11
March
2007
Good article from a medical professional on the need for tort reform and the impact lawsuits have of the profession. There have to be better ways to have doctors “behave” than threatening them with financial ruin. The same goes for all professionals, especially those in charge of systems that can have life threatening side effects.
As far as unexpected side effects go
it is very clear that a medical center desperate for another orthopedic surgeon accepted a doctor with a demonstrably troubled background
That’s what happens. Go after the good guys, get more bad guys instead. The medical field is a business that needs to keep operating. If you race to the bottom - by kicking all the good guys out - you’ll end up in trouble. We’re still racing down. People are leaving the islands because they see it happening. What’s driving all this. There was an article in the paper today on private funds waiting to jump in and support a new Kona Hospital. And still it is not happening.
(Original found here.)
Public support needed for tort reform
John Bellatti, MD
Friday, March 9, 2007 9:06 AM HST
On March 1 at the Judiciary Committee hearing I, along with many other physicians and medical students and the state insurance commissioner, gave testimony urging passage of HB220 to allow consideration by the full House of Representatives. This bill would have placed a cap of $500,000 on “non economic damages” awarded to a plaintiff in a medical malpractice suit. It in no way limited the right or the ability of a person to sue a doctor.
This bill has been called a “tort reform” bill. Other states have experienced good results in regards to medical care availability as a result of tort reform. Following tort reform in 2003, the people of Texas have available to them 153 MORE orthopedic surgeons, 152 MORE ob/gyn, 33 MORE neurosurgeons. For an explicit description of the recent Texas experience, try Google “Texas liability miracle” and click the top link.
HB220 was initially sponsored by Kona Rep. Josh Green, who chairs the Health Committee, and it passed in that committee. It also passed Consumer Protection Committee (Robert Herkes, chairman) just a week before (13 yes, 0 no, 2 absent).
The newspaper accounts of the March 1 hearing stated that “Emotions carried the day.” The opposite was true. The results of the hearing were obviously predetermined. There was nothing emotional about this, just a cruel, hard dollar- value decision. The Democratic majority leader, Kirk Caldwell, was present watching over his brood to make sure they did nothing to upset the plaintiff’s attorneys. The Judiciary chairman, Tommy Waters, did his biding.
Rep. Cindy Evans who had earlier proposed a bill with identical language, and who had on Feb. 14 voted FOR the same HB220 in the Consumer Protection Hearing suddenly voted against the bill. Hilo’s Rep. Clift Tsuji changed his vote the same way. Apparently the doctor shortage for their constituents on the Big Island was trumped by some other considerations. The votes were: PASS Reps. Green, McKelvey, Souki, Marumoto, Pine. HOLD (Kill) Reps. Waters, Oshiro, Caldwell, Evans, Ito, Luke, Sonson, Tsuji, Yamane and Yamashita. Not present were Reps. Morita and Theilen. This prevented the bill from being debated by all the representatives in full view. The gallery of the Capitol holds a lot more citizens than the hearing rooms. Apparently the Democratic leaders do not want the Democrats’ electorate to understand the issues.
Many of us the hearing re were a captive audience while the malpractice attorneys, absent real arguments, provided emotional cover for their position. A staged reappearance of their clients occurred. Each of these represented real tragedies which occurred during the treatment of patients in Hawaii. For most of the cases no one would argue against compensating the patient, or survivors. Yet residual unhappiness and resentment in these clients was evident in spite of the multimillion dollar awards and the multi-million dollar fees to their attorneys. Compassion for these patients and their loved ones was sincerely felt by all of us — especially the doctors and medical students present. We have dedicated our lives, through education, training, and continuing practice to assisting in the midst of all sorts of tragedies.
What was most amazing to me was that, despite the presence of so many attorneys on the Judiciary Committee itself, there was no interest in showing any relevance of these cases to the matter at hand — HB220. No evidence whatsoever was brought to show that the existence of HB220 by itself would have prevented these lawsuits or have significantly limited the awards to the injured persons.
What also was lacking was a recognition that two or more of the cases could just as easily have been taken as justifications for the bill. In one case, the monetary award was $12 million for future medical and other care. Then there was an additional award for $4 million for loss of income and pain and suffering. This part of the award never made it to the plaintiff.
The attorney took $4 million in attorneys fees; no pain and suffering for him. The attorneys hinted that they would not be willing to represent these deserving clients if the awards were reduced. Unless the attorneys are threatening to strike, there are plenty others in the phone book who would. In a second case, it is very clear that a medical center desperate for another orthopedic surgeon accepted a doctor with a demonstrably troubled background.
This is exactly the situation that we (physicians, HMA and many concerned citizens) are seeking to avoid. HB220 is one important step in bringing more and better quality medical care to Hawaii. We all want less errors and less real malpractice. This will only come with a revitalized and expanding medical community. The current crisis trend will bring a different solution — no doctors — no malpractice.
The people of Hawaii are losing again. Last year a tort reform bill got no hearing at all in the House Judiciary Committee. This year Rep. Caldwell had to use his “leadership” to corral the bill. But the doctor shortage crisis is real and worsening by the week. Yesterday two more fine long-time Kona general practitioners announced they are leaving — 6,000 patients to find new doctors.
One physician is going to Texas (see above), the other to the Canadian Air Force. There is one last chance this session. SB813 is soon to be heard in the House committees for Health and then Consumer Protection. Passage there will lead back to another Judiciary consideration. Citizens could save this bill from being killed also. Submit testimony and SHOW UP. E-mail your representatives and senators.
Follow the newspaper and the Internet for announcements. Bring a water bottle for any hearings. They may last long to allow the attorneys their full show-time. Get up and speak your 3 to 5 minutes on how the doctor shortage affects you and will affect you. Mention how much you think an attorney should be able to take from his client’s pain and suffering. A recent article mentioned that there were many causes of the doctor exodus, not just liability issues.
Well, yes, there are. But does that mean that any multi-factorial problem is immediately insoluble in Hawaii? If an attorney drives over a box of nails and has three flat tires, must he junk the car because he can’t figure out which tire is to blame most for the rough ride? The health of our communities is too important to allow the status quo to continue. But no change will occur if the people affected in Hawaii do not voice their concerns, and where appropriate, their outrage (visit Evans and Tsuji).
