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The Armed M is a publication of the 2nd Amendment SIG, a special interest group of American Mensa Ltd. Opinions expressed herein are the opinions of the writers, and not of American Mensa, Ltd., which has no opinions. This newsletter is linked to the Mensa web page WWW.Mensa.org as WWW.webcatt.com/2ndAmend_SIG

I have moved and am now in Wilmington North Carolina. My E-Mail address is Smith13@att.net. I can always use contributions to the newsletter. If you write something or find something e-mail it to me I'll put it in the newsletter as space and theme allows. Bob Smith -----

I have been having problems with ATT Internet service. They put a sieve on e-mail limiting address to twenty-five. I couldn’t just split the mailing list because by anti virus does not like sending repeat messages. I think I have it all fixed. I was deeply mistaken when I wrote this. I will be using juno who lets me do 50 at a time. Juno doesn’t give me opportunity to do to hide recipient so you will lose some of your privacy. Sorry about that.

In the almost two years since the Columbine tragedy, American police have coined the term "active shooter." It means, in essence, a crazed gunman who is at the scene now, murdering people or trying to. As a cop for 27 years by the time you will read this, I find that terminology poignantly sad. For most of my life, "active shooter" meant a decent person who actively pursued a certain healthy hobby.

Like many of you reading this, I grew up with guns. Also like many of you, I had kids and guns in the same house when it was my turn to be the parent. This is true of almost every cop I ever worked with. The officer who leaves his only gun, the issued service weapon, at his locker when he leaves work and doesn't have a firearm at home is a rara avis indeed, and probably a young and unseasoned one, or one who has spent his career safely behind a desk. The cops in the street learn quickly the reality of violence, and after they've seen enough victims they say to themselves, "Not me and not mine."

This is also why most cops leave a gun at home for their significant other when they are at work. They know best of all that police work is necessarily reactive rather than proactive. Anyone who says "the police will protect you" hasn't been a cop. Those of us, who have been, know that we can only respond to calls for our service. This means, basically, that you have to survive long enough to call us, and then you have to wait for us to get there.

There is now great emphasis on passing legislation that will criminalize parents who make loaded guns accessible to their children. Hey, send me up. One day, off duty with my kid in a jurisdiction other than my own, we passed a cop who was struggling on the ground with a violent suspect at the side of the road. As I pulled over, I handed my loaded 2" .38 Special backup gun to my 11 year old daughter before I got out of the car and ran back to assist the officer. All ended well, with no bloodshed. I would do it again tomorrow. The kid was already trained to an adult standard. It was an emergency. In what the law calls "the balance of competing harms," it was simply the right thing to do. If that suspect had overpowered and killed the officer and then killed me, he wasn't going to leave my kid alive as a witness. She stayed locked in the car, her finger clear of the trigger of the loaded gun, similar to one with which she had recently qualified to a police standard. She did the right thing, too.

Each family has to make their own decision, and it has to be made specifically for each child, with a ruthlessly honest appraisal of the child 's emotional stability, maturity, and ability. My father, and his father before him, was gunfight survivors before I was born. I grew up with firearms. By the age of nine, I had a .22 rifle, a shotgun, and a Winchester 94 deer rifle hanging on a rack in my bedroom. At the age of 12, I had a loaded Colt .45 automatic in the desk drawer in that same bedroom.

My own children are now 16, and almost 24. Both learned guns early, helping me clean them at age 5 and shooting at age 6. The elder has been licensed to carry loaded and concealed since age 18, and it has already saved her in one incident, with no shots fired. Her attackers fled when they saw her S&W 9mm.

Elder Brat chose not to have a loaded gun in her own room until she was 18. She has had one there ever since, except when she was living on a "gun-free" university campus. Younger Brat at 16 also prefers not to keep a loaded weapon of her own in her room, but if home alone, knows where the immediately accessible loaded defense guns are.

I respect their choices. These young women often entertained their female friends in their rooms, and didn't want loaded guns accessible to the untrained. When I was a teenage boy, if my buddies came over we stayed in the living room or the yard, and if the guys wanted to see my guns, we had my dad clear it with their dad and all could go to an appropriate range together. My daughters did the same: many of their friends found guns fascinating, and Dad always cleared it with the parents before the trip to the gun club. It all worked out.

