Even while the United Nations was holding its so called "Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders" in New York City last week, they were unofficially condoning the persecution of Christians. The UN will not admit that, of course, but that is exactly how things worked out.

We can say that without grinning and adding "spin" to the subject, too. Because, exactly at the time the UN had communist approved Chinese religious officials standing in front of the Millennium World Peace Summit Religious meeting, saying there was no oppression in China, their commie partners in China were rounding up members of Protestant churches and taking them for what they call "re-education through labor."

They're catching these Protestants in groups of anywhere from 10 to 150 at a time. They caught a couple American citizens in one roundup, but word is that they let them go after a day or so. Most of the others will be given lengthy administrative sentences, which means detention and "re-education through labor." That is, they will be forced to work in a government labor camp.

The last time we wrote about that fiasco, a couple corporations who purchase a lot from communist China to resell to Americans took offense. We learned that some of these labor camps make products sold here -- goods that were given by American Christians to family members for Christmas. The corporate replies were that we went too far with that article. Not one corporation ever said it was not true, they only chastised us for bringing it up just before the Christmas shopping season.

Last week's report was about a mass arrest of Protestants in Henan province. So many were arrested, in fact, that even the central government became interested and sent people there to see what was going on. Meanwhile, Beijing's delegates to the UN religious summit in New York insisted that there is no religious repression in China.

The interesting point is, that story (and others) made quite a few major newspapers around the world. And, one would guess, at least a few of the people attending that UN meeting can read. Therefore, this goes to show that the UN is all show and no go. Or, they just don't care. Their song and dance about the civil rights of oppressed people must, then, be no more than cheap socialist propaganda.

After all, they had Beijing's religious delegates right there and nothing was said. And, it's not like this is something new in China. The Chinese communists have been persecuting Christians (and practitioners of most other faiths) for many years. Communists and socialists do not like religion. They treat it like everything else: That is, they only use it for the gain of the party.

Unfortunately, this may just be the beginning. The latest people arrested were part of a group called the China Evangelistic Fellowship. That fellowship has a membership of 500,000, which could staff quite a few labor camps. Ye Xiaowen, the communist director of China's Bureau of Religious Affairs, decreed that the China Evangelistic Fellowship is an "evil cult." Therefore, they are officially available for "re-education through labor" for any labor camp needing the workers. All bureaucrats need do is send the local police out to round some up.

The communist Chinese police really like arresting Christians for the labor camps, too. As is the case here, China has harsh forfeiture laws and police get to keep some of the arrestee's property and money when they send them off for "re-education through labor." However, unlike Waco, at least they don't shoot'em, gas'em and burn'em to death. The Chinese Christians get out of the prison camps eventually.

Anyway, with all the hoopla the third-world buffoons at the United Nations are spouting about protecting civil rights around the world, it seems like they could have at least publicly chastise these commie Chinese offenders while they had them there. But, they didn't.

So, we shall note this as yet another outward sign -- proof, as it were -- that we should never believe anything this group at the UN says.

These clowns want to run the world, but 90% of them cannot even run their own little dictatorships effectively. And, even when a massive, long running civil rights violation stares them in the face, they do nothing.

When you wish to rate the effectiveness of a politician, don't listen to what they say, watch what they do. Same for a political program. The test is the results, not what the program's proponents say the intended goals are. So, let's look at some of the major results of Al Gore and his eco-wacko team.

First, they say global warming can ruin the world as we know it. They blame that on man. Except, not once do they ever admit that we are still coming out of the last ice age. Then, they inform the public that something as common as CO2 is a cause of global warming. Even if that were true, no one says that if everyone plants just one oak tree in their life, that tree will use more CO2 than they will ever produce and give back oxygen.

But, that's just part of a rant, not a documentation of some of the poor results from the failed ecology programs of the far left. So, let's move on:

The Al Gore and Bill Clinton ecology program is responsible for killing all plant life in an area of the United States equal to four times the size of Delaware, a seventh the size of Michigan or Florida, or a sixth of the area New York or Virginia. And, not only did they kill off all the plant life, they barbecued hundreds of thousands of the wild critters living in that huge area, too.

