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| Dr. David Marlett, Editor | 31 August 2001 | Vol II, No. 70 | ||
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| Dr. David Marlett, Editor | 31 August 2001 | Vol II, No. 70 | ||
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"Million Mom March" mogul Barbara Graham was sentenced to 10 years to life for shooting and paralyzing a 23-year-old man she alleged was responsible for the death of her son. Turns out the victim was innocent. The court record contains several interesting nuggets: first, several handguns were found in her home; second, she was convicted of a premeditated plot to commit murder; third, Million Mom supporters defended her throughout the trial, despite the group's self-description as an "organization dedicated to preventing gun death and injury." So what's new about abject hypocrisy in Leftist feminist movements...?
[ The Federalist ]
** Rep. Ron Paul joins physicians in suit over privacy regulations
A Republican congressman has joined a respected physicians group in a lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Resources for issuing regulations plaintiffs say violate constitutional privacy protections.
"Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, has joined the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons as a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed today in Houston against HHS and Secretary Tommy Thompson to overturn new federal medical privacy regulations as unconstitutional," said Kathryn Serkes, a spokeswoman for the AAPS.
The libertarian-minded Paul - a surgeon by profession - has long opposed the HHS regulations because they allegedly open up a patient's medical records to unreasonable invasions of privacy by government and private entities.
"Far from protecting privacy, these rules give government officials and certain private interests a new federal right to access medical records without consent," Paul said in a statement released by the organization.
"AAPS deserves the gratitude of every American for fighting to stop these regulations, and I am pleased to support their efforts," he added.
In its suit, the organization claims the rules - written under the authority of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPPA - violate the First, Fourth and 10th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the Paperwork Reduction and Regulatory Flexibility Acts.
The agency's privacy regulations "expressly reiterate the traditional expectation of privacy by patients in their medical records," said the complaint. But they also "simultaneously allow government virtually unrestricted access to those same records without a warrant."
Furthermore, the suit claims that HHS failed to promulgate the final regulations within the time period specified under HIPAA.
The lawsuit seeks declaratory judgments that the regulations:
· Violate the Fourth Amendment by requiring physicians to allow government access to personal medical records without a warrant or patient consent, and authorizing the government construction of a centralized database of personal medical records with personal health identifiers;
· Violate the First Amendment to the extent they chill patient-physician communications "by requiring them to be subject to warrantless review by government";
· Violate the Tenth Amendment to the extent they govern purely intrastate activities by physicians in using and maintaining medical records for patients;
· Violate HIPAA and lack statutory authorization to the extent they regulate medical records other than electronic transmissions, were not promulgated within the time period expressly required by Congress, and increase administrative costs.
The suit also describes how the regulations violate a number of state laws and constitutional protections that "grant a specific right to privacy."
"Law enforcement agencies will have unrestricted access to all records - including notes about drug use, family interactions and other confessions. But it gets even worse," said the statement. "Not only can doctors be fined or imprisoned - up to $50,000 and one year - for withholding records, patients can be denied treatment if they refuse to sign the consent form."
"We've tried everything else. We've appealed to Congress; we've testified at HHS; we've generated tens of thousands of public comments and frozen up the HHS e-mail server with public response. None of it has done any good," said the group's executive director, Dr. Jane Orient, in explaining why AAPS resorted to a lawsuit.
"We had nothing left to do short of leaving our patients to the mercy of government spies or resorting to civil disobedience by refusing to violate our ethical code and our patients' privacy, or file a lawsuit. We choose to work through the courts," she added.
Joining in the suit are Dawn Richardson, Rebecca Rex and Darrell McCormick.
Richardson, a patient from Austin, Texas, is president of a group known as Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education, or PROVE, a non-profit association. Rex is a patient from Houston, Texas, and is vice president of PROVE. McCormick is a patient who resides in Gainesville, Fla., and a former billing manager for about 500 physicians at the Shands Healthcare System at the University of Florida, also in Gainesville.
