Let the impeachments begin. And yes, that was written plural intentionally. Congress should stop all other work and handle multiple impeachments simultaneously.

The Reno Justice Department, and everyone in it, should be forever banished from both government and the practice of law. They are not just dishonest, they are actually using the power of the Justice Department to obstruct justice -- in an ever expanding number of cases.

The Senate Finance Committee has enough information on Clinton and Gore to start impeachment hearings. The Thompson Committee on Government Affairs does, too. There is still that outstanding matter concerning the $1.7-million "Centralized White House Computer System." And there is the Cox Committee.

When is enough enough?

And, Henry Hyde and his House Judiciary Committee surely cannot be done yet. For them to quit amounts to total negligence and would be a blatant affront to the law they expect the American people to respect. We are about to hear a lot more on that in a few weeks, too. David Schippers, Rep. Hyde's hand picked chief investigative counsel, was a bit upset that the Committee refused to do its job properly and promises to shine a little light on the subject in a book to be released soon.

There are also a number of newly exposehttp://www.judicialwatch.orgd crimes that are worthy of impeachment hearings. At least two of these are known as a direct result of the good works of Judicial Watch and the legal tenacity of Larry Klayman.

Last week, Judicial Watch (http://www.judicialwatch.org) reported:

The finding of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that President Bill Clinton committed a crime in violating the privacy rights of Kathleen Willey, will go down as a first in American history. The landmark decision by the Court surpasses the decision by Judge Susan Webber Wright, who never found criminal wrongdoing by the president in Paula Jones' lawsuit. Chairman and General Counsel Larry Klayman says the criminal ruling bolsters Judicial Watch's $90 million class action lawsuit on Filegate by showing a pattern of similar misconduct. "It raises an evidentiary inference that Filegate really occurred," Klayman said.

Also last week, Rep. Dan Burton and his House Government Reform Committee got an earful when White House counsel Beth Nolan did everything but stand up and confess that there is an ongoing conspiracy among the upper echelon at the White House to withhold information subpoenaed by Congressional committees, the independent counsel and others.

Nolan, an attorney, said her predecessor did not recognize that a computer glitch failed to capture and record hundreds of thousands of e-mails. That's a bald- faced lie, of course. But, let's examine what she said anyway:

The White House probably has as many lawyers per square foot as anyplace else in the world. All these lawyers are there for one reason and one reason alone: they want enough power to be able to control the lives of the American people.

Anyway, there sits Nolan telling the House Government Reform committee that lawyers like White House Counsel Charles Ruff, and a dozen others, were so stupid they did not realize that hundreds of thousands of subpoenaed e-mails that were wanted by investigators probing the Lewinsky and campaign finance scandals were missing.

Sure.

So, who is totally stupid here, most of the White House staff because the story is true, or us for even considering it could be true? Because, either way, it's impeachment time again.

Making matters worse, Nolan told the committee that the White House just hired an independent contractor to go through backup tapes of the e-mails and restore them to a searchable format so they can respond to subpoena requests. She said that will take about 170 days to reconstruct e-mail back-up tapes and conduct a thorough search.

We have a better idea: Contact a high school computer club and offer them two thousand bucks to get it done and double if it's done next week. They will have the completely searchable database ready within days.

On top of all this comes the Justice Department's obstructers of justice. The Justice Department said it just learned of this and so launched a criminal probe into charges that the White House, once it recognized the problem, failed to hand over relevant e-mails to various scandal investigators and threatened computer workers to keep the conspiracy quiet. So, Justice wants everyone else to back off while they conduct their investigation.

What a farce! How many "open" White House investigations does Justice still have in progress? It's quite a few.

But, Larry Klayman, the "people's Independent Counsel" started the ball rolling without Justice. Last week, he informed the judge hearing many of these cases, Judge Royce Lamberth, that the White House has tampered with key evidence in the probe.

Based on the testimony of Beth Nolan, White House counsel, it has been revealed that contrary to your orders, the Clinton-Gore White House has been testing and/or altering evidence which you placed into the custody of Charles Easley. In fact, as a result of this, information from the now infamous "zip" disk was harmed.

The judge was already loosing his patience with all the foot dragging and lies by White House staff, so we look for some fireworks to be forthcoming.

Meanwhile, let the impeachments begin.

For more information, see three excellent pieces in Insight Magazine by Paul M. Rodriguez at:

http://www.campaignscoop.com/insight/item50.shtml,

http://www.insightmag.com/archive/200003334.shtml and

http://www.insightmag.com/cgi-bin/ViewNews.cfm?Item=49

Back in the 60s there was a case called Terry v. Ohio (392 U.S. 1 (1968)) in which the United States Supreme Court trashed our Fourth Amendment rights. Chief Justice Warren delivered the opinion of the Court starting out by saying:

This case presents serious questions concerning the role of the Fourth Amendment in the confrontation on the street between the citizen and the policeman investigating suspicious circumstances.

