Weekly Update - A publication of the Michigan Militia Corps August 15, 1996 Volume 3, Issue 23 Robert Dole Kisses Off Gun Owners, Presidency Bob Dole threw away his chance to be President when he told CBS July 11 that if the bill to repeal military look semi-autos "came to me, I wouldn't sign it. I'd probably veto it too." In March 1995, he wrote NRA that he would make repealing the assault-weapons law a top legislative priority, saying he viewed it as "ill-conceived." Earlier in the week Dole had gone to Richmond and made some confusing statements about repeal; "We've moved beyond the debate over banning assault weapons." The reason for the confusing wording, according to Time Magazine was that Speaker Newt Gingrich had learned he planned to say: "I do not support repealing that ban." The Speaker was furious, "Telephoned the campaign and demanded that Dole remove the offending sentence," the magazine said. A couple of nights later he "clarified" his position by telling CNN talk show host Larry King, "Let's just keep it." A MS-NBC poll that weekend, when Dole's comments had been major news all week, showed that he had fallen seven points, to 25 percent, while Clinton was unchanged at 54 percent. Kevin Phillips, a political analyst and former strategist for the GOP said "Clinton has seized the center with great skill and little principle and Dole has done it with neither." ILA Executive Director Tanya Metaksa told reporters that the Board of Directors would make the decision on whether to endorse anyone for President at its September meeting, but that she doubted it would be Dole and knew it wouldn't be Clinton - one of whom is going to be sworn in come January. She told a reporter that ILA would focus on Congressional and state elections, "NRA was involved in 10,000 campaigns in 1994 - and will probably be involved in 10,000 minus 1 in 1996." Hard Corps Report; August 3,1996 Terrorism Bill Passes House, HR 3953 The House overwhelmingly passed another anti-terrorism bill on Aug. 2, before recessing until after Labor Day. President Clinton, attempting to use the public revulsion against the bombings of Flight 800 and the Olympic Centennial Park while the blood was fresh, called for Congress to put aside partisanship and pass the parts of his anti-terrorism package that were whacked out earlier this year. A White House fact: sheet called for "criminalizing" the possession of untagged explosives, including black powder and smokeless powder. That marked a major escalation in the decades-old taggants battle, which had previously been limited to requiring manufacturers to insert the tags. The House-passed version called for an independent minimum one year study by scientists with no vested interest in tagging, and no implementation without Congressional action. The original White House proposal called for BATF to "study" the issue then write regulations which would automatically go into effect, unless Congress objected within 45 days. 3M Corporation developed the taggants in the late I 970s, using a pepper-sized color-coded chip that would be added to each lot of explosive or propellant, then tracked by recording the "serial number" of each lot. The biggest single problem for hand-loaders is that the 3M tags react with the nitrates used in most propellants. Hercules Powder, now Allian Techsystems, said in a June 12,1980 letter to their handloading customers; "When we added 3M taggant to a small lot of Herco (propellant), a serious reduction of the powder's thermal stability resulted. Different tests by different laboratories confirmed the deleterious effect...." Taggants won't make terrorist bombs fail to go off-- but they could cause cans of propellant to burn or explode in the homes of thousands of handloaders. The vote on this bill was 389 to 22. Representatives Vern Ehlers and Pete Hoekstra voted against this bill along with 20 others from other states. Call and commend them. Crises Invented to Ensure Social Control It's amazing how we listen to people who've been dead wrong time after time. In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, "The world as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000 - World food production cannot keep pace with the galloping population. Family planning cannot and will not, in the foreseeable future, check this runaway growth." Paul Erlich, author of the "Population Bomb" in 1968 predicted that by 1999 the US population would fall to 22.6 million. According to Erlich, during the 1980s, 65 million Americans would perish from starvation. In January 1994, Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute said, "Seldom has the world faced an unfolding emergency whose dimensions are as clear as the growing imbalance between food and people." Even the UN joined the chorus with its 1975 prediction that there would be "500 million starvation deaths in Asia between 1980 and 2025." Asia, as it turns out, is experiencing unprecedented economic growth. These grossly erroneous predictions can't simply be chalked up to ignorance. As Dr. Thomas Sowell points out in his book, "The vision of the Anointed," statists deliberately invent crises as a means to gain more control over our lives. In the early '60s, Planned Parenthood and other groups convinced the nation there was a "crisis" in teen pregnancy and venereal disease. They got Congress to give them our money to sponsor sex education classes. The classes often showed films to junior high students depicting heterosexual and homosexual couples engaged in sex; teen-age birth control clinics were set up and condom distribution programs started. Was there a crisis in the first place? Teen-age fertility rates and venereal disease rates had been declining steadily since 1950. After "sex education," teen pregnancy rose from 68 per thousand in 1970 to 96 per thousand by 1980. It's the same story with poverty and dependency. When the "war on poverty" began in 1965, the number of people living in poverty had been rapidly declining since World War II. From 1950 to 1965 it had declined by about one-third. It's the same story with crime the absolute number of murders committed in the United States in 1960 was less than in 1930, 1940 or 1950, even though the population was larger. After 1960, the courts succumbed to idiotic liberal ideology saying that the problem wasn't "the so-called criminal population" but with society whose "need to punish" was a "primitive urge" that