Serkes said even Paul was showing signs of desperation.
"Sometimes, even a member of Congress has to sue the government to get anything done," she said.
She added that some analysts have said they believe the suit may succeed.
"They say the Tenth Amendment issue is probably the strongest," she told WND.
AAPS is a non-partisan association of physicians in all specialties. Established in 1943, the group says it exists "to protect the sanctity of the patient-physician relationship from third-party intrusion" and accepts no "government grants or contracts."
"Our organization doesn't extort our member physicians to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year in membership fees," Serkes said, "so we don't do lawsuits for the 'public relations' benefit of it. The leadership just didn't feel there was any other choice."
[ WND ]
Bangladesh's caretaker government tightened up controls on firearms on Wednesday in a bid to ensure an October 1 parliamentary election is free and peaceful.
The government canceled all gun licenses issued since January and ordered the owners to surrender their weapons to authorities immediately.
The move followed allegations made by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) that most of the licenses had been issued to activists from its main rival, the Awami League led by former prime minister Sheikh Hasina.
[ Reuters ]
TCN Comment: That is just how easy it is…. License all of the guns…. Cancel the licenses and collect the weapons. Use a good excuse like terrorism control or insuring a safe and fair election and no one will complain too loudly.
"The same fundamental problem that plagued (Elizabeth Dole's) presidential bid remains (for her expected U.S. Senate bid to replace retiring Sen. Jesse Helms): She has no ideas, no issues and no motivating principles except the eternal preservation of her political viability. Instead, she and Republican strategists in Washington are relying on her personality, chromosomes, celebrity status and ideological squishiness to vault her to victory.
"On guns she has echoed Mrs. Clinton's call for a ban on semi-automatic firearms, restrictions on ammunition and mandatory trigger locks. Mrs. Dole sides with Sarah Brady in opposing laws allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons. On abortion she is an artful dodger. . On affirmative action, she earned cheers from the left for championing 10 percent set-aside contracts for minorities during her tenure as Ronald Reagan's Transportation secretary.
"She forced car manufacturers to install brake lights in rear windows. She opposed Mr. Reagan by supporting the Carter-era airbag mandate. She championed a federal ban on drinking alcohol for adults up to 24 years old. And she supported one of the biggest wastes of taxpayer dollars, the federal Job Training Partnership Act.
"Some members of the Republican establishment argue that Mrs. Dole's star power and 'moderate' makeup make her a perfect candidate at a time when the party needs every Republican it can get in its uphill battle to recapture the Senate majority. But Mrs. Dole's beltway backers should be careful what they wish for, lest they end up with Jim Jeffords in a skirt. For conservatives it's another depressing rain cloud on the horizon. Say goodbye to Senator No - and hello to Senator Whatever."
[ Columnist Michelle Malkin ]
TCN Comment: Why is it more important to have a Republican majority than to have a conservative majority? If they wear the label "R" in front of the state they hail from, they are automatically the good guys. Nonsense!
Liddy Dole is a big government liberal. She is a Democrat ideologically regardless of the label she wears. She is anything but a replacement for Sen Helms.
WASHINGTON - The panel appointed by President Bill Clinton to study existing research and data on firearms met for the first time Thursday and was immediately shot at for allegedly being stacked with pro-gun control academics and funded by advocates for tighter gun control laws.
The panel, called the Committee to Improve Research Information and Data on Firearms, will operate under the supervision of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council, with a final paper due in May 2003.
But John Lott, a criminal researcher who is skeptical of gun control laws, says the panel is like "a parting present from President Clinton," that will be delivered just in time to boost pro-gun control candidates in the 2004 elections.
"It's not a balanced panel," Lott, a Yale University law professor, said Thursday after the committee held its inaugural meeting in Washington, D.C.
The panel has "selectively picked the questions which focus on all of the bad aspects of guns and not the benefits," said Lott. "And, they've been selective in who they have put on the panel and they are making sure the report comes out just before a major election."