Access to loaded weapons requires training, skill, and already-demonstrated adult levels of responsibility. My kids fit the latter. What struck me most was that each of them became the ones their peers came to for advice when they were in trouble. Skills? My first-born, Cat, won her first pistol match against adult men at age 11, and at 19 earned High Woman honors at the National Tactical Invitational. My second daughter, Justine, was 13 when she won the National Junior Handgun Championship Parent/Child Team with only a little help from her dad.

Kids and defense guns. In 2000, a maniac with a pitchfork broke into a home occupied by a bunch of kids guarded by a young teenage girl. She tried to reach her parents' gun for defense, but it was locked and inaccessible. She jumped out a window and ran to a neighbor's house, telling him what happened and begging him for a gun. Aghast, he kept her there as he called the police. When the cops’ came-and finally killed the homicidal maniac-it was too late to save the little ones.

I remember the little boy who killed the man who otherwise would have beaten his mother to death, using the mom's little pistol that he snatched from her desk drawer. I remember the youth who used a .22 rifle to kill the pit bull that was trying to bite his little sister to death. And I remember the 12-year-old whose father trusted him to have his own .22 revolver in his bedroom. It saved the boy's life when the estranged lover of the father's new girlfriend broke into the house and killed the older son and the girlfriend and shot the father and left him for dead. When the mass murderer came to the 12-year-old’s room, the boy's gunfire killed the murderous home invader, saving the kid's life.

We who own firearms have to live up to the responsibility of keeping them out of the hands of the irresponsible. That is patently obvious. But, once it is said, there are times when responsible young people will face life-threatening crisis and have to act like adults to save innocent lives. That can only happen if the child who has lived up to adult standards of responsibility and prudence has access to an adult level of power to stop the harm.

It is not an easy question, and it never will be. I will never suggest that all children have access to deadly weapons. That would be madness. But, once they had been specifically trained in the responsibility attendant to them-not just gun safety per se, but the ability to make what cops call "the deadly force decision"-I did entrust my own responsible children with that power.

And those responsible children never gave me cause to regret it. Fate, however, gave me reason to be glad I had done so.

I will stand by the decision I made ... as you will have to stand by yours. ---------

Massad Ayoob is a police officer and gun expert who writes extensively about gun issues.

While Britain has some of the toughest firearms laws in the world, the recent spate of gun murders in London has highlighted a disturbing growth in armed crime.

The shooting of a young woman in London by a mobile phone thief has again raised the issue of escalating gun crime in the UK.

The attack follows a series of gun-related incidents in east London between Christmas and New Year, which included the case of two men who were killed by a single shot at a party.

Between April and November 2001, the number of murders in the Metropolitan Police area committed with a firearm soared by almost 90% over the same period a year earlier.

Armed street robberies rose, in the same period, from 435 to 667 in 2001 - an increase of 53% - while overall in the capital there were 45,255 street robberies and snatches last year, against 32,497 in 2000.

Much of the blame has been pinned on the trade in stolen mobile phones and up to half of all muggings are now thought to be for mobiles.

With both street robberies and gun crime on a sharp increase, there are fears that the two trends will overlap and young muggers will, more and more, graduate from knives to firearms.

The worrying trend is not just in London. Birmingham, Manchester and Nottingham have also witnessed increasing gun crime.

Police believe young men are mostly responsible for the attacks, which are often fuelled by rows in the lucrative crack cocaine market.

There are even suggestions the recent spurt is down to inner city police officers being siphoned off to protect terrorist targets in the wake of the 11 September attacks in America. Muggings in London have risen by more than 40% since early September.

In the capital, so-called "black on black" attacks have accounted for much of the increase in gun murders. Of the 30 firearm killings between April and November 2001, 16 were classed as "black on black".

In response to this trend, the Met set up the intelligence-based initiative Operation Trident in March 1998, specifically to tackle "black on black" gun crime.

The operation was deemed necessary because of the reluctance of witnesses to come forward through fear of reprisals from the criminals involved.

Yet only a few years ago the British government led a rigid crackdown on gun ownership.

Following the Dunblane massacre in 1996, in which 16 schoolchildren were killed by a lone gunman, the government hoped to nip in the bud Britain's burgeoning firearms culture with an outright ban on handguns.

Although all privately-owned handguns in Britain are now officially illegal, the tightened rules seem to have had little impact in the criminal underworld.

No-one knows how many illegal firearms there are in Britain, although estimates range from between 200,000 to several million. Whatever the true figure, it is said to be growing daily.