It appears most legislators are hoping you’re not noticing. Please, remind them that you are.
John Bellatti is an orthopedic surgeon practing in Kona.
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local, health 
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11
March
2007
One warning shot to government to do something or face more business-as-usual. There are some common sense messages in here of things we all already know. The counter-argument is still “well, you’ll just want to pull them out but you don’t really offer a solution.” At this point it may be senseless for us to come up with that solution. Cut your losses and leave with your tail between your legs.
Now the impacts of that decision will be enormous - mentally, economically, politically. It’s definitely counter-message. But for years and years we’ve gotten emails of how “the tide is turning,” “shut up and see how many good things we’ve accomplished.” And yet, the tunnel gets deeper and deeper and deeper
(Original found here.)
DEMOCRATS: YOU WERE ELECTED TO END THIS WAR
Richard Reeves
03/09/2007
WASHINGTON — There were folks who joked or argued before last year’s congressional election that winning would be the worst thing that could happen to Democrats. Joking or not, they seem to have been right.
The Democrats have to bite the bullet on Iraq, American bullets. They can hold all the hearings and propose multiple all-things-to-all-Democrats resolutions they want — like the one House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “unveiled” on Thursday — but if they keep that up, they will own a half-share of Bush’s war by the 2008 elections.
Democrats were elected to end the war, not to debate it. The American people, enough of them, are past debate. The war was a mistake. The government lied. The war is lost. It does not matter when we leave; the same horrific things will happen in Iraq no matter when we leave. The only difference to us now is how many more Americans (and Iraqis) will be killed or maimed or ruined — for no good reason.
Quoting an editorial on cutting off funding for the war, written more than 500 miles from this hermetic capital, in the Buffalo (N.Y.) News:
“The argument made by Bush partisans that limiting the war equates to a lack of support for our troops is similar to the argument made by the drunken brother-in-law that cutting off his liquor supply means you don’t love him. The difference being, of course, that while the nation’s leaders are the ones with the denial problem, it is the soldiers and their families who suffer …”
Americans know all this already. Even the press, which failed miserably before the war and during most of it, has finally figured out how to get the real story out: Think small! Both television and newspapers around the country are covering the small, tragic stories of individual American (and Iraqi) families being destroyed in the name of … what? Those “little” stories, which include the reporting on the scandals of military medical care, are having more impact now than anything said in Congress or at the White House.
But in Washington, they still think they can talk their way out of the chaos we have wrought. This paragraph is from The New York Times last Thursday, covering still another hearing: “‘You have to protect the (Iraqi) people long enough to get economic assistance to them and change their attitude and change their behavior,’ said Jack Keane, the retired vice chief of staff of the Army, who has argued that the troop buildup should last 12 to 18 months. ‘You cannot do that in weeks. It takes months to do that. The problem with the short-term surge is that the enemy can wait you out.’”
Wait us out? Of course they will wait us out. They live there. We don’t. They have been there for thousands of years. They will be there for thousands more. We are leaving; it is only a matter of when.
After all their hearings and conferences, the Democrats, at least in the House, came out with their plan to leave in the fall of 2008. The plan includes giving the president “waivers,” which means there is no deadline and there is no plan. The best analysis of what the Democrats are doing now came from a Republican, House Republican Conference Chairman Adam Putnam: “The Democrats are making it complicated to pacify the third of their caucus who want to immediately cut off funds to the troops, the third of their caucus who would like to cut off funds for the troops but don’t want credit for it, and the third of their caucus that ran as Republicans and are running away from the other two-thirds of their colleagues.”
That’s exactly right, and those complications could destroy the victors of 2006 when they go back to the voters in 2008. One Democrat, an unelected one, Terry Michael, former press secretary of the Democratic National Committee, gave his party some uncomplicated advice in a sort of open letter to Sen. Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, published in The Washington Times: “You rise on the Senate floor. You say you were out of your mind to write a blank check for this hideous abuse of American military power. And then you propose an immediate withdrawal, just slow enough to maximize the safety of the 135,000 young men and women you helped put in harm’s way by your collusion with this elective war.”
wombat politics No Comments »
11
March
2007
Two global trade articles back to back. The first talks about an ongoing NAFTA problem where Mexican trucks aren’t allowed freely to drive across US Highways. Just imagine that in Europe - there are trucks from all kinds of countries crossing back and forth. But in the US we have to block that through a variety of maneuvers thereby adding to the cost of products, which is what NAFTA was supposed to help to improve. So you end up with a situation of “no jobs for US workers ” and “still expensive products.” Great.
So now the President is in Brazil talking to President Lula da Silva about Ethanol production. There were some issues about CAFTA and even more concern about Mercosur and rival trade agreements being set up in South America. But isn’t da Silva one of the biggest supporters of the block of non-aligned nations fighting the west?
What’s going on here. Apparently we have to protect the American corn growers, but want to encourage Brazilian sugar growers to convert sugar into Ethanol. It is not clear why, because it doesn’t seem for our market. In fact, we make it hard for them to come in. Hey, Hawaii used to grow loads of sugar, why not talk to them about ethanol? Would Brazil be chopping down the Amazon rain forest for sugar can production? Are we just showing face to counter Hugo Chavez’s success? Is our generous “benevolence” going to help at all, or just make us look even worse …
This sounds weird … perhaps another trade success will come out of this.
(Originals found here and here.)
NAFTA
Let the Trucks Roll
Is Congress going to apply the brakes to the benefits of U.S.-Mexico trade?
Thursday, March 8, 2007; Page A22
ANOTHER ANTI-NAFTA pile-on is brewing in Washington this week. Even though the United States has gained jobs, wealth and goodwill from the regional trade pact, for years opponents of free trade have tried to persuade American leaders to ditch one of the agreement’s most benign provisions — allowing Mexican freight trucks onto American roads. When the United States signed the treaty in 1993, it promised to allow such trucks in, scheduling implementation for 2000. But lobbying from the Teamsters and others with economic turf to protect have held that up — until now.