According to its mission statement, the committee is supposed to study current firearms research and data, including methodologies and prevention, intervention and control strategies," illegal firearms markets and the "complex ways in which firearms may become embedded in the community."
The panel has 16 members, including former Carter administration Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, a gun control advocate.
"The nation can no longer afford to let the gun lobby's distortion of the Constitution cripple every reasonable attempt to implement an effective national policy towards guns and crime," Civiletti said in The Washington Post in 1992.
The panel also includes Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago professor who has written extensively on guns and crime and authored a controversial study that said the legalization of abortion in the United States in the early 1970s may explain in part the drop in crime in the last several years.
And the committee is funded in part by Joyce Foundation and the David & Lucille Packard Foundation, both generous supporters of anti-gun groups in the past.
But the committee also includes James Q. Wilson, who has supported gun ownership rights in his writings. Wilson, a professor of political science at Pepperdine University, said Thursday that he does not believe the committee's mission is to direct policy, rather to take a tough look at existing data in hopes of improving resources for policymakers, researchers and social scientists in the future.
He said this is the fourth time he has sat on a National Academy of Sciences panel and each time he has found it to be balanced and apolitical. "My hope and belief is this panel will do the same thing," he said. "I could be wrong, but I've been on this loop before and I expect it will be the same."
Carol Petrie of the National Research Council says those in charge of the selection process took recommendations from the varying Academy of Science departments and tried to avoid choosing persons with "extreme views" either way.
"It's not that the people may not have personal biases," she said, but they all have "credible, objective views of research." If the committee finds that it does not have a balance, she added, they are not averse to adding one or two new members.
"We wanted people who would be open-minded to the facts," she said. "It's a consensus process."
Lott did not make the cut. His research of 3,054 U.S. counties over a 17-year period resulted in a conclusion that tough gun control laws do not deter crime, but in those states and counties that have adapted concealed-carry laws allowing citizens to carry firearms in public, crime has dropped.
His work has been criticized by gun control groups before and today was no exception.
"Are all his findings believable?" challenged Douglas Weil of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. "Why do we need to know this stuff?"
Dave Kopel, research director for the Independence Institute and a vocal advocate for Second Amendment rights, charged that the real intent of the committee was to debunk research that supports the right to own guns, including Lott's work, which has added scholarly heft to the arguments made by gun rights groups in the last two years.
"I don't think they can say they have no predisposed outcome," Kopel said. "I think it's a group of people who are first class, respectable folks … but who are inclined to be on the control side."
[ Fox ]
"A three-judge panel of the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals overturned a deportation order for a Haitian nanny convicted of killing an 18-month-old infant, saying the fatal beating she admitted giving the child was not a crime of violence. . The previously undisclosed ruling, which remains under court seal, was handed down by Board of Immigration Appeals Judges Cecelia Espenoza, Gustavo Villageliu and Lory D. Rosenburg. All three were appointed by former Attorney General Janet Reno.
". After (44-year-old Melanie Jeanbeaucejour's) 1997 release from prison, the INS called for her deportation as an alien who had been convicted of a violent crime. . U.S. Immigration Judge Philip J. Montante Jr., who heard the INS case, ordered her deportation on August 18, 1999, ruling that the woman was an aggravated felon and not eligible under existing federal law to stay in the United States. Four months later, the Board of Immigration Appeals...ordered the case returned to Judge Montante, ruling that he had 'erroneously' decided that her manslaughter conviction was a crime of violence.
"...According to court records, Jeanbeaucejour admitted to Monroe County, NY, police investigators that she had hit the infant on the head and shook him until he stopped breathing. She told detectives, according to a statement she made after her arrest, that she picked up the baby after he had fallen and 'hit his rear end two or three times with my open hand.'
"'I did this to get him to stop crying,' she said, according to the statement. 'He continued crying so I hit him two or three times with my fist on the top of his head. I did this to stop him from crying. It did not work. Jeanbeaucejour told detectives, according to the statement, that she then picked up the infant and started shaking him. 'I do not know how long I shook [the baby], but I did not stop until he was unconscious.'
