First, if you haven't signed the petition demanding a response to questions originally posed by Rep. John Conyers and 88 other members of Congress, please do so here. Conyers expects to present the petition to the White House Thursday and already has a half million names.

Second, check the list below to see if your Representative has signed. If not, call and email your Representative to find out why not.1 (The list at DowningStreetMemo.com is in PDF format, so I've copied it here.)   Ditto for your Senators.

Congressional signers

Neil Abercrombie 1 Brian Baird 2 Tammy Baldwin 3 Xavier Becerra 4 Shelley Berkley 5 Sanford Bishop 6 Earl Blumenauer 7 Corrine Brown 8 Sherrod Brown 9 G.K.Butterfield 10 Donna M.Christensen 11 William Lacy Clay 12 Emanuel Cleaver 13 James Clyburn 14 John Conyers 15 Jim Cooper 16 Elijah Cummings 17 Danny Davis 18 Peter DeFazio 19 Diana De Gette 20 Bill Delahunt 21 Rosa DeLauro 22 Lloyd Doggett 23 Sam Farr 24 Bob Filner 25 Harold Ford,Jr.26 Barney Frank 27 Al Green 28 Raul Grijalva 29 Louis Gutierrez 30 Alcee Hastings 31 Maurice Hinchey 32 Rush Holt 33 Jay Inslee 34 Sheila Jackson Lee 35 Jessie Jackson Jr.36 Eddie Bernice Johnson 37 Stephanie Tubbs Jones 38 Marcy Kaptur 39 Patrick Kennedy 40 Dale Kildee 41 Carolyn Kilpatrick 42 Dennis Kucinich 43 Barbara Lee 44 John Lewis 45

Zoe Lofgren 46 Carolyn Maloney 47 Ed Markey 48 Carolyn McCarthy 49 Jim McDermott 50 James McGovern 51 Cynthia McKinney 52 Martin Meehan 53 Kendrick Meek 54 Gregory Meeks 55 Michael Michaud 56 George Miller 57 Gwen S.Moore 58 James Moran 59 Jerrold Nadler 60 Grace Napolitano 61 James Oberstar 62 John Olver 63 Major Owens 64 Frank Pallone 65 Donald Payne 66 Charles Rangel 67 Bobby Rush 68 Bernie Sanders 69 Linda Sanchez 70 Jan Schakowsky 71 Jose Serrano 72 Ike Skelton 73 Louise Slaughter 74 Hilda Solis 75 Pete Stark 76 Ellen Tauscher 77 Bennie Thompson 78 Edolphus Towns 79 Chris Van Hollen 80 Nydia Velazquez 81 Debbie Wasserman Schultz 82 Maxine Waters 83 Diane Watson 84 Melvin Watt 85 Robert Wexler 86 Lynn Woolsey 87 David Wu 88 Albert R.Wynn 89

By the way, the name of Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, Democratic leader in the House, is conspicuously absent. As is the name of Rep. Barbara Boxer.

Juan Cole of Informed Comment and professor of Middle Eastern studies lost his professorial reserve yesterday to write—

The bloggers have forced the issue into the corporate media, and are helping create a real buzz around the Conyers hearings scheduled for Thursday.

Conyers and his staff are well aware that ordinarily hearings held by members of the minority party in Congress (which therefore are unlikely to have teeth) are routinely ignored by the corporate media. They are placing their hopes in the blogging world to cover the hearings and get the word out. They are planning to release further documents corroborating the Downing Street Memo.

This entire affair could be a harbinger of what is coming in 2007. If the Democrats can take back the Senate in 2006, all of a sudden they could schedule real investigatory hearings at the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Senate Armed Services Committee, into Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans, into Cheney's pressure on the CIA analysts, into the fabrication of intelligence and the political lies that dragged this country into the Iraq quagmire. Imagine what the Republicans did to Bill Clinton for merely fibbing about a desultory relationship (13 meetings) with a young woman that did not even involve intercourse. What would be the appropriate punishment for lying about Iraq's non-existent nuclear weapons program? Or launching a war of aggression in contravention of the United Nations Charter? Bush knows very well he will be a lame duck by January 2007. The real question is whether he will end up being roasted duck.

Don't hold back, Juan. Go on. Tell it like it is!

Follow-up post
PBS NewsHour claims credit for Downinggate;
may deserve some after last night (6/17/05)
David Manning's memo to Blair (6/17/05)