Finally, after years of lawsuits, congressional meddling and cross-border negotiation, the Transportation Department and its Mexican counterpart have announced that they will pursue a “demonstration project” allowing trucks from 100 screened Mexican carriers to use American roadways freely. Under the program, U.S. inspectors working in Mexico will thoroughly vet the carriers, including every truck and every driver they send over the border, checking for such things as safety features, U.S.-licensed insurance coverage and knowledge of U.S. traffic signs. After the year-long demonstration phase, the Mexican undersecretary for transportation says, the two governments plan to allow all carriers from both countries access to each other’s highways, and U.S. officials say that the inspection regime will be comparably extensive then.
Such requirements are far more burdensome than what NAFTA and common sense require. Under the treaty, Mexican trucks operating in the United States are subject to American trucking regulations, the enforcement of which should be enough to ensure safety on American roads. The Transportation Department points out that since it increased enforcement in the border zone — a pocket of American territory into which Mexican trucks are currently allowed to travel — Mexican trucks have become just as reliable as American ones, as measured by how many trucks are regularly out of service.
But in 2001, Congress imposed discriminatory requirements for Mexican trucks that went beyond simply enforcing existing trucking regulations. That move was a compromise between the White House, which wanted less regulation, and the House, which wanted to effectively ban Mexican trucks. It is unlikely that Congress would reverse itself now. On the contrary, the Teamsters and other groups are already arguing against even the overly cautious demonstration project, asserting that it is not stringent enough.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on transportation,, will hold hearings today on the issue. We hope that she and her colleagues fully support the demonstration project and its ultimate goal of making cross-border trade more efficient for all Mexican and U.S. carriers. Currently, long-haul trucks in Mexico stop at the border and transfer their goods to short-haul vehicles that cross into the United States and transfer their cargo to American trucks. The process is unnecessarily wasteful and environmentally harmful, and it makes a variety of goods that Americans buy more expensive. After 14 years, it’s time to let Mexican trucks in.
Brazil and Ethanol
Bush’s unpromising Brazil visit
Thanks to an unwise policy on ethanol, the president isn’t likely to get very far on his trip to Latin America.
March 8, 2007
READY FOR YOUR pop quiz about the Americas? Try this: In the run-up to today’s meeting between the leaders of the Western Hemisphere’s two most populous countries, one president spoke movingly of the need to boost Latin America’s struggling trabajadores y campesinos (workers and peasants) while lamenting that U.S. policies have failed to reduce the region’s poverty. The other grumbled about unfair agricultural protectionism. Which is the free-trade conservative president of the United States and which the left-wing populist leader of Brazil?
If you matched Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva with the anti-poverty crusading and George W. Bush with the trade-policy gripe, you lose. This seeming role reversal says a lot about the political pressures on both men, and it suggests why the fence-mending presidential summit is unlikely to accomplish either leader’s primary goals.
Bush is deeply unpopular in most of Latin America — a region he has largely ignored — in part because many feel the U.S. focus on free-trade pacts and drug interdiction may have exacerbated poverty instead of relieving it. Into that breach has stepped autocratic President Hugo Chavez of oil-rich Venezuela, who has backed successful leftist leaders in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. During his trip to Latin America, Bush will try to counter Chavez’s influence by appealing directly to the region’s impoverished underclass and signing energy deals — such as a partnership with Brazil and other ethanol producers — that are designed to wean countries from Venezuela’s cheap oil.
Lula has other priorities. Fearful of seeming too close to Bush, he is under heavy pressure from Brazilian farmers to protest U.S. agricultural supports — especially the 54-cents-a-gallon tariff on Brazilian ethanol. But U.S. officials have flatly stated that they have no intention of seeking a reduction in the ethanol tariff. What Bush has offered instead is a variety of small anti-poverty programs that are dwarfed by Chavez’s initiatives in the region. The “OPEC for ethanol” that the president is expected to create today with Lula won’t actually open the U.S. market to Brazilian ethanol, and as a result it will accomplish little.
Brazil’s sugar-based ethanol is more energy efficient and far cheaper to produce than U.S. corn-based ethanol, yet we impose a steep tariff on the Brazilian product to protect domestic corn growers and ethanol producers. The damage wrought by this policy is enormous. It raises consumer prices for all corn products, sabotages long-overdue attempts to move away from dirty fossil fuels and poisons the U.S. relationship with Latin America.
Bush has never shown the political courage to take on the farm lobby, even though U.S. agricultural subsidies and tariffs undermine his free-trade rhetoric. He’s not going to win many friends in Brazil unless that changes.
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11
March
2007
Recently heard the news that Guantanamo is finally set up to accept prosecution of terrorism suspects. Their first case, David Hicks, an Australian. Don’t know exactly what happened, but Dick Cheney was in Australia recently and pestered about Mr. Hicks. So now we have a citizen of our ally having spent 5 years in prison without charges, and we’re trying to keep his lawyer quiet.
… notes that it is a crime under military law for an officer to use “contemptuous words” about high public officials.
It seems that Marine Major Michael Mori is an Australian, but since he is a military guy and this is a military case that military law applies. Military law is apparently very different, because free speech does seem to have higher limits. I wonder if he could defend the person if he wasn’t military.
Now I’m assuming there are many kinds of different laws in this country, or actually even cross-country (like religious laws) and the main problem will be what set of rules you play under. The administration has made it clear that you play under our rules, which means “civilian laws do not apply,” and “we determine what laws we’ll accept.”
So David Hicks (see wikipedia here), is, like John Walker Lindh (see wikipedia here), a white muslim convert who felt strong enough to support a cause he believed in. They both got busted. We haven’t heard from Lindh in a while, but probably because he’s already in jail near Los Angeles.
Nice to see that the administration needs to make its case through intimidation.
(Original found here.)
