Mark Ruffalo, Daniel Ellsberg Can’t Wait

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Mark Ruffalo:

This is Mark Ruffalo for the World Can’t Wait, Drive Out The Bush Regime.

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It’s time to get on the bus this Saturday, February 4th. It’s time to demand that Bush step down.

I am afraid, and I don’t think it is just me, I think we are all terrified to a degree. I know the desire today is to grow so small and be left alone and not be spied on or noticed as out of the ordinary in any way because maybe we might be defamed or sent away or ruined.

And what about our children? What deeds that we do now might come to weigh upon their unspoken selves? If only we were to remain a little quiet, unnoticed, with some untold luck, we’ll squeak by and have a place in the and have a place in the great American sun. That is what the small secret self says.

There are millions of us out there who are frustrated and angry. Not only in small pockets, but all around the United States crossing into many different kinds of people, spanning oceans and continents. We are the growing majority. Ultimately, we are not alone. If you come out, you will see that others will greet and support you and enfold you into something that is greater than your fear of what we are being led to believe America is about.

America is bigger than what we are being sold. America is greater than the two party politics. It is greater than the exporting of war and importing of oil. It is greater than living any less free because of terrorism.

We are greater than the constantly growing division between the rich and the poor and the have and the have-nots.

We are the singular vision of democracy that carried America to it’s crowning achievements of civil liberty, justice and the ability for the poor and downtrodden and broken and despaired to lift into the safety of the great middle class.

Mr. Bush and his agenda have made a sham of each and every aspect of that great ideal. Legal torture, incompetence, corruption and greed rule the day.

Step down Mr. Bush; your oil cronies and lobbyist friends have made their riches on the backs of our working people. Step down and go back to your ranches and island homes and let us rise up again to be the free and fearless nation united in our diversity, under our many different gods and be the shining light of democracy that we truly are.

Step down and let freedom ring in the red states and blue states and the forgotten black southern states and let us mend ourselves again. Free of your lies, and your tyranny.

Step Down! Step Down! Step Down!

Mark Ruffalo is an actor who has appeared in over two dozen films

Danniel Ellsberg:

I would not have thought of copying the Pentagon Papers, risking a possible lifetime in prison, without the example of thousands of young Americans who were doing everything they could–including non-violent disobedience to the draft regulations–to oppose a wrongful, hopeless war. They showed civic courage, and I can attest to its effectiveness; as a government consultant and former official, I felt its power on my own life.

In the face of a president blatantly violating the law, pursuing another stalemated, hopeless, wrongful war, and proclaiming his intent to continue both, civic courage is needed today from those who can hold him and his administration to account: members of Congress, journalists, potential whistleblowers inside the government, prosecutors and judges. “Everything they can do,” even at cost to their positions and careers, is what is needed from those in such strategic positions at this moment, and what we should demand of them, by our own example. Nothing less is appropriate to this constitutional crisis.

Courage is contagious. One way members of the public can awaken courageous initiatives by such people is by confronting them with the spectacle of masses of plain citizens showing their faces together in public streets and squares to express their outrage, their condemnation and rejection of official practices. Demonstrations scheduled for this Saturday in Washington, D.C. can, among other things, encourage Congressional representatives to use their full powers in upcoming investigations to expose and curtail governmental abuses –starting on Monday in the Senate Judiciary Committee on the blatantly illegal and unconstitutional domestic spying by the administration.

Members of the Republican majority have taken the same oath as Democrats and their official witnesses– to uphold the Constitution. Asking questions that meet with evasion, lies or refusal to answer is not enough to fulfill that oath. Committee powers include subpoenas for testimony and evidence and criminal citations for contempt or perjury. Illegal practices must not only be identified and condemned, but stopped, and officials who originated and persist in them must be, at the very least, removed from office, and that before 2009. Candidates in primaries and elections this year should be put on notice that their own ability to hold office will depend on their willingness to investigate and to impeach and remove officials, from the president and vice president on down, who endanger our freedom and democracy.

There will be dozens of ways to do that. Demonstrating at the White House on February 4 is a good start.

Daniel Ellsberg made history when as a top Pentagon official, he released the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War, which exposed government lies going back 20 years. His act of resistance helped galvanize opposition to the war and triggered the events leading to Watergate and the downfall of Richard Nixon.