That was just this year. Already this year.

The failed Clinton & Gore ecology plan is directly responsible for the burning of nearly 7,000 square miles of "public" and private land this year alone. At this writing, there are over 100 huge fires burning out of control that encompass nearly one and a half million acres. To fight these fires, they have but 19,000 firefighters -- one for each 74 acres of fire.

Obviously, there is a problem. Many of these fires will not go out until extinguished by the winter snows. Then, following this huge fiasco, the government will come along and say that quite a number of the critters they char-broiled will now need to be placed on the endangered species list.

The fires, of course, start on "public" land -- the steward of which is the various over-budgeted federal agencies. One reason the plant life on this land burns so well is because of very poor ecology programs. That is, those gardeners and foresters hired to care for the land do nothing to clear out the underbrush and dead wood. In fact, they actually start some fires every year and allow other forest fires to burn. That's how these eco-wacko's care for the "public" lands. By collecting their paycheck, but doing nothing.

In most areas of the country, private property owners care for their land. They remove excessive underbrush and old, dried timber. Often, people bush-hog once or twice a year as a way of making paths through the woods and cutting out some of the underbrush that will become a fire hazard when it dries.

But, the federal bureaucrats and their controlling eco-wacko groups decided to allow everything to grow wild -- what these people think is "wild," anyway. The government workers actually allowed flammable brush, dead wood and other fuel to accumulate waist-deep in some forests. That is not "wild," that is both stupid and criminally negligent.

What they are now learning is that their idea of "wild" is a bit different than nature's. So, nature is erasing their mess and starting over. Nature does that with fire.

Generally speaking, nature -- and good stewards of the land -- provides lush meadows of a couple hundred acres surrounding large woods. Meadows act as a natural fire-brake. But, the federal land management people and their eco-wacko friends preferred trees. Some places, they planted as many as 850 trees per acre, which is considerably more than nature will allow. So, more than half eventually became starved for sunlight and infested by insects. They died and became nothing more than standing kindling. And, of course, logging in these areas was not allowed, so all the kindling remained.

Last year, a General Accounting Office report titled, "Western National Forests: A Cohesive Strategy Is Needed to Address Catastrophic Wildfire Threats," reported that a large build-up of dead wood and undergrowth in many western forests created what it called a tinder box. The GAO suggested mechanical removal of this wood, which requires access to forest lands.

The response from Clinton & Gore was an order that the Forest Service halt road construction on approximately 50 million acres of national forests. So, no one has access to the dead and dying timber for removal. Therefore, we can expect many huge fires. This year alone, more than 55,000 wildfires have already burned more than 4 million acres.

On top of that, Congressional and Interior Department aides confirm that Clinton & Gore cut the Interior Department's request of $322 million for fire preparedness and prevention to $305 million for this year. They wanted the money for more land acquisitions.

This would amount to little more than another entry on the list of Clinton & Gore idiocies if it were not for the fact that people live in these burning areas. The fact that this negligence burned out whole farms and ranches, and that people are being killed fighting the fires, puts it in the criminal negligence column. However, Congress and the Justice Department have not cared about administrative law-breaking so far, so they will probably get a pass on this, too.

So let the lawsuits began. It's time the eco-whacko groups be sued into nonexistence and all these "public" lands be deeded to the respective States, where they rightfully belong. Constitutionally, the federal government has no right to own any land, except that needed for offices and military bases. Now we see why.

Check out the fires at <http://www.nifc.gov>, and see what some of the people of Montana think of the federal government's negligence at <http://www.oughtsix.com/announcements.htm>

The rabid-left Handgun Control group announced its "Fourth Annual Report Card" and again, there are no real surprises. Their intent was to disparage the State governments around the country that do not subvert the Second Amendment rights of the people. <http://www.handguncontrol.org>

In issue #192, we reported that new data from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that firearms deaths dropped 22% between 1994 and 1998, as more States began issuing concealed carry weapons permits. Clearly, when even a few good citizens are armed, the bad guys become more careful.