With so many deadly weapons on the streets of the UK's big cities, the next question seems to be whether Britain's famously unarmed police officers should carry guns as a matter of course.

In recent years, the police have gradually become accustomed to firepower. Almost every force already has armed response vehicles, equipped and ready to attend the scene of a robbery or siege.

But there appears to be unease at the prospect of rank and file officers carrying guns on the beat. Many fear that such a move would be counterproductive, inviting more criminals to arm themselves with higher grade weaponry.

Almost 80% of PCs said they were not in favour of being routinely armed, according to a ballot carried out by the Police Federation in the mid 1990s.

And in the event of a decision to arm all officers, only 43% said they would be prepared to carry guns on duty all the time.

Yet the recent spate of attacks will only increase the feeling in some quarters that one day Britain's bobbies may have to cross this Rubicon.

Massive rise in gun murders by Justin Davenport Crime Correspondent © Associated Newspapers Ltd., 19 December 2001

Gun crime in London is rocketing, with increases of almost 90 per cent in some firearms offences, Scotland Yard revealed today.

New figures show London murders with guns increased by 87 per cent in the first eight months of the year compared with the same period last year.

There were significant rises in virtually all offences involving firearms. Armed muggings increased from 435 to 667, a rise of 53 per cent.

continuees: http://www.thisislondon.com/dynamic/news/story.html?in_review_id=484328&in_rev

The year was 1957. Monroe, N.C., was a rigidly segregated town where all levels of white society and government were dedicated to preserving the racial status quo. Blacks who dared to speak out were subject to brutal, sadistic violence.

It was common practice for convoys of Ku Klux Klan members to drive through black neighborhoods shooting in all directions. A black physician who owned a nice brick house on a main road was a frequent target of racist anger.

In the summer of 1957, a Klan motorcade sent to attack the house was met by a disciplined volley of rifle fire from a group of black veterans and NRA members led by civil rights activist Robert F. Williams.

Using military-surplus rifles from behind sandbag fortifications, the small band of freedom fighters drove off the larger force of Klansmen with no casualties reported on either side.

Williams, a former Marine who volunteered to lead the Monroe chapter of the NAACP and founded a 60-member NRA-chartered rifle club, described the battle in his 1962 book, "Negroes With Guns," which was reprinted in 1998 by Wayne State University Press.

According to Williams, the Monroe group owed its survival in the face of vicious violence to the fact that they were armed. In several cases, police officials who normally ignored or encouraged Klan violence took steps to prevent whites from attacking armed blacks. In other cases, fanatical racists suddenly turned into cowards when they realized their intended victims were armed.

Oddly, it appears that the organized armed blacks of Monroe never shot any of their tormentors. The simple existence of guns in the hands of men who were willing to use them prevented greater violence.

It is important to note that the guns were not used offensively. They were part of an overall strategy that relied primarily on peaceful protest like picketing or entering whites-only establishments. Williams demonstrated that the dignified and responsible use of firearms for self-defense was an important method to achieve justice for those denied fair treatment by all institutions of government.

The civil rights movement was deeply divided between those who espoused a pacifist, non-violent approach and those who believed that human beings had a right and a duty to use force in self-defense. Williams was the most influential leader of the self-defense wing of the movement.

His effort to provide guns and training to African-American civil rights supporters was alarming to white politicians. Most state gun control laws, not just in the South, were blatantly designed to keep guns out of the hands of blacks and other minorities. Those with racist beliefs were not pleased when blacks claimed the right to keep and bear arms that is guaranteed to all Americans.

The connection with the NRA might surprise some people who portray the organization as a haven for racist rednecks. Former NRA Executive Director Tanya Metaksa spoke with Williams before his death. She recalls, "He was very proud of being an NRA member and that the NRA sanctioned his club without question."

The civil rights organizations of today bear little resemblance to the deadly serious armed activists of Monroe. African-American leaders generally support the liberal white line that guns are evil and have no place in modern society.

On the other hand, small numbers of responsible black gun owners continue to honor their heritage by practicing their marksmanship and joining gun rights organizations. The tradition of the black gun club still lives on in the Tenth Cavalry Gun club, led by Ken Blanchard in Prince Georges County, Md.

While researching this column, I contacted Don Kates, a civil rights attorney who went to North Carolina in 1963 to participate in the movement. I asked if he ever carried a gun during those days and he responded with a list of a half-dozen that were always within reach.