Guantanamo Intimidation
Lawyers for Terrorism Suspects are Still Being Bullied.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007; A18
CULLY STIMSON may be gone from the Pentagon, but his spirit unfortunately lives on. Mr. Stimson, you may recall, was the Pentagon official in charge of Guantanamo Bay prisoners who had to leave his post after suggesting that private law firms shouldn’t be representing detainees. Now the Pentagon’s chief Guantanamo prosecutor, Air Force Col. Morris Davis, has gotten into the attack-the-defense-lawyers act, this time complaining about the conduct of a military lawyer assigned to defend Australian David Hicks, who has been accused of terrorism. Mr. Hicks, who has spent five years at Guantanamo after allegedly being caught fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan, was charged last week with providing material support for terrorism and is to face trial before a military commission.
Mr. Hicks’s outspoken military lawyer, Marine Maj. Michael Mori, has spent a good deal of time in Australia helping stir up public support for his client, and he has been unsparing in his criticism of the military tribunals, going so far as to call them kangaroo courts. His needling clearly is getting under the prosecution’s skin. “Certainly in the U.S. it would not be tolerated having a U.S. Marine in uniform actively inserting himself into the political process. It is very disappointing to see that happening in Australia, and if that was any of my prosecutors, they would be held accountable,” Col. Davis was quoted as telling The Australian newspaper. Col. Davis, though he later said he wasn’t suggesting a court-martial, noted that it is a crime under military law for an officer to use “contemptuous words” about high public officials.
Col. Davis’s unsubtle effort to quiet Maj. Mori may be even more disturbing than Mr. Stimson’s remarks: It’s not likely that private law firms are going to be intimidated out of representing their clients, but military lawyers who have to fear for their careers might think twice before zealously representing their clients. “Recent statements attributed to both the defense and prosecution in the David Hicks case do not reflect the views of the Department of Defense,” Pentagon press officer Cynthia O. Smith told us when we called for comment. Okay, but it’s the prosecution that really needs reining in.
wombat politics, legal No Comments »
10
March
2007
Another article suggesting that the case for war may often be overstated - this time on nuclear weapons development in North Korea. I heard something on the radio where a “senior government official” (or some other lofty title like that) said that it is difficult to know whether the North Koreans really have a large nuclear weapons production facility.
Well … so we’ll go blow them up before we find out. Better safe than sorry, right? Wasn’t that what happened in Iraq?
By the way, somewhat unrelated, but I’m hearing the term Srebenica thrown out, in terms of Genocide, in terms of stopping terrorists, in terms of having to stay in Iraq. Supposedly Srebenica was a giant massacre of 200,000 people, which is “like Holocaust” levels, a government controlled program to eradicate a population. I just came across an article talking about the Milosevic case and what he was accused of, and how nobody these days can actually vouch that more than 8500 people were actually killed. Still that’s a big number, but very, very different from a “genocide of 200,000 people.”
Yet you have to make your case somehow. You can’t just go invade North Korea for no reason - those people are starving. But hey, if they’re the biggest nuclear weapons producer, and if those weapons can already reach Guam and Hawaii, well then of course it’s totally justifiable.
(Original found here.)
Another Intelligence Twist
The CIA may have overstated North Korea’s uranium program. But Pyongyang still must answer for it.
Friday, March 2, 2007; A12
ONCE AGAIN the Bush administration is being accused of exaggerating intelligence to justify an aggressive policy toward a rogue regime, with disastrous results. In October 2002 the State Department announced that North Korea had acknowledged secretly developing a uranium enrichment program. The next month the CIA reported to Congress that it had “recently learned that the North is constructing a plant that could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for two or more nuclear weapons per year when fully operational — which could be as soon as mid-decade.” On this basis the administration suspended a deal under which North Korea received fuel oil in exchange for freezing a separate program to produce plutonium. Pyongyang responded by restarting that program and producing enough plutonium for a number of nuclear weapons, one of which it tested last October.
Now administration officials are conceding that outside experts may be right when they say that the North probably never constructed a large uranium-enrichment plant. According to the New York Times, a new intelligence update concludes “with moderate confidence” that the uranium program continues, but it says it’s not known how much progress has been made. Christopher R. Hill, the principal U.S. negotiator with North Korea, told Congress on Wednesday that it’s debatable “whether they’ve actually been able to produce highly enriched uranium.”
Clearly there’s a basis for investigation about whether the 2002 CIA estimate was justified. But it’s also worth underlining that the issue here is not whether North Korea sought a uranium enrichment capacity. The uncertainty is about how far the program advanced. That distinction makes a difference both in reconsidering the Bush administration’s actions in 2002 and judging how the problem should be managed in the new disarmament negotiations with the North beginning next week.
What the administration knew in 2002 — and what remains uncontested now — is that North Korea secretly obtained 20 centrifuges for uranium enrichment from Pakistan and purchased other equipment needed to construct a large-scale enrichment facility. When U.S. officials confronted the North Koreans at a bilateral negotiation session, members of a U.S. diplomatic team received what they believed was a defiant confirmation. That tipped an internal administration debate toward hard-liners who all along had wanted to renounce the Clinton administration’s “agreed framework” with Pyongyang.
No doubt those hard-liners made use of the CIA’s conclusions about a factory under construction. Yet even without that intelligence some action would have been warranted. The United States and its allies were supplying Pyongyang with food and energy on the assumption that its nuclear program was frozen, only to discover that it had covertly begun work in another area. It would have been foolish to ignore such activity by a criminal regime.
Similarly, the weakening of the intelligence about an ongoing uranium program does not mean that the United States can drop the issue in the next phase of negotiations. On the contrary, a crucial test of the diplomatic process will be whether the North will reveal what it did with the centrifuges and other materials it is known to have acquired. Pyongyang’s response will show whether it, like the Bush administration, is more inclined to conduct serious negotiations than it was four years ago.
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10
March
2007
Another set of articles happening within days leading to confusion (see nutrition article previous to this one). So on Tuesday we get an article that the white house says the surveillance programs are ok. On Saturday we have an article when the two top policemen in the country, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Muller, state that the FBI broke the law with their misuses of national security letters.
“People have to believe in what we say,” Gonzales said. … We have some work to do to reassure … the American people that we are serious about being responsible in the exercise of these authorities.”