But, in fairness, that's only part of the story. What was barely touched on in that article was how this huge increase in violence and armed robbery all started. Historically, the appearance of gangs of feral punks harassing whole neighborhoods of good people is a fairly new phenomenon in the United States. And, interestingly enough, rather than being driven by some mysterious factor affecting all of the nation's inner-city neighborhoods simultaneously, it correlates quite well with the intentional acts of those in Washington.

Today, police and legislators like to say that most of the street violence is a product of the illegal drug trade. What they fail to admit is that the illegal drug trade is but an outward symptom of a much more serious problem. That problem started in the 1960s, after liberal President Lyndon B. Johnson noticed that much of the poor Black population was tending to vote Republican. Johnson needed a hook with which to snare that Black vote for the Democrats, so he bought their vote through the "Great Society" welfare programs.

Those on the political left will never intentionally admit these gross errors in judgment, of course. But, when we compile some of their own numbers, an interesting trend becomes evident.

For instance, for crime background, we point readers to the Fall 2000 edition of "Blueprint: Ideas for a New Century." Blueprint is a publication of the Democratic Leadership Council, a Congressional "Third Way" socialist group. <http://www.ndol.org> The article of interest is titled "Keeping Crime on the Run," by John J. DiIulio, Jr., a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. <http://www.ndol.org/blueprint/fall2000/diiulio.html >

From there, we went to the Bureau of Justice Statistics <http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/welcome.html> for some raw crime report data. Then, we visited the "pro- freedom" Independence Institute for welfare statistics. <http://www.i2i.org/SuptDocs/IssuPprs/IsWelfRef.htm>

Back in 1960, we didn't have much in the way of welfare, so illegitimate births were down around 5.2%. Violent crimes were down around 160 per 100,000 people and there were 9,110 homicides throughout the country.

By 1970, welfare was starting to catch on, and illegitimate births more than doubled. Violent crime rose to 363 per 100,000 people and the murder rate rose to 16,000.

By 1980, there were 21.1 million people on welfare, at an annual cost of $8.7-billion. By then, we were seeing 597 violent crimes per 100,000 people and the homicides were up to 23,040 that year.

By 1990, there were still over 20 million people on welfare, at an annual cost of $14-billion. That year, 28 percent of all births nationally were out-of- wedlock. The rate among whites had increased to an alarming 21 percent, but among blacks it had skyrocketed to an astonishing 65.2 percent. In ten of our major cities in 1991, over half of all births were illegitimate. Worse, in some urban neighborhoods, 80 percent of all births were illegitimate.

So, it's not really surprising that the 1990 crime statistics also skyrocketed. There were 732 violent crimes per 100,000 people nation-wide and 23,440 homicides that year. Much of this crime, of course, was concentrated in the inner-cities. The urban murder rate was so bad, in fact, that one out of every 350 young Black males in the country could be expected to die before reaching the age of 21.

Put another way, the murder rate for White males was 31.6 per 100,000 nation-wide. The murder rate for Black males was 288 per 100,000 nation-wide.

Generally speaking, through those welfare programs, the Democratic Party did great harm to the basic foundation of our American way of life: the family. By specifically targeting their welfare programs at minorities so as to lock in the Black vote for Democrats, they ruined most of the larger Black communities in the country.

So, when liberals look for the real cause for the huge increase of violence in the United States, all they need do is to look in the mirror. Violence was not common in the inner-city before Johnson started his "Great Society" programs. All those feral teenagers causing violence on the streets today are there simply because government adversely affected the family structure by paying unwed girls for making babies.

Incidentally, that is exactly what those young girls call it, too: "getting paid."

It's in the history books as 95-1478, "Printz, Sheriff/Coroner, Ravalli County, Montana v. United States." Or, just "Printz" for common usage.