However, he then sacrificed the Constitution in favor of instant police searches; to wit:

We merely hold today that where a police officer observes unusual conduct which leads him reasonably to conclude in light of his experience that criminal activity may be afoot and that the persons with whom he is dealing may be armed and presently dangerous, where in the course of investigating this behavior he identifies himself as a policeman and makes reasonable inquiries, and where nothing in the initial stages of the encounter serves to dispel his reasonable fear for his own or others' safety, he is entitled for the protection of himself and others in the area to conduct a carefully limited search of the outer clothing of such persons in an attempt to discover weapons which might be used to assault him.

 

Needless to say, some police officers can usually find a reason to "pat down" nearly anyone. In some cities the "Terry Search" has become more or less some street officers' standard way of greeting the average citizen. It is also not uncommon for police to stop people just to pat them down and see what they can find. In some neighborhoods, that might not be a bad idea. Nevertheless, that does not make it any more Constitutionally correct.

So, even though most public officials are very poor at following Supreme Court rulings, that "Terry Search" thing immediately caught on like wildfire and the oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution, which includes the Fourth Amendment, was soon forgotten.

Anyway, in some places, officers will pat down anyone, for any reason, just because they feel like it. So, when Florida officers stopped to frisk a teenager, known as J. L., waiting at a bus stop and found the kid had a gun, they arrested him. Their reason for the stop was said to be an "anonymous" telephone call. Regardless, the court bought into the "reason" for the search and went on from there. Justice Ginsburg wrote for a unanimous Court, in part:

The anonymous call concerning J. L. provided no predictive information and therefore left the police without means to test the informant's knowledge or credibility. That the allegation about the gun turned out to be correct does not suggest that the officers, prior to the frisks, had a reasonable basis for suspecting J. L. of engaging in unlawful conduct: The reasonableness of official suspicion must be measured by what the officers knew before they conducted their search. All the police had to go on in this case was the bare report of an unknown, unaccountable informant who neither explained how he knew about the gun nor supplied any basis for believing he had inside information about J. L.

And there we go: "The reasonableness of official suspicion must be measured by what the officers knew before they conducted their search." An officer must have at least some suspicion that the person to be searched was probably involved in a crime of some sort. Simply standing at a bus stop just doesn't get it. That is not yet a crime.

The strict authoritarians from the State of Florida and the Justice Department, of course, said that the standard "Terry" rule should be modified to include a "firearm exception." The Court, however, would have no part of that:

Firearms are dangerous, and extraordinary dangers sometimes justify unusual precautions. Our decisions recognize the serious threat that armed criminals pose to public safety; Terry's rule, which permits protective police searches on the basis of reasonable suspicion rather than demanding that officers meet the higher standard of probable cause, responds to this very concern. But an automatic firearm exception to our established reliability analysis would rove too far. Such an exception would enable any person seeking to harass another to set in motion an intrusive, embarrassing police search of the targeted person simply by placing an anonymous call falsely reporting the target's unlawful carriage of a gun. Nor could one securely confine such an exception to allegations involving firearms. Several Courts of Appeals have held it per se foreseeable for people carrying significant amounts of illegal drugs to be carrying guns as well. . . . If police officers may properly conduct Terry frisks on the basis of bare-boned tips about guns, it would be reasonable to maintain under the above-cited decisions that the police should similarly have discretion to frisk based on bare-boned tips about narcotics.

 

Police do that already. But, that's another problem.

So, the bad news is that the "Terry" rule still stands. The good news is that even that atrocious rule has some limits.

Florida v. J. L may be found at: http://laws.findlaw.com/US/000/98-1993.html

Terry v. Ohio may be found at: http://laws.findlaw.com/US/392/1.html

As summer approaches, so do some of our flag flying holidays. To me, that is a time to make a statement all can see.

I will never, ever, fly the American Flag upside down unless I intentionally wish to call for immediate help. Anyway, if the truth be known, I do not even own a full sized, 50 star, American flag to fly. I have another American flag that better represents our Constitution and the original intent of the Founding Fathers. In these days of wayward big government oppression, my flag makes a statement.

As legend has it, a secret committee from the Continental Congress called upon a Philadelphia seamstress in late May or early June of 1776. Two of the men knew the woman from church and the general among them had used her services many times to adjust and repair his personal clothing.

