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Liz Michael for United States Senate

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The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives
by Tenney L. Davis

This is a book for all interested in explosive chemistry.Appriorpriate not only for the advanced explosive expert, but also written so that a beginner could understand. It provides the reader with a well rounded selection of reading on high explosives, including dynamite, RDX, TNT, low explosives and propellants, nitrosamines, primary explosives, the assembling of detonators, and pyrotechnics. Davis covers the manufacturing of explosives and pyrotechnic compositions through the centuries and gives the historiy of explosives.

Ragnar's Ten Best Traps and a Few Others That Are Damn Good Too
by Ragnar Benson

Catch even the craftiest critters with the trap lore perfected over generations. Ragnar has culled his all-time favorite traps that are easy to build, easy to maintain and guaranteed to work! Detailed illustrations show you how to build a floating duck snare, den trap, live-mouse set, campfire set and fish trap, to name just a few. And with Ragnar's expertise at hand, you can avoid the baits and sets that don't work and never have.

The fractured Europe post-World War II is perfectly captured in Carol Reed's masterpiece thriller, set in a Vienna still shell-shocked from battle. Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is an alcoholic pulp writer come to visit his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles). But when Cotton first arrives in Vienna, Lime's funeral is under way. From Lime's girlfriend and an occupying British officer, Martins learns of allegations of Lime's involvement in racketeering, which Martins vows to clear from his friend's reputation. As he is drawn deeper into postwar intrigue, Martins finds layer under layer of deception, which he desperately tries to sort out. Welles's long-delayed entrance in the film has become one of the hallmarks of modern cinematography, and it is just one of dozens of cockeyed camera angles that seem to mirror the off-kilter postwar society. Cotten and Welles give career-making performances, and the Anton Karas zither theme will haunt you. --Anne Hurley

I wanted to make the announcement today that I intend to run for the United States Senate from Arizona in the year 2004. But I didn't want to do it in a self-serving way, which said nothing more than "Look at me". Nor did I want to do it in such a way which would prove divisive, pitting one group of Americans against another.

Most of you who will be the audience of this article come from extremely diverse backgrounds and politics. We won't always agree with one another, and most of you won't always agree with me. Yet there is one thing that most of us are in definitive agreement with: there is something seriously wrong with the government of this voluntary union of republics called America. And America itself is under a serious malaise.

What is the nature of this malaise? Well, every average person, every politico, and every pundit will have their spin on it. They'll say it is everything for failure to worship God to failure to care for the poor, failure to dispense justice, to failure to provide for every person's need, to, whatever their own pet cause may be. In truth, the malaise is much deeper and much more sinister though, than any single issue, or any given politic. And I can better explain the malaise in terms of a question. And here it is.

Has America lost its divinely inspired right to exist?

                      America will have two choices, and only two

Many will point to any number of given points in history where we by rights lost the right to continue as a nation. We can look back to Andrew Jackson's Trail of Tears, on through to the 1861 war against the South, and further to the monstrosity called Reconstruction, and the continued annihilation of the Indians. Some will go to 1913 with the imposition of an income tax and the abolition of our gold standard. Some will point to the New Deal, others to the use of the country's resources to save "Uncle Joe Stalin", others to McCarthyism, still others to the War on Poverty. Some will point to the erosion of liberties under Clinton. Others will point to the erosion of liberties under Bush. Some may say, because of slavery, that we never had it to begin with.

I don't exactly know if we have totally lost the concept of the original America. An America bred of European roots, with a type of limited government inspired by the Iroquois nations. A nation which, by the way, despised the feudalism of its European roots and religious hierarchies, and sought as best it could to empower a free people. But this I do know. The time is coming soon when America will have two choices, and only two choices. Become the limited government classical liberal republic, guaranteeing the rights of a free people, that the founders intended it, albeit imperfectly, to be. Or cease to be as a nation, completely and utterly.

It was stated during the war against the South that the nation cannot survive half slave and half free. I've got news for you. America cannot survive with the slavery of any of its people. And it certainly cannot survive with the enslavement of all of its people.

                       America cannot survive as a police state

What is the enslavement of all of the American people? Let's start with the police state. We may not have the level of police state that Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany had. Not yet anyway. But we have truly outdone all those two bit dictators and fascists. We have federal agents who shoot Boy Scouts, burn churches, murder children and mothers carrying babies. We have federal tax nazis harassing us at every turn. We have people arrested for daring to have to go to the bathroom in the middle of an air flight. We have turned airplanes into prisons. We have turned schools into prisons, too.

We have terrorized families with the use of unelected bureaucrats who don't have the courage to attack real child abusers. So they attack homeschoolers and other innocents families on some excuse or another. Everywhere we turn we are besieged with this regulation, that tax, this intrusion into the way we want to live, that intrusion into our privacy. All in what I could call a "No American Left Alone" policy. And we have a thought police which have invaded our public schools to such a degree that is even more oppressive than the old Soviet system in its random terror, which it calls "zero tolerance".

I know that most political bodies of the United States are corrupt, seemingly so corrupt as to be irreparable. And I know that the government of the United States is doing a massive amount of lying to us. But this is not really the worst part. The worst part is that almost everything, from campaign finance reform, to health care, to environmental preservation, to education, is seemingly stacked in favor of the special interests, and against the individual's  liberties. For every 100 votes a governmental body in this country takes, it seems that 95 of them infringe upon our freedom somehow. Take an accounting. A GOOD accounting. Most of the laws passed today are specifically designed to deny us liberty.