How can we be reassured if only days after trumpeting that you think things are legal, you get blown out of the water. You give the FBI some questionable authority, they abuse it. Whose fault is that? You opened the door, against everybody else’s warnings … That’s why you need to have oversight and debate in government.
(Originals found here and here).
First the “it’s OK” message (by the way, is it strange that the White House sets up a board who researches an issue to determine that it’s own program is cleared?)
Privacy Board Clears U.S. Spy Programs
By HOPE YEN
The Associated Press
Monday, March 5, 2007; 9:13 PM
WASHINGTON — A White House privacy board is giving its stamp of approval to two of the Bush administration’s controversial surveillance programs _ electronic eavesdropping and financial tracking _ and says they do not violate citizens’ civil liberties.
Democrats newly in charge of Congress quickly criticized the findings, which they said were questionable given some of the board members’ close ties with the Bush administration.
“Their current findings and any additional conclusions they reach will be taken with a grain of salt until they become fully independent,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee.
After operating mostly in secret for a year, the five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Board is preparing to release its first report to Congress next week.
The report finds that both the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program and the Treasury Department’s monitoring of international banking transactions have sufficient privacy protections, three board members told The Associated Press in telephone interviews.
Both programs have multiple layers of review before sensitive information is accessed, they said.
“We looked at the program, we visited NSA and met with the top people all the way down to those doing the hands-on work,” said Carol Dinkins, a Houston lawyer and former Reagan administration assistant attorney general who chairs the board.
“The program is structured and implemented in a way that is properly protective and attentive to civil liberties,” she said.
Some board members were troubled by the Homeland Security Department’s error-ridden no-fly lists, which critics say use subjective or inconclusive data to flag suspect travelers.
One area the board will focus on in its report is the computerized anti-terrorism screening system recently announced by DHS and used for years without travelers’ knowledge to assign risk assessments to millions of Americans who fly abroad.
“That’s a place where there’s a lot of opportunity for improvement,” Dinkins said.
Lanny Davis, a former Clinton White House counsel and the lone Democrat on the panel, described the board’s first report to Congress as modest. He said most of the work in the past year was spent being briefed on the administration’s surveillance programs.
“We felt reassured regarding the checks-and-balance concerns,” Davis said. He said that after several classified briefings, members were impressed by the multiple layers of review, which included audit trails to track whoever has access to the data.
Still, Davis said he anticipated the board will continue to monitor the program as needed. “It would be a mistake if that was the end of the review,” he said.
The board’s initial findings come as Congress is moving forward on measures to give the board more authority and make it more independent of the president. Created in late 2004, the panel was established as a compromise between Congress and the White House after a recommendation by the Sept. 11 commission.
Both conservative and liberal civil liberties groups have urged the members to aggressively review the eavesdropping program and have questioned whether board members would stand up to the president if he were flouting the law.
In recent weeks, the administration has agreed to let a secret but independent panel of judges oversee the program. But many lawmakers and civil libertarians have remained skeptical about its legality, and the Justice Department’s inspector general is investigating whether the agency used any of the information improperly.
The warrantless program monitors phone calls and e-mails between the United States and other countries that are suspected to be linked to agents of al-Qaida. A federal judge in Detroit last August declared the program unconstitutional. Government attorneys have since asked a Cincinnati-based appeals court to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing the case is moot because the surveillance is now monitored by a secret court.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called it absurd that the White House board effectively gave the eavesdropping program its stamp of approval even before the administration was forced to backtrack and submit it to court oversight.
“I have no confidence in the current board in its ability to provide meaningful evaluation of important programs such as the no-fly lists, based on its work on the domestic surveillance program,” he said. “It is critical that Congress make the civil liberties board independent of the executive branch.”
The board does not have subpoena power, and the White House can change its annual reports before they go to Congress. The members serve at the pleasure of Bush, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has final say over whether officials must comply with the board’s recommendations.
Separate House and Senate measures would require that the entire board _ not just the chairman and vice chairman _ be confirmed by the Senate.
The House version would also remove the board from the executive office of the president but keep it within the executive branch and give it subpoena power. The Senate version would keep the board within the executive office and allow it to ask the attorney general to issue subpoenas, with notice to Congress required if a subpoena request was refused or modified.
The privacy board members declined to comment on the proposed legislation. But they have made it clear they believe the board works effectively in its current structure and that it could alienate the president if members took on a more openly adversarial role.
Bush appointed Dinkins, a Republican, to chair the board. A longtime friend of the Bush family, she was treasurer of Bush’s first campaign for governor of Texas, and she is a longtime partner in the law firm of Vinson & Elkins, where Gonzales was once a partner.
The panel’s other GOP members are vice chairman Alan Raul, a Washington attorney, and former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson. Former Ambassador Francis Taylor is an independent.
On the Net:
Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board: http://www.whitehouse.gov/privacyboard/
then the “busted” message
Gonzales, Mueller Admit FBI Broke Law
By LARA JAKES JORDAN
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The nation’s top two law enforcement officials acknowledged Friday the FBI broke the law to secretly pry out personal information about Americans. They apologized and vowed to prevent further illegal intrusions.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales left open the possibility of pursuing criminal charges against FBI agents or lawyers who improperly used the USA Patriot Act in pursuit of suspected terrorists and spies.
The FBI’s transgressions were spelled out in a damning 126-page audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. He found that agents sometimes demanded personal data on people without official authorization, and in other cases improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances.
The audit also concluded that the FBI for three years underreported to Congress how often it used national security letters to ask businesses to turn over customer data. The letters are administrative subpoenas that do not require a judge’s approval.
“People have to believe in what we say,” Gonzales said. “And so I think this was very upsetting to me. And it’s frustrating.”
“We have some work to do to reassure members of Congress and the American people that we are serious about being responsible in the exercise of these authorities,” he said.
Under the Patriot Act, the national security letters give the FBI authority to demand that telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses produce personal records about their customers or subscribers. About three-fourths of the letters issued between 2003 and 2005 involved counterterror cases, with the rest for espionage investigations, the audit reported.
Shoddy record-keeping and human error were to blame for the bulk of the problems, said Justice auditors, who were careful to note they found no indication of criminal misconduct.