Those representatives were George Washington, the head of the Continental Army; landowner Robert Morris, perhaps the wealthiest man in the Colonies back then; and Colonel George Ross, a respected citizen of Philadelphia and the uncle of the woman's recently deceased husband.

At that time, the various colonies and militias used many different flags. Some were (are) famous, such as the striped "Rattlesnake" and "Grand Union" flags or the "Liberty Tree" flag. Most were, however, confusing.

Anyway, as the story goes, the Congressional Committee wanted to commission the woman to make a flag. General Washington drew her a rough design of the flag they had in mind. And, Elizabeth Griscom Ross (1752-1836) was entrusted with making our first flag.

That July, the Declaration of Independence was read aloud for the first time at Independence Hall. On June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress, seeking to promote national pride and unity, adopted the national flag with a simple resolution:

Resolved: that the flag of the United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.

Actually, some accounts report that the Betsy Ross flag was not officially sanctioned until the early 1790s. Yet, those same accounts also discount what happened to the one mentioned in the resolution of 1777. And it is true that, for a time, there was a flag available with thirteen "staggered" stars. However, there are also written accounts that Betsy Ross made flags for about 50 years. So, for many reasons, our vote goes for the easily identifiable Betsy Ross version.

We should note, too, that the thirteen star flag is still a legal American Flag and must always be treated as such.

On special occasions, below the Betsy Ross version of the American flag, I chose to fly the 1775 version of the Culpeper flag. Mine is a full sized silk version, so I am very careful with it.

The Culpeper flag is easily identifiable because of the large coiled rattlesnake and the words "LIBERTY OR DEATH -- DON'T TREAD ON ME".

The original Culpeper flag is said to be the flag of Colonel Patrick Henry's First Virginia Regiment, about 1775. As another story goes, in the fall of 1775, a Colonel Stevens assembled three hundred minutemen in "unusual dress" at Culpeper Court House and marched for Williamsburg.

That must have been an eventful march, too. Because, it was said that their "unusual dress" frightened many people along the way. The words "Liberty or Death" were written in large white letters across the front of their shirts. There was also word that many of them had bucks' tails in their hats and tomahawks and knives in their belts for scalping.

Later, in one iteration or another, the Culpeper flag could be found used as the colors of various Revolutionary War fighting groups. And, although it is not a "legal" American flag, it most certainly deserves to be treated with respect.

So, there you have it. On National Holidays and special occasions, I will fly flags that are unique to the history of our country. These are the flags from a better time: A time when the word liberty had meaning. A time when honor and integrity in government meant something. A time when, if government did not behave properly, there were severe consequences. A time when men didn't quietly whine, they acted.

These flags are easily available -- even over the Internet. And, for good reason, they are again becoming popular.

The fight to protect the dwindling number of species on earth has completely overlooked the plight of mosquitos. Not only is there no organized group rallying to their defense, there is a concerted effort to completely eradicate them.

Over the years, mosquitos have been unfairly maligned as the cause of various diseases. They do not cause a disease. They merely become unfortunate carriers of infections, just as humans transmit the common cold and other ailments. Do we kill people who carry various viruses like tuberculosis, smallpox, aids, etc.? No, we develop vaccines to fight the disease itself. Yet, in the case of mosquitos, we kill the carrier.

In California, for instance, state government has created "Mosquito Abatement Districts" which actually tax the people to finance the killing of mosquitos. These districts employ a particularly gruesome strategy in killing unborn mosquitos by spraying their breeding grounds (wetlands) with killer chemicals. Where are the tax protesters on this issue?

But help is on the way. The courageous Clinton administration has been waging a battle against destruction of the breeding grounds, mainly through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Using his executive authority, the president has now enlisted the Defense Department in the fray. The army has established an Environmental Center at Maryland's Aberdeen Proving Ground and a deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security. The Army Corps of Engineers has had their authority greatly expanded to include protection of wetlands on private property as well as federal property.

Another hopeful sign is the multimillion dollar inventory of plant species in the U.S. conducted by the Department of Interior last year. Preliminary indications are that the number of known species has tripled, with many of them being of the endangered variety. This should lead to declaring millions of acres of public and private land off-limits to rapacious developers.

However, without the support of the public, all of these efforts may fail. The EPA must redouble its efforts in this area by providing more "seed money" to create more non-governmental organizations (NGO's) across the country to generate public support.

Mosquitos can be saved, but not without that groundswell of public support.

Jim Rarey, publisher of the "Medium Rare" newsletter, is a free lance writer based in Romulus, Michigan. If you would like to receive Medium Rare articles directly, please contact Jim at msutton828@provide.net.

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The President said he is reducing taxes.

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Congress says they are balancing the budget.

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