                           Three solutions to the malaise

There are three solutions I see to this malaise: only three ways out of it. I'm not including "praying" because that is a given: we don't do that and we have no hope anyway. Those three are:

1. The electoral process
2. Secession
3. Violent revolution

John Fitzgerald Kennedy said that "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." And I find myself as a Patriot and as an American confronted with the stark reality that in order to preserve freedom, and in order to guarantee freedoms that we should have, but currently don't, that it may become necessary to take up arms against my own countrymen. Or that it may be necessary to separate ourselves from our countrymen, and form a new government, based upon a new constitution which gives a better guarantee to those liberties. And yet I find myself at this very sobering crossroad we have arrived at. We've been here before. Most of the time it has not been pretty, and did not end well.

I also know that I cannot refuse to stand up, in any of those three arenas. If a violent revolution is to be our destiny, I have a responsibility to be there, and lead it. If secession via some method and the establishment of a new republic, or perhaps establishment of an old one, is to be our destiny, then I must be there, and lead it. And likewise, if we are to have a chance at any salvation at all through elections, regardless of how meager that prospect now looks, again, I must stand up. I must stand up despite the hatred it will invoke, the ridicule it may draw, and the spectacle it may cause.

                               WE are the anointed

Often, many of us look to someone else to rescue us, and rescue that which we love. My friends, I have to frankly tell you. There will be no other rescuers. You ARE the anointed. If you understand what I am saying, and if you agree with it, then you should take it as a sign that Divine Providence, in whatever way you personally define it, has chosen YOU, in perhaps what could be called a Gideon Brigade, to lead.

And what will the end of your leadership be? A Jewish prophet once said that if your faith is great enough, you will be able to say to a mountain, oft used as a scriptural symbol of a government, "Go, and be cast into the sea", and it will happen, and nothing will be too great for you, if you have faith.

Notwithstanding, the selfsame prophet also told his followers that "they shall deliver you up to the councils and they shall kill you".

Forget about the cute labels such as "liberal" or "conservative". Because the looking glass we all are about to be thrust through isn't about left and right. It is about freedom vs. slavery. It is about liberty vs. tyranny. We will not survive as a people half slave, and half free, nor half free and half tyrant. And we will not survive as complete slaves and subjects. It isn't in our nature. We don't work well that way. We must establish a free republic. We can't back off, and run away like Jonah. Even if we run, we will inevitably be spit back into the situation again, whether we want it or not.

And we will find that we in advocating freedom, will have to revisit and reexamine every previous political assumption we have ever made to see if it is really and truly consistent with what a free people ought to be. And probably some of our religious assumptions, too. It will not be easy. But we as a people, meaning YOU, who are reading this now, and understanding, are understanding because Providence has anointed you.

Some of you have given up hope in saving our country through the electoral process. No, it doesn't look very promising to the casual observer. But even if you don't think you can "win the election", there is a much more important reason one needs to stand for election.

I believe it is necessary to warn the powers that be that we are here, and we are coming, and that they must repent of their tyranny or they will ultimately perish under it. That's strong language. But it needs to be said. And it is a characteristic of many cultures, and many faiths, that an enemy should be confronted to his face.

I also believe that unless we thoroughly and utterly exhaust the opportunity to change things at the ballot box, that we will not get sufficient support to reform America through either revolution or secession. Enough people have to believe the ballot box has been exhausted as a solution, before the revolution, or a secession, will work.

Oh, and by the way, I do think I can win the election.

Now, yes, I'm going to make all the stands on all the issues: heck, I have more positions on my Senate web page than I've seen on all the 2002 candidate web sites I've seen put together. But then I guess unlike most politicians I stand for something. Yes, I'm going to ask people for money. Yes, I'm going to buff up on my debate techniques that I've learned in my years in politics and journalism. Yes, if John McCain is the candidate against me, I am going to confront him with everything he's ever done. I'm going to do all of that.

But before I do that, I wanted to tell you, the people whom I trust the most, why.

And it may be bleak, but who knows. Many enough of us WILL stand up, and some of us will run for offices, and some of us may actually win, and enough of us will be able to make the impact that restores that republic which was fought for and sacrificed for in 1776, and several times since. Maybe one of us will make it to the top office someday, and strike out this entire tyranny via executive order.

My faith in seeing the tyranny cast into the sea is pretty great.

                             The worst that can happen

But losing the elections isn't the worst thing that can happen to us, even if we lose every single one. Neither is being killed or jailed over a war of revolution, or an attempt at secession.

The worst thing that can happen to us would be for us to bend over and take the tyranny.

Even if any of you are tempted through the seeming convenience of bending over and taking the tyranny, let me remind you of a people who for the most part did just that. The victims of The Holocaust. Can any of you honest tell me with a straight face that the Jewish people would have had any more of their people slaughtered had each and every one of them stood up and fought the Nazis to their face?

And if you bend over and take the tyranny, one of two things will happen to you. The governments of America will come for you anyway. Or the governments of foreign countries will come for you when America collapses because it simply is not designed to stand as a tyranny.

And what if you do manage to by capitulation to live under tyranny, against all odds? Consider a line from one of the greatest movies ever made, "Braveheart", with Mel Gibson as William Wallace is speaking to the assembled masses:

  "And, dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom!"

I have made my choice. They can kill me. They can jail me. They can entice me. But they shall never have my surrender. And I hope you who are reading this will come to a similar conclusion. Then you must, after coming to this conclusion, seek out others of like mind, regardless of their stated politics, and determine precisely what it is you must do to confront the tyranny. Because as Benjamin Franklin once said, "We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Liz Michael has abandoned her exploratory committee for the McCain seat, but is considering running in Arizona for the U.S. Senate of Jon Kyl in 2006 as a Democrat, as part of the Free Democratic Caucus, and she believes it is vital to the survival of the nation for Southern Democrats to reassert their influence in the party.