Kates also suggested that I read a letter written by an old friend of his from those days, John R. Salter Jr., who is now Professor Emeritus at the University of North Dakota. Here are two brief quotes:

In the early 1960s, I taught at Tougaloo College, a black school in Jackson, Mississippi. I was a member of the statewide board of the NAACP and was Chairman of the Jackson Movement. No one knows what kind of massive racist retaliation would have been directed at grass-roots black people had the black community not had a healthy measure of firearms within it.

During most of the 1960s I did civil rights work in various parts of the South and almost always had with me a .38 special Smith and Wesson 2-inch-barrel revolver - what you would now erroneously call a "Saturday Night Special."

In 1962 the Monroe freedom fighters were overwhelmed by a huge mob that converged on the town. The Justice Department and the state police ignored calls for help. The rabid racists were aided by law enforcement that branded Williams a communist and a dangerous schizophrenic.

Rob Williams eluded an FBI manhunt and fled to Cuba, which he erroneously believed to be free of racism. Within five years he realized that Cuba was not as he had imagined and moved on to China. There he was treated as a celebrity and returned to the United States in 1969 with the quiet blessing of Richard Nixon.

Williams worked as a China scholar at the University of Michigan and reportedly advised Henry Kissinger on Chinese affairs. He died in 1996.

Dr. Michael S. Brown is an optometrist and member of Doctors for Sensible Gun Laws, www.dsgl.org. He may be reached at rkba2000@yahoo.com

These are "public servants," paid for by tax dollars, right? If you personally hired servants to do a job for you, and your hired help then deliberately lied to and damaged you, would you be within your rights to try to sanction them, and to perhaps sue them for damages? Why is this any different? If these public servants are immune from any sanctions for this kind of behavior, then they are public masters, and not servants at all.

Subject: [Lis-LEAF] Supreme Court to decide if government officials can be punished for lying to public http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=15543

High court to decide if government officials can be punished for lying to public

CIA intrigue, murder and cover-up are the main plot lines in the case of Warren Christopher v. Jennifer Harbury, granted review last week by the Supreme Court. But important subtexts are the First Amendment rights of government officials, and whether officials can be punished for misleading or lying to the public.

The case has its roots in the 1992 disappearance of Guatemalan guerilla leader Efrain Bamaca-Velasquez. His American wife, Jennifer Harbury, devoted her life to finding him. U.S. government officials repeatedly denied any knowledge of his whereabouts, even though some CIA officials and others were aware that he was being held in secret by the Guatemalan army. It was later revealed that after being questioned, Bamaca was killed in 1993 on the orders of a paid CIA asset.

In 1996, Harbury sued U.S. government officials including Secretary of State Warren Christopher, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, and ambassador to Guatemala Marilyn McAfee. She claimed that the misleading information put out by these officials had the effect of depriving her of her right of access to the courts. If she had known earlier what the U.S. government knew, she says she could have filed a Freedom of Information Act request earlier, and might have been able to seek injunctive relief in court that could have saved her husband's life.

A federal district court judge dismissed Harbury's lawsuit, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit revived it, in spite of the immunity that usually protects government officials from lawsuits. In an opinion written by Judge David Tatel, the court ruled that public officials may not mislead the American public to protect themselves from being sued.

Tatel noted that several other circuit courts have found that "government cover-ups can infringe the right of access to courts." That right, Tatel said, includes not only the right to go to court, but to have the court's review of a case be "effective and meaningful." Because her husband was already dead and because of the government officials' actions, the court ruled, Harbury's access to the courts could not have been effective.

But in order for government officials to lose their immunity, the appeals court said that it must be clear to the officials that their actions were violating someone's constitutional rights. "We think it should be obvious to public officials that they may not affirmatively mislead citizens for the purpose of protecting themselves from suit," Tatel wrote. "Qualified immunity was never intended to protect public officials who affirmatively mislead citizens for the purpose of protecting themselves from being held accountable in a court of law."

In their challenge before the Supreme Court, Christopher and the other officials claim that the appeals court ruling "expands the constitutional right of access to the courts beyond all recognizable boundaries." In a brief by their lawyer, Richard Cordray, they claim that if upheld, the appeals court ruling could mean that government officials violate the law whenever they conceal information, "since it can always be claimed later that their actions were intended to and did hinder the filing of some hypothetical lawsuit."