Still, “we believe the improper or illegal uses we found involve serious misuses of national security letter authorities,” the audit concluded.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller said many of the problems were being fixed, including by building a better internal data collection system and training employees on the limits of their authority. The FBI has also scrapped the use of “exigent letters,” which were used to gather information without the signed permission of an authorized official.
“But the question should and must be asked: How could this happen? Who is accountable?” Mueller said. “And the answer to that is, I am to be held accountable.”
Mueller said he had not been asked to resign, nor had he discussed doing so with other officials. He said employees would probably face disciplinary actions, not criminal charges, following an internal investigation of how the violations occurred.
The audit incensed lawmakers in Congress already seething over the recent dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys. Democrats who lead House and Senate judiciary and intelligence oversight panels promised hearings on the findings. Several lawmakers , Republicans and Democrats alike , raised the possibility of scaling back the FBI’s authority.
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“It’s up to Congress to end these abuses as soon as possible,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The Patriot Act was never intended to allow the Bush administration to violate fundamental constitutional rights.”
Rep. Pete Hoekstra, top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the audit shows “a major failure by Justice to uphold the law.”
“If the Justice Department is going to enforce the law, it must follow it as well,” said Hoekstra, of Michigan.
The American Civil Liberties Union said the audit proves Congress must amend the Patriot Act to require judicial approval anytime the FBI wants access to sensitive personal information.
“The attorney general and the FBI are part of the problem, and they cannot be trusted to be part of the solution,” said ACLU’s executive director, Anthony D. Romero.
Both Gonzales and Mueller called the national security letters vital tools in pursuing terrorists and spies in the United States. “They are the bread and butter of our investigations,” Mueller said.
Gonzales asked the inspector general to issue a follow-up audit in July on whether the FBI had followed recommendations to fix the problems.
Fine’s annual review is required by Congress, over the objections of the Bush administration. It concluded that the number of national security letters requested by the FBI skyrocketed in the years after the Patriot Act became law. Each letter issued may contain several requests.
In 2000, for example, the FBI issued an estimated 8,500 requests. That number peaked in 2004 with 56,000. Overall, the FBI reported issuing 143,074 requests in national security letters between 2003 and 2005.
But that did not include an additional 8,850 requests that were never recorded in the FBI’s database, the audit found. A sample review of 77 case files at four FBI field offices showed that agents had underreported the number of national security letter requests by about 22 percent.
Additionally, the audit found, the FBI identified 26 possible violations in its use of the letters, including failing to get proper authorization, making improper requests under the law and unauthorized collection of telephone or Internet e-mail records.
The FBI also used exigent letters to quickly get information , sometimes in non-emergency situations , without going through proper channels. In at least 700 cases, these letters were sent to three telephone companies to get billing records and subscriber information, the audit found.
On the Net:
The report is at: http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/FBI/index.ht
Justice Department: http://www.usdoj.gov
FBI: http://www.fbi.gov
wombat politics, legal No Comments »
10
March
2007
Here are two health related articles talking about nutritional deficiencies. The first article talks about a study involving almost 200,000 people and how they’re determining whether eating vitamins and antioxidants helps or hastens death. The second article generously advises us, once again, on what we’re missing and what we need to keep eating to get our recommended intake. At least they’re not suggesting to eat vitamins, but suggest ways to increase our intake by shifting our diet.
But still, how do you make decisions here? Do you or don’t you have to get your minimum recommendable intake?
Consumers can’t know for sure what, if anything, sizable doses of antioxidants might do to their health.
(Original found here and here)
First, the warning article:
Don’t Take Your Vitamins?
Antioxidants might be dangerous.
Wednesday, March 7, 2007; Page A16
IN LAST WEEK’S issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, a new study on antioxidant supplements, pills that magazine covers in the 1990s trumpeted as potential miracle drugs for their putative cancer-fighting power, concludes that they do not help users live longer and might even increase the risk of death. It’s a reminder that you can’t rely just on bottle labels to make smart choices about which pills to take.
A team of scientists performed an exhaustive review of the research on antioxidants, considering 68 trials conducted since 1990 that included more than a quarter-million subjects. After removing studies with a high risk of statistical bias, leaving 47 studies including 180,938 participants, the team found that taking beta carotene, Vitamin A and Vitamin E actually increased the likelihood of death by 5 percent. Vitamin C and selenium did not have any significant effect on mortality. Though fronts for the vitamin industry have tried to pick away at the findings, the data nevertheless generally support the work of a National Institutes of Health conference on multivitamin supplements — pills packed with antioxidants and other nutrients — held last May. Then, doctors and researchers concluded that antioxidants appear to have no beneficial health effects except in the cases of a few users with certain conditions, and that they might actually pose a risk to some populations, especially to those individuals who regularly ingest too much of a particular antioxidant supplement.
The next step in the research is determining which antioxidants assist in the treatment of which diseases and which supplements are harmful to which types of patients. Most American adults probably won’t see any effect, positive or negative, from taking a daily multivitamin, and participants at the NIH conference did not recommend discontinuing their use. But until reliable data appear to answer those questions, health experts say, consumers can’t know for sure what, if anything, sizable doses of antioxidants might do to their health.
Meanwhile, Americans buy about $23 billion worth of dietary supplements every year, and about half of American adults take some kind of supplement. The evidence analyzed last week should lead them to question whether the pills are worth the cost.
and then the “Business as Usual” article
Lost in the land of plenty
Overfed Americans still fall short on many important nutrients
By Janet Helm, a Chicago dietitian and nutrition consultant.
Special to the Tribune
February 28, 2007
Talk about nutrition tends to focus on America’s widening waistlines. No doubt, we’re a nation that’s overfed. But we’re also undernourished.
Government surveys show that we continue to suffer from nutritional shortfalls–a fact that’s often overlooked because we’re obviously eating enough calories.
The seven most neglected nutrients are calcium, potassium, fiber, magnesium and vitamins A, C and E.