"The Monroe County Medical Examiner's Office, in an autopsy report, said the cause of death was blunt trauma to the baby's head, chest and abdomen. One official familiar with the case said he had 'never seen such a brutal beating involving a baby.'"
[ Washington Times ]
In a bizarre series of comments Wednesday, Stanislaus County District Attorney James Brazelton cited "the Clinton rule" to explain that embattled Rep. Gary Condit broke no laws when he tried to get a California flight attendant to sign a false affidavit denying their affair.
"There's an exception to all laws regarding perjury, false swearing, witness tampering and obstruction," Brazelton told CNN's "Burden of Proof" host Greta Van Susteren. "That exception, known as the Clinton rule, says that you cannot be prosecuted for any of these crimes if the subject matter being lied about is sex."
"There's no law against having sex with somebody," Brazelton added.
The California prosecutor was responding to a court filing by James Robinson, attorney for flight attendant Anne Marie Smith, who alleges that Condit repeatedly called her in May to coax her into signing a false affidavit denying their affair.
On Monday, Robinson, working with longtime California prosecutor Sterling Norris, now with Judicial Watch, presented evidence to Brazelton that Condit had engaged in witness tampering and obstruction of justice.
Yesterday, D.A. Brazelton, Robinson and Norris were guests on the CNN show, where they locked horns over whether Condit had broken any laws.
BRAZELTON: Well, I again reviewed the documents. And I, frankly, feel that there are no criminal charges alleged.
And let me, first of all, indicate to you that I am not interested in protecting Congressman Condit or anybody else involved in this. I'm interested in seeing to it that the truth comes out. The documents that were presented to me are requesting a grand jury indictment for obstruction of justice.
First of all, there's no California statute regarding obstruction of justice. That's a federal statute. I believe that the ...
VAN SUSTEREN: Well, let me ask Jim Robinson. Let me stop right there, and let's take it one by one.
Jim Robinson, the DA says no California statute obstruction of justice, no crime. What do you say?
ROBINSON: I toss that to Sterling. He's the California attorney. And that's why I went to him.
VAN SUSTEREN: No, he said - but this is a federal - and they're saying that this is a federal matter.
ROBINSON: We are saying that this is California statute; this is California law. There is California statute on suborning perjury. There is a California statute on obstructing justice.
VAN SUSTEREN: OK, Sterling, what do you say in response to Jim Brazelton?
NORRIS: Mr. Brazelton is absolutely wrong. Try 182.5 of the penal code.
VAN SUSTEREN: All right.
NORRIS: Conspiracy to obstruct justice. It's been there since 1872, a subordination of perjury, section 127 in the penal code. That's there. They're all ...
VAN SUSTEREN: OK. Jim Brazelton, you've heard Sterling. Sterling says there is a crime there. How do you respond to that?
BRAZELTON: The crime he is citing is conspiracy. And there are certain things you have to show to prove a conspiracy. One of them - the only overt act that is alleged that took place in this county is a person asking Anne Marie to make a telephone call.
There's certainly no law against that. There's no law against having sex with somebody. And about four years ago, what was known - or is known - as Clinton's rule was enacted. And it says that there's an exception to all laws regarding perjury, false swearing, witness tampering and obstruction. That exception, known as the Clinton rule, says that you cannot be prosecuted for any of these crimes if the subject matter being lied about is sex.
(End of Excerpt)
After the program, Robinson said he was outraged over Brazelton's attempts to use the Clinton "just about sex" rule to excuse possible Condit criminality.
"This is not about sex," he told the Modesto Bee. "This is about obstructing the investigation into the disappearance of Chandra Levy."
Robinson also complained that the Stanislaus County DA hadn't had enough time to conduct any type of meaningful investigation since the charges were filed on Monday.
[ NewsMax ]
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