The Printz Supreme Court opinion, and the earlier Lopez decision, have a lot in common. Both are about guns -- sort of. The Printz decision declared that Congress exceeded its authority by demanding that local police do background checks for handgun purchases and the Lopez decision said that Congress exceeded its authority when it tried to ban guns near schools.

But these opinions could just as easily have been about any object. The Brady law, which gave us the Printz decision, was a stupid law for Congress to pass. Stupid for many reasons, but only emotional around the country because it violated our gun rights.

The Printz Supreme Court opinion is surely about the stupidity of Congress, but is it about guns? No, not at all. It's about a Congress run amuck. It's about a Congress that no longer even pretends to obey the Constitution. It's about a President who acts more like a king. And, it's about a Supreme Court that thinks it's time to rein in the gross overreaching of the other two branches of government.

That's also what the Lopez decision, and others, were about. That's why there are a lot of really worried bureaucrats in Washington. Periodically, the courts do their job.

First comes a little history lesson from the Supreme Court on why the federal government may not command a State to enforce its laws. All regular readers of this newsletter are going to want to understand these words from the "Printz" opinion:

"Enactments of the early Congresses seem to contain no evidence of an assumption that the Federal Government may command the States' executive power in the absence of a particularized constitutional authorization. The early enactments establish, at most, that the Constitution was originally understood to permit imposition of an obligation on state judges to enforce federal prescriptions related to matters appropriate for the judicial power. The Government misplaces its reliance on portions of The Federalist [Papers] suggesting that federal responsibilities could be imposed on state officers. None of these statements necessarily implies -- what is the critical point here -- that Congress could impose these responsibilities without the States' consent. They appear to rest on the natural assumption that the States would consent. Finally, there is an absence of executive commandeering federal statutes in the country's later history, at least until very recent years. Even assuming that newer laws represent an assertion of the congressional power challenged here, they are of such recent vintage that they are not probative of a constitutional tradition.

"The Constitution's structure reveals a principle that controls these cases: the system of 'dual sovereignty.' Although the States surrendered many of their powers to the new Federal Government, they retained a residuary and inviolable sovereignty that is reflected throughout the Constitution's text. ...

"Finally, and most conclusively in these cases, the Court's jurisprudence makes clear that the Federal Government may not compel the States to enact or administer a federal regulatory program."

And there it is folks, the Prozac moment for bureaucrats. It was written in very clear and concise English, too. This comes right from the majority opinion of the Supreme Court in Printz: "The Federal Government may not compel the States to enact or administer a federal regulatory program."

So, that takes care of the federal government ordering a state to do something. But the federal government also coerces states into obedience through threat of withholding highway, education and other funds, grants and what have you. The Court knows that. So apparently the Justices figured that if they were going to have the Washington bureaucracy reaching for the Prozac anyway, they may as well lay it all out for them at once. The Court continues in Printz:

"The Government points to a number of federal statutes enacted within the past few decades that require the participation of state or local officials in implementing federal regulatory schemes. Some of these are connected to federal funding measures, and can perhaps be more accurately described as conditions upon the grant of federal funding than as mandates to the States; others, which require only the provision of information to the Federal Government, do not involve the precise issue before us here, which is the forced participation of the States' executive in the actual administration of a federal program. We of course do not address these or other currently operative enactments that are not before us; it will be time enough to do so if and when their validity is challenged in a proper case. For deciding the issue before us here, they are of little relevance. ...

"Even assuming they represent assertion of the very same congressional power challenged here, they are of such recent vintage that they are no more probative [proof -- ed.] than the statute before us of a constitutional tradition that lends meaning to the text. Their persuasive force is far outweighed by almost two centuries of apparent congressional avoidance of the practice."

Whew! "Even assuming they [programs the federal government coerces the states into following] represent assertion of the very same congressional power challenged here. . ." Yeah, we see that it's the same. The federal government demands compliance to thousands of rules relating to subjects on which it has no right to even speak. It's all a grossly un-Constitutional overreach of power. And, it looks as though the Court sees it that way too.