Filling these nutrient gaps is not as tough as it may seem. Sure, a multivitamin could remedy part of the problem, but you would be missing out on some of the natural compounds in food that can’t be captured in a pill. Plus, supplements are meant to be just that–supplemental to the diet. Pills are not intended to be substitutes for real food.
Here’s why you need these nutrients and how you can easily get more.
What you’re missing
Nutrient: Calcium
People not getting enough: 70 percent
Why you need it: Promotes bone health, helps muscles contract, may help maintain normal blood pressure
Your daily goal*: 1,000 mg
And how to reach it: Drink a skim latte made with 8 ounces of milk and … Eat a cup of yogurt as a mid-afternoon snack and …
Grate 1 1/2 ounces of cheese on your salad or pasta at dinner
Nutrient: Potassium
People not getting enough: 97 percent
Why you need it: Regulates body fluids, helps maintain normal blood pressure, needed for muscle contractions
Your daily goal*: 4,700 mg
And how to reach it: Include 1 cup of orange juice and 1/2 cantaloupe at breakfast and …
Stir 1 cup of white beans and 1/4 cup of tomato paste into a soup and …
Eat a banana in the afternoon and …
Eat 5 ounces of pork tenderloin and a baked potato at dinner
Nutrient: Fiber
People not getting enough: 96 percent
Why you need it: Helps maintain healthy cholesterol levels, promotes regularity, can help reduce hunger
Your daily goal*: Men: 38 g, Women: 25 g
And how to reach it: Eat 1 1/2 cups of oatmeal topped with 1/4 cup raspberries for breakfast and …
Make a sandwich with whole-grain bread and eat a pear with your lunch and …
Snack on 1/4 cup dried figs and …
Eat 1 cup of steamed broccoli and 1 cup of whole-wheat pasta at dinner
Nutrient: Magnesium
People not getting enough: 56 percent
Why you need it: Supports bone and heart health, signals muscles to relax and contract
Your daily goal*: Men: 420 mg, Women: 320 mg
And how to reach it: Eat 1 ounce of whole-grain cereal and 1/2 cup milk for breakfast and …
Include 1 cup of sauteed spinach and 1 cup of brown rice with your dinner and …
Snack on 1 ounce of Brazil nuts
Nutrient: Vitamin A
People not getting enough: 44 percent
Why you need it: Promotes healthy skin, eyesight and immune function
Your daily goal*: Men: 900 mcg, Women: 700 mcg
And how to reach it: Add 1 cup of sliced carrots to your stir-fry or …
Bake a medium-sized sweet potato as a side with dinner
Nutrient: Vitamin C
People not getting enough: 31 percent
Why you need it: Promotes a healthy immune system, helps wounds heal, works as an antioxidant to inhibit damage to body cells
Your daily goal*: Men: 90 mg, Women: 75 mg
And how to reach it: Slice a small red pepper on your salad or …
Eat 1 cup of strawberries for dessert
Nutrient: Vitamin E
People not getting enough: 93 percent
Why you need it: Acts as an antioxidant that may help lower risk of heart disease and cancer, helps bolster the immune system
Your daily goal*: 15 mg
And how to reach it: Top a salad with half of an avocado and a dressing made with 1 tablespoon safflower oil and …
Snack on 1 ounce of almonds or sunflower seeds
*Recommended daily intakes for adults, ages 19-50
Source: What We Eat in America, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2005. www.ars.usda.gov/foodsurvey.
Other missing nutrients
All women of childbearing age need to keep an eye on folic acid, a vital nutrient that helps reduce the risk of certain birth defects. Orange juice, dark leafy greens and fortified grains are top sources of folic acid.
Older adults often lack vitamin D, which partners with calcium to keep bones strong. Milk is a top source; some yogurts and juices also are fortified with vitamin D.
Janet Helm is a Chicago dietitian and nutrition consultant.
wombat health No Comments »
8
March
2007
At the GAP this weekend I saw a big display of boyfriend trousers. Just caught the commercial on TV with a guy and girl on stage to the music “anything you can do I can do better.” Girl is without pants, guy is with pants, girls rips off guy’s pant’s and puts them on. Queue to “boyfriend trousers.”
What are boyfriend trousers? Are they like leather jackets? Signs of an adoring love’s willing to share clothing?
But just imagine if men met in the locker room to check each other out. “Hey, what is that you’re wearing?” “Oh, those are my new girlfriend trousers?” Quite the different reaction.
So what is it about male female relationships and our reactions? Women wear tiny bathing suits, men wear bags. Female frontal nudity is ok, male frontal nudity is not ok. A woman making love to a woman is being asked for, a man making love to a man is just …
People talk about equality of the sexes, but this on a very primal level seems filled with obstacles. It’s entirely cultural and probably entirely different elsewhere on the globe. I’m not advocating change, but just observing, how many of us work deep inside. Obviously boyfriend trousers are cool. Even for men?
wombat social/culture, design No Comments »
8
March
2007
Had this strange thought on the ride home today: whatever happened to Tariq Aziz?
He was the foreign minister and deputy prime minister and basically the face of Iraq before the war started. You saw quite a bit of him on TV while the US provided lip service to diplomacy. He seemed diplomatic, intelligent, and reasonable - not at all the crazy madman out to destroy the Zionists plotting to create undue influence in the region, ready to strike back in a seconds notice with Weapons of Mass Destruction. In a nation of muslims, in a political party of a specific sect, he was a Christian. I thought that could have been an asset. Last thing I remember, is that sometimes after the invasion started, he turned himself in to the US Authorities in Iraq. He wasn’t hunted down, he actually went to them.
That was years ago. What has happened since then? Is he still in some jail? Or in exile? Are Iraqis guarding him, or is he in U.S. custody? Was he tortured for inside information (he should have had lots), or was he treated with respect as a former senior government official - like “diplomatic immunity”? Saddam is dead now, so what happens to the rest of the former Iraq government? Remember the deck of cards with the 50 plus top officials they were looking for right at the invasion? What happened to all of them?
Wikipedia has a short article on him that provides few details. (Wikipedia Article here.) But it really doesn’t offer much of an explanation, or status update. He’s in jail awaiting trial.