Cordray continued, "This holding will chill the speech and the discretion of government officials." He said it could seriously hinder the conduct of foreign policy.

In an interview, Cordray said the case also concerns government officials because it could expose them to suit for routine acts such as denying a request under the Freedom of Information Act. If such a denial could later be shown to have deprived the requester of a constitutional right, Cordray said, the officials could be sued.

The case will be argued before the Supreme Court in March or April, with a decision by the end of the term in June or July.

Tony Mauro covers the Supreme Court for American Lawyer Media and is a legal correspondent for the First Amendment Center.

Injectable chip opens door to 'human bar code' By Charles J. Murray (01/07/02, 12:38 p.m. EST)

http://eetimes.com/story/OEG20020104S0044

Radio-frequency identification chips, which have found a home in applications ranging from toll road passes to smart retail shelves, may be close to taking up residence in the human body.

A Florida-based company has introduced a passive RFID chip that is compatible with human tissue, and the developer is proposing the chip for use on implantable pacemakers, defibrillators and artificial joints. The company, Applied Digital Solutions (Palm Beach, Fla.), also said that the chip could be injected through a syringe and used as a sort of "human bar code" in security applications.

Called the VeriChip, the device could open up a broad new segment for the $900 million-a-year RFID business, especially if society embraces the idea of using microchips for human identification. Applied Digital executives ultimately believe that the worldwide market for such implantable chips could reach $70 billion per year.

"The human market for this technology could be huge," said Keith Bolton, senior vice president of technology development at the company.

Futurists agree that the idea of using microchips inside the body could ultimately represent a large market opportunity, but they doubt whether this initial effort will have a significant effect on the RFID market.

"Are we going to see chips embedded in the human body? You bet we are," said Paul Saffo, a director of The Institute for the Future (Menlo Park, Calif.). "But it isn't going to happen overnight."

Pacemaker helper

Still, Applied Digital Solutions' executives are preparing to sell between $2.5 million and $5 million worth of VeriChips in 2002. The company initially plans to sell the chips in South America and Europe for use with pacemakers and defibrillators. In that application, it could be attached to the outside of the heart device or implanted nearby in the body.

Doing so would enable medical personnel to identify and monitor a patient's implanted devices merely by running a handheld scanner over the patient's chest.

"If you're a pacemaker user and you're in an accident and in shock, an ambulance attendant could scan the body and retrieve information about the device," Bolton said. "The chip could provide information about the [pacemaker's] settings, who its manufacturer is and whether you have any medical allergies."

The company said it is working with makers of implantable pacemakers and defibrillators to incorporate the chip during the equipment-manufacturing process.

Applied Digital Solutions is awaiting approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and does not expect to sell the chips in the United States until that approval is granted. The company's engineers said they expect approval later this year.

The announcement of the chip's availability created a media stir, however — not because of its potential use with pacemakers but because of its science-fiction-like potential application in human identification systems. Because the microchip and its antenna measure just 11.1 x 2.1 mm, Applied Digital Solutions said the assembly can be injected through a syringe and implanted in various locations within the body.

The tube-shaped VeriChip includes a memory that holds 128 characters of information, an electromagnetic coil for transmitting data and a tuning capacitor, all encapsulated within a silicone-and-glass enclosure. The passive RF unit, which operates at 125 kHz, is activated by moving a company-designed scanner within about a foot of the chip. Doing so excites the coil and "wakes up" the chip, enabling it to transmit data.

The chips are said to be similar to those that are already implanted in about a million dogs and cats nationwide to enable pet owners to identify and reclaim animals that have been temporarily lost. Applied Digital Solutions, which has made the pet-tracking chips for several years, says that the human chips differ mainly in the biocompatible coating that's used to keep the body from rejecting the implanted chip. The VeriChip is believed to be the first such chip designed for human identification.

Inspired by Sept. 11

In September, Applied Digital Solutions implanted its first human chip when a New Jersey surgeon, Richard Seelig, injected two of the chips into himself. He placed one chip in his left forearm and the other near the artificial hip in his right leg.

"He was motivated after he saw firefighters at the World Trade Center in September writing their Social Security numbers on their forearms with Magic Markers," Bolton said. "He thought that there had to be a more sophisticated way of doing an identification."

