on a little known floor rule (via opednews.com)

“Representative Yarbrough stumbled on a little known and never utlitized rule of the US House of Representatives, Section 603 of Jefferson’s Manual of the Rules of the United States House of Representatives, which allows federal impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of a state legislature.”

Well, we’ll see. First of all, the state legislatures have to pass the resolutions. The floor rule may have given the opponents a new lever to apply, but politics still do play a role in this. Still, these attempts are definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Particularly given the fact that the Bush administration is caught in a negative feedback slope now: Revelations about misconduct reduce its political clout thereby leading to more revelations about misconduct, and so on.

Today’s exaymple? From ThinkProgress via Economist’s View –

“[Yesterday, on CBS] 60 Minutes, CIA analyst Tyler Drumheller revealed that in the fall of 2002, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others were told by CIA Director George Tenet that Iraq’s foreign minister — who agreed to act as a spy for the United States — had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program.”

Watch it (quicktime).

By the way, according to the tape, the White House had no comment…

Wow, suddenly those demanding the impeachment of President Bush don’t sound too crazy anymore. Political power sometimes is such an elusive thing. So President Bush admitted to declassifying the NIE report so it could be used by his political operatived for political and PR reasons. Yesterday, he claimed to have done it so the American people could know “the truth” about his reasons for proposing to invade Iraq.

Well, if I were him, I’d stop using the word ‘truth’ for a lot of reasons. But that’s not the real point: the real point is – did he, on any level, authorize to blow CIA agent Valerie Plame’s cover to threaten her husband to stop arguing that the administration was not ‘truthful’ about Iraq seeking to buy Uranium in Niger? If that were the case, I’m really not sure how, and when, his presidency would end. And for that matter, the vice presidency of Dick Cheney.

it also looks like the American so-called mainstream media is no longer that scared by the administration. Here’s an example, an MSNBC segment about the affair and the recent developments, posted on the “bradblog“.