So while I’m sitting here watching comedy shows, with life going on as usual, we don’t reflect much on what happens elsewhere? These “things” happen, and then they’re over. The problem is that there are people involved, real people, and all this time while this is out of our minds, there are real people some place in a jail, probably having tried to do the right thing (at least in their mind), now waiting for some trial that may execute them.
I don’t know if he was a good guy or a bad guy, but does it really matter? Whatever did happen to Tariq Aziz? Why don’t we care?
wombat social/culture, politics No Comments »
7
March
2007
Wombat had to go across the pond to visit the Big City of Honolulu. We had an early official appointment and then had the rest of the day to enjoy ourselves, before our scheduled trip back. What do you do in a big city? For us farm folks from the countryside it’s just exciting to step out the big International Airport and see nothing but concrete as far as the eye can see, eight-lane highways and traffic jams, dozens of car dealerships and lots of fancy cars, big box stores and self-storage places to keep the stuff, correctional center, and other buildings much higher than just three floors. What are simple, country folks to do in this place but … go shopping at the mall.
Honolulu has a nice hang out mall in Ala Moana. It’s 380 stores, three levels, semi outdoors, pretty much a long stretch around an open courtyard, with fishponds and plants. It’s nice, no trouble wasting the better part of a day here. And for us who are shopping deprived, it’s very, very exciting.
So here are a few random impressions of bumpkins in consumerland.
One shopping has become so compartmentalized that you can tell within 5 seconds whether you’re the intended customer. Skulls above the door - nope. Skinny pink bikini bits in the windows, nope (and who calls a swimsuit brand “Raisins”?) Motorcycles extruding out the front wall - nope. Pink flowerly dresses - nope. Everything is designed to look nice, but everything is so thought out, that you have an immediate reaction “yes” or “no.” And I would say for most of the stores the answer is no.
Now design is relative. Prada, Fendi, Gucci all charge you lots of money for their products. You get design and fashion, but we get few reactions for “style.” There are lots of Japanese though in the store, buying status symbols. From a window display I finally realized what the Fendi logo means.
We head into Tiffanys because we’re expecting some design, and sure they have pieces by designers, but it’s definitely split into a “modern” and “tranditional” section. I see some weird pieces designed by Frank Gehry (what else would you expect), but they somehow look like Holocaust memorials, rather aggressive for jewelry. There’s very little that’s simple, I mean simple, simple.
Across from Tiffanys is a Jimmy Choo, shoewear made famous through television series. Looks like there’s unusual things in there (it doesn’t really matter what it is), but looking at the two sales guys gives me enough heebee-jeebies to not get me within 6 ft of the front door. I don’t even want to be “hi, how are you doing today”ed.
Next to Jimmy Choo is a Coach store. Coach used to sell leatherwear, you know belts, wallets, purses, travel bags, and suitcases. How quaint. Now they sell clothing, eye glasses, and fashion items. It’s not about the product, it’s about the brand. And brand is everything. Oakley used to make sunglasses, now I can’t tell that they have anything to do with sunglasses. Just look at the amount of surfstores in the mall, and the amount of surfing stuff sold in them. Or take a look at Banana Republic. Way back when I remembered it as a two level store in a house on Newbury Street in Boston, selling safari clothes and souvenirs upstairs and travel literature and language books downstairs. The current Banana Republic sells some souvenir shirts with the original logo and some Rhinocerous line drawing on them. But the current Banana Republic has nothing to do with a Banana Republic, I wonder if people understand those T-shirts.
But for more branding take a look at Apple. The Apple Stores are very popular, but not for the products, but for the free Internet on their computers. As far as the products go … hmmm. I really don’t like the look of their current products. It’s all nice and clean, but those big monitors look like shiny plastic. The laptops are so unadorned, they almost seem thoughtless, like the only purpose for them was to look simple, at the expense of any personality. They don’t even need to work well (though I think they do).
We spent some time at the Macy’ - “America’s Department Store” it said somewhere. We had some gift certificates that had to be spent. One had expired two weeks ago, we got it extended. As we’re checking for simple tops, I’m watching the clothes on sale and watching the people shop. There sure is a lot of variety out here, but very few pieces I would consider picking. You can tell right away when people are conscious in their decisions, the Eileen Fischer stuff stood out right away in cuts, colors, and materials. But all of the stuff comes with labels, and very little of it causes a response. Who comes up with all these products.
Macy’s also has a few beds for display. We were tired and had to testdrive them. Nice, thick top cover, very comfortable. Found an error on the price label - it said $9600 for the mattress. Yup, for the mattress. We bought a bedsheet that was on sale. Now we’re left with $1.42 on our giftcard. I doubt there’s anything in Macy’s for $1.42.
What else. Realized that Williams Sonoma and Barnes & Nobles are high density stores, that is lots of different products per square foot. Luxury good stores are low density stores, oftentimes sells what seems like less than a dozen products. You spend a lot more time in a high density store, and it’s much more fun to browse and discover. Price is not necessarily the issue, because Williams Sonoma is not cheap.
But you can already tell that shopping here may be no different from any higher-end shopping mall in the country, and yet it is still an Hawaii experience. There were just a few more impressions. 1) I saw a local TV personality doing his lunch shopping at the mall. 2) Found out the reason why security cops are always stationed near the escalators when a bunch of four teens took a joy ride up and down. Escalators are rare around here. 3) I found lockers. These are the first set of lockers I’ve found in the states. They’re not cheap, $1 per hour, $5 per day, but they’re there, tucked away in a dark alley in the bottom level. A place where you can store your bags for the day. What a novel idea, unknown to Hawaii. The airports don’t have them, and we don’t have railway stations here. And I get excited about seeing a bank of metal boxes.
At the end of the day we took the bus back to the airport. Our loot - the above bedsheet and a pair of pants. For lunch we headed into the food court at the Shirokiya Department Store - fresh tempura, sashimi, custard pancakes, marinated cuttlefish and mackerel, ocean salad and kim chee daikon. All “not normal” and all good.
So boy that was a fun day. But let’s not go crazy. Now it’s time to jump back to the quiet life in the wombat burrow.
wombat social/culture, design, local No Comments »