was "highly irrational." Court contempt for law-abiding citizens has produced today's crime rampage. The elite who've created or magnified our social problems see themselves as nobler and wiser than the ordinary person. They also see themselves as having been ordained to forcibly impose that "wisdom" on the "ignorant" masses. In the process, they've engineered one disaster after another. I want to know how long we, the benighted people, are going to sit on our butts and take it. Dr. Walter E. Williams, Aug. 1996, Media Bypass Magazine. Hillary in Disguise: Health Bill Harms Doctors A health-care reform bill sponsored by Sens. Ted Kennedy and Nancy Kassebaum, passed 100-0 by the Senate, has drawn fire from activists who claim it harms the independence of doctors in treating patients. S. 1028 was incorporated by amendment into a similar House bill [HR 3103] and is currently in committee. The centerpiece of the bill, portability of health insurance from one job to another, is hardly controversial. However, the proposal is under intense fire in several quarters, including objections from the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. "Sending doctors or patients to federal prison in order to protect health plans from paying too much was one of the loathsome features of the defeated Clinton Health Security Act. Now it's back," wrote AAPS Executive Director Jane Orient in the Wan Street Journal. The bill's most odious features, according to Orient, include: - Five years in prison for a person who misrepresents information on a health plan (e.g. failure to include a preexisting condition). - Five years in prison for a doctor failing to turn over a patient's records (e.g. to a prosecutor who wants to accuse the patient of making a misstatement). - A fine of up to $10,000 ifs doctor incorrectly codes, even through an honest mistake, an insurance form. There are thousands of codes and no consistent interpretation. - Confiscation of property paid for with the gross proceeds of any "federal health-care offense" (and all health plan related offenses will be federal crimes). "The message sent by the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill is loud and clear: Any doctor who practices fee-for-service medicine has to put it all on the line," Orient wrote. "If he fails to comply with a statutory obligation to provide only medically necessary services, correctly coded, he can be reduced to lifelong poverty and imprisoned besides." "The law enforcement machinery will be vastly augmented to meet the challenge. There will be rewards for informants, and prosecutors get to keep the fines and seized property," she wrote. Media Bypass Magazine, Aug, 1996 Colonists Had Good Plan If there is a stain on the record of our forefathers, a dark hour in the earliest history of the American Colonies, it would be the hanging of the "witches" at Salem. But that was a pinpoint in place and time - a brief lapse into hysteria. For the most part, our 17th century colonists were scrupulously fair, even in fear. There was one group of people they feared with reason - a society, you might say, whose often insidious craft had claimed a multitude of victims, ever since the Middle Ages in Europe. One group of people were hated and feared from Massachusetts Bay to Virginia. The Magistrate would not burn them at the stake, although surely a great many of the colonists would have recommended such a solution. Our forefathers were baffled by them. In the first place, where did they come from? (Of all who sailed from England to Plymouth in 1820, not one of them was aboard.) "Vermin." Theta what the Colonists called them. Parasites who fed on human misery, spreading sorrow and confusion wherever they went. "Destructive," they were called. And still they were permitted coexistence with the colonists. For a while, anyway. Of course there were colonial laws prohibiting the practice of their infamous craft. Somehow a way was always found around all those laws. In 1841, Massachusetts Bay colony took a novel approach to the problem. The governors attempted to starve the "devils" out of existence through economic exclusion. They were denied wages, and thereby it was hoped that they would perish. Four years later, Virginia followed the example of Massachusetts Bay and for a while it seemed that the dilemma had been resolved. It had not: somehow the parasites managed to survive and the mere nearness of them made the colonists' skin crawl. In 1658, in Virginia, the final solution: banishment, exile. The "treacherous ones" were cast out of the colony. At last, after decades of enduring the psychological gloom, the sun came out and the birds sang, and all was right with the world. And the elation continued for a generation. I'm not sure why the Virginians eventually allowed the outcasts to return, but they did. In 1680, after 22 years, the despised ones were readmitted to the colony on the condition that they be subjected to the strictest surveillance. How soon we forget! For indeed, over the next half century or so, the imposed restrictions were slowly, quietly swept away. And those whose treachery had been feared since the Middle Ages ultimately took their place in society. You see, the "vermin" that once infested colonial America, the parasites who preyed on the misfortunes of their neighbors until finally they were officially banished from Virginia, those dreaded, despised, outcast masters of confusion, were lawyers. From Paul Harvey's "The Rest of the Story" "We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in." Thomas Paine Volunteers Needed We need volunteers to act as Security for the National Patriot Rally to be held 31 August and 1 September, 1998, in Washington, DC. Call Tom Wayne at (616) 665-7168 for further information. The Rothschild Brothers: (Who quote approvingly, Mr. John Shennan, their protege, regarding the passage of the National Banking Act) "The few who can understand the system will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors, that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of the people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantages [that] capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests." *From a letter to Ikleheimer, Morton and Vandergould, New York bankers, 1863* *** To subscribe to the Weekly Update, put out weekly by Michigan Militia Corps state command, simply send a message conveying that to xxx.