Applied Digital said Seelig, who serves as a medical consultant to the company, has now had the chips implanted in him for three months with no signs of rejection or infection.

Ordinarily, the company said, the chips would be implanted in a doctor's office under local anesthesia.

Applied Digital's executives said the ability to inject the chips opens up a variety of RFID applications in high-security situations, as well other types of human identification systems. The chips, they said, could be implanted in young children or in adults with Alzheimer's disease, to help officials identify people who can't identify themselves.

But the company is backing away from involuntary identification applications, such the tracking of prisoners or parolees. "We are advocating that this technology be totally voluntary," Bolton said.

Whether the technology will boost the market for RFID chips remains uncertain. Industry analysts had assumed that by now RFID would constitute a far larger market than its current, $900 million annual tally.

A consortium of major manufacturers has sought to push the technology as a replacement for bar codes in everyday products ranging from cereal boxes to shaving cream cans, but the cost hasn't dropped low enough to make that feasible. More recently, a group led by the European Central Bank began work on embedding RFID chips in the euro bank note, but the chip category has yet to find its killer app.

Applied Digital nonetheless has high hopes for its RFID technology. The publicly held company's stock did not fare well last year, plummeting from a high of $3 a share on Feb. 7 to 11 cents per share on Sept. 17. But its per-share stock price jumped to 50 cents from 38 cents after the company announced the VeriChip.

Eventual adoption

Analysts expressed confidence that the concept would eventually be adopted but were skeptical about its immediate future. "For this to work, you are going to need a standard that everyone agrees to," said Saffo of The Institute for the Future. "Then you have to convince people to buy reading devices that may be fairly costly."

Applied Digital's engineers would not say how much the chips or handheld readers might cost. The company's reader is a proprietary unit that is required for use with the VeriChip.

Some further suggested that the chip might be too large for easy adoption. Veterinarians who have implanted the chips in dogs and cats say that the techniques used in animals are unlikely to be embraced by humans. "The needle is huge," said Dean Christopoulos, a veterinarian in Des Plaines, Ill. "It's almost as thick as your pinky."

Some engineers suggested the technology might ultimately be scaled down, making the chip's acceptance more likely. At Alien Technology Corp. (Morgan Hill, Calif.), engineers have already discussed using that company's ultrasmall RFID chips in human applications. Alien, which uses a process known as fluidic self-assembly to create chips measuring 350 x 350 microns, has demonstrated its 900-MHz technology on everyday products such as soap and shampoo bottles. The coded information can be detected and read across distances measuring almost 3 feet.

"There are companies making RFID tags that are much smaller than a couple of millimeters," said Andy Holman, director of business development for Alien Technology.

Analysts also suggested that human identification technology would be more likely to be popularized when engineers are able to integrate more memory and other features, such as global-positioning satellite units and induction-based power-recharging techniques. GPS might help find lost children and adults, they said, while larger memories would enable doctors to store vital patient information.

The concept "goes all the way back to the 1960s," said Jerry Krasner, vice president of market intelligence for American Technology International Inc.'s Embedded Forecasters Group. "What's new is the ability to store a lot of data.

"As soon as you can do that, you'll see more applications for this type of technology," he said.

-. -. -. -. -. -. -. -. -. -. -. -. -. -. -. -. -. -.

"There are already enough anger-driven assholes that I have to listen to. I don't need any more," Sen. Adam Kline, D-Seattle

"When we're desperate for money, we do all sorts of things like this," said House Appropriations Chairwoman Helen Sommers, D-Seattle.

"Just because the Democrats are in control, I don't see why all the responsibility should all fall on us", Senate Majority Leader Sid Snyder (D-Long Beach).

[[Just WHO should be RESPONSIBLE???? - the janitors? the meter maids?? the bridge tenders???]]

"Councilman Dwight Pelz, D-Seattle, drew a murmur when he said voters had become an obstacle."

"But we simply must reduce the size of this government, so everything else in on the table." ... Gary Locke
Too many Americans are in the Witless Protection Program.....   Jackie Juntti 9/6/01

"There will always be death and taxes; however, death doesn't get worse every year."

Great News resources:
http://www.covenantnews.com/              Covenant News
http://www.lewisnews.com/main.asp       Lewis News
http://www.sierratimes.com/                   Sierra Times
http://www.proliberty.com/observer/         Idaho Observer
http://www.klamathbasincrisis.org/          Klamath Falls Board and discussion