In other words, the Court will be looking for a case to use to limit many of the rules, regulations and programs the federal government now imposes on the states and the people.

Now the Printz Court goes back to teaching a little history that should be of great interest to most of us.

"Finally, and most conclusively in the present litigation, we turn to the prior jurisprudence of this Court. Federal commandeering of state governments is such a novel phenomenon that this Court's first experience with it did not occur until the 1970's, when the Environmental Protection Agency promulgated regulations requiring States to prescribe auto emissions testing, monitoring and retrofit programs, and to designate preferential bus and carpool lanes. The Courts of Appeals for the Fourth and Ninth Circuits invalidated the regulations on statutory grounds in order to avoid what they perceived to be grave constitutional issues, and the District of Columbia Circuit invalidated the regulations on both constitutional and statutory grounds, see District of Columbia v. Train. After we granted certiorari to review the statutory and constitutional validity of the regulations, the Government declined even to defend them, and instead rescinded some and conceded the invalidity of those that remained, leading us to vacate the opinions below and remand for consideration of mootness. EPA v. Brown, 431 U.S. 99 (1977).

"Although we had no occasion to pass upon the subject in Brown, later opinions of ours have made clear that the Federal Government may not compel the States to implement, by legislation or executive action, federal regulatory programs."

There we go again! "The Federal Government may not compel the States to implement, by legislation or executive action, federal regulatory programs." There's the law of the land, folks. Now, how do we get the executive and legislative branches to comply?

But there is more. And the following text is just as important as the text above.

"When we were at last confronted squarely with a federal statute that unambiguously required the States to enact or administer a federal regulatory program, our decision should have come as no surprise. At issue (in New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992)), were the so called "take title" provisions of the Low Level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1985, which required States either to enact legislation providing for the disposal of radioactive waste generated within their borders, or to take title to, and possession of the waste -- effectively requiring the States either to legislate pursuant to Congress's directions, or to implement an administrative solution. We concluded that Congress could constitutionally require the States to do neither. 'The Federal Government,' we held, 'may not compel the States to enact or administer a federal regulatory program.'"

And so we see it again: "The Federal Government may not compel the States to enact or administer a federal regulatory program." This raised the heartburn level to new heights in the federal regulatory agencies. It sounds as though thousands of federal bureaucrats may have but one Supreme Court decision separating them from the unemployment line.

There was an interesting point in the N.Y. v. U.S. opinion not cited in Printz. In New York, Justice O'Connor more or less made a new rule on the relationship between States and the federal government in that opinion. Therein, she writes: "When Congress exceeds its authority relative to the States, departure from the constitutional plan cannot be ratified by 'consent' of State officials." Yeah. Because the States are the Principals in the Constitutional arrangement. The Federal Government is an Agent of the States.

(Hello EPA, BLM and Army Corps of Engineers! Study this and weep. This is the Law of the Land. And get ready for Independence Day 2001, eco-wackos, because two more good cases are percolating to the top.)

Actually, there is already enough Supreme Court case law to authorize scrapping almost the whole of the federal regulatory bureaucracy. That is, there would be if the other two branches of government honored Supreme Court opinions. But to do so would mean that the executive branch must relinquish many of its un-Constitutional powers. It would also mean that Congress would again be responsible for writing all laws -- and keeping them within the bounds set down by the Constitution. Neither the White House nor Capitol Hill want any part of that. So, the Court's opinions are ignored as much as possible.

Getting another applicable case to the Supreme Court can sometimes be a crap-shoot. They do not accept many cases each year. Yet, our reading of the above opinion leads us to believe that the Court is actually yearning for the proper regulatory case to come along.

It should also be noted that there is a shortcut available to the Supreme Court. That is, a State's attorney general may, at times, bring some of these cases directly to the Supreme Court under the "original jurisdiction" rule, bypassing all other courts.

So you see, the Printz and Lopez opinions were not really about guns at all. They were about freedom. Or rather, our lack of it. In this case, the concept was called "Federalism."

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Congress says they are balancing the budget.

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