Have You Seen the Title? Where's That Confounded Title?
Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 21 Oct 2003 12:00:00 GMT
Adapted from an email that I sent last night. A pretty good
explication of where I'm currently at politically:
In case you haven't read much of what I write daily, I am an avowed anarcho-capitalist. I believe in property, but I do not believe in government of any kind. Government doesn't work.
I agree with Lysander Spooner ("The Constitution of No Authority") that the Constitution has no authority over anyone who has not sworn to uphold it. Hence it applies to congress critters, the military, police, bureaucrats, judges, and naturalized citizens, but not to natural born citizens. We are sovereign if we choose to claim our birthright.
I consider taxation, all taxation, to be theft, armed robbery. I pay my taxes because I am not at this time willing to fight the armed goons who will come to my house should I stop doing so. I consider taxes to be protection money extorted from me by the organized criminal gang called government. I believe that I would be fully within my moral rights to shoot dead anyone who DID come to my house with the intention of enforcing the tax (or gun or drug) "laws". I would be defending myself against theft, assault, and kidnapping (the proper name for an arrest for something that is not a real crime).
I consider our constitutional republic to be a reasonable compromise to anarcho-capitalism, and I could live with it if the Constitution were narrowly interpreted and rabidly enforced, meaning that about 90% of the current crop of U.S. representatives and senators (and cops and judges and tax collectors) should be rotting in prison or swinging from lamp posts for proposing or voting for (or enforcing) unconstitutional or treasonous "laws".
Gun Week - Anti-Gunners Hope to Defibrillate Moribund Assault Weapons Issue - good article on the push to extend and make permanent the so-called "assault" weapons ban. Dick Gephardt signed up on October 15 as a cosponsor of H.R. 2038. This excrement now has 106 cosponsors.
Vin Suprynowicz at The Las Vegas Review-Journal - The Eli Lilly Protection Act - Senator Bill Frist wanted to make it impossible for parents of vaccine-damaged children to sue those responsible, the drug companies. So back in March he attached a bill that would have done this to a "homeland security" bill. More landmine legislation. Fie. Fortunately, people were watching, and lots of angry letters and emails caused him to back off. This time.
Let's say the parent of an autistic child wishes to file a civil lawsuit against a manufacturer of childhood vaccines or their components, demanding the pharmaceutical firm respond to new medical findings that the thimerosal (mercury) preservative in many common childhood vaccinations may have caused or contributed to the child's autism. Would you consider that parent ... a "terrorist"?
Probably not. But it appears U.S. Sen. Bill Frist -- a Tennessee Republican and the Senate's only serving medical doctor -- would.
On March 19, Sen. Frist introduced S.15, which attempted "to protect drug companies from thimerosal-related litigation while eliminating legal recourse for families of vaccine-injured, mercury-toxic children," according to Sandy Mintz of Vaccination News.
"The new legislation, sponsored by Sen. Judd Gregg, comes on the heels of a just-published report in the Journal of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons. The research, conducted by Dr. Mark Geier and David Geier, analyzed mercury doses children received from thimerosal in childhood vaccines in comparison to Federal Safety Guidelines," Vaccination News reported last March.
"The doctors concluded that mercury from thimerosal did exceed federal safety guidelines and that the study provides 'strong epidemiological evidence' for a link between increasing mercury from thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism which has reached epidemic proportions."
...
Not that S.15 was Sen. Frist's first try. In 2002, "shortly after ... Frist introduced legislation limiting suits against vaccine makers, the drug industry's trade group gave $10,000 to the surgeon-turned-politician's political action committee," reported Jonathan Salant of The Associated Press. "Frist ... has raised more than $2 million from doctors, health insurers, drug companies and others in the health care industry. That's roughly 20 percent of all the contributions to his two Senate campaigns."
The $10,000 "contribution" came "the day after he submitted S.2053, that contained similar language to S.15 and that was quietly slipped into the Homeland Security Bill in the 11th hour," according to Vaccination News. "The corrupt rider was later repealed in response to media backlash and at the request of moderate Republicans."
To find out what happened to Sen. Frist's second attempt to slip his "Eli Lilly Protection Act" into another bill, I called Laura Bono, the Durham, N.C., housewife and mom who founded the Right to Fight Mercury Damage Campaign. ("I'm just a mother who saw a need," she explains.)
"The bottom line is he has backed off. ... There was a huge e-mail and fax campaign and we were able to get him to stop this," Ms. Bono told me.
Robert Byrd - The Emperor Has No Clothes - a speech Mr. Byrd gave in the Senate on October 17, opposing Bushnev's $87 billion request. [smith2004]
The Armed Citizen - The Kel Tec SUB2000 Folding Carbine page - lots of good information about my new toy.
