ustxtxb_obs_1998_03_13_50_00017-00000_000.pdf

patients still experience. However, Dr. Charles Bell of the Bureau of HIV a4d STD Prevention at the Texas Departnrient of Health says this system just isn’t working. State health officials argue that the new treatments available today allow people with HIV to live longer before the development of AIDS, and specialists recommend earlier treatment for those infected. Without adequate control of the affected population, officials say they cannot plan adequately. The proposal, however, has met with widespread opposition. Town hall meetings in Arlington and Houston have drawn thirty groups \(including the American state’s reporting HIV patients by name. Jamie Schield, of the AIDS Resource Center in Dallas, told the Abilene ReporterNews that requiring names will prevent people from coming forward to be tested, leaving them without knowledge of their condition, or education and support. The Center will hold the next town hall meeting to discuss the proposal on Wednesday, March 18, 6-8 p.m. \(2701 Regnery Street, make a decision in March or April. MANAGED NEWS. Thus far the highlight of the media’s new Gulf War campaign was CNN’s exclusive February 18 broadcast of a so-called “town meeting” at Ohio State University, planned as a White House staged event worthy of the Politburo. Fortunately, a handful of ordinary citizens refused to play along. Instead, they fiercely questioned the assembled dignitaries, loudly declaimed their opposition to what is indeed a “racist war,” and embarrassed poor Bernard Shaw and Judy Woodruff in their eagerly assumed roles of palace scribes. The next-day’s reaction from the national press? The networks complained that they hadn’t been allowed the same broadcast rights as CNN, and the pundits blamed the White House for allowing these protestors to “send the wrong message” to Saddam Hussein. Less noticed but just as telling was National Public Radio’s February 17 special edition of “All Things Considered,” which featured eighty-nine minutes of warmongering “experts” discussing the most efficient ways of destroying Iraq, and one minute of a war opponent \(Sara Flounders of the International Action Center in New the war. Anchor Bob Edwards cut Flounders off before she could finish \(which he marks \(e.g. “Seven years ago, against the Gulf War, it took three months of military mobilization before there was large oppoeven disappeared from NPR’s official transcript of the broadcast. May the first medal of the new Iraqi campaign be awarded to those brave Ohio peacemakers; and may Bernard, Judy, Bob and the rest be sentenced to live on a sanction-determined Iraqi diet for a month, before they are allowed to file their next “reports.” DON’T CALL US. What if you held a town meeting and nobody came? If you’re the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, that’s called public input. The TNRCC has inaugurated a six-week series of “town hall” meetings around the state to discuss “strategic planning” but hasn’t bothered to invite the public. Almost nobody turned out for the first meetings in El Paso and San Angelo \(because the agency meeting at Arlington’s North Central Texas Council of Governments building was nearly cancelled when the TNRCC only notified COG officials the day before. Dallas environmentalists who hastily organized to testify said they waited for an hour for somebody even to open the building. TNRCC watchers also report that Commissioner Barry McBee used a recent Dallas speech to blast the press, particularly the Dallas Morning News, for insufficiently favorable coverage of agency initiatives. According to a press release we coaxed out of the agency, additional meetings for March the web site at www.tnrcc.state.tx.us . CAMPAIGN FINANCE ABORTED. Maybe you thought campaign finance reform is about getting the obscene amounts of corrupting money out of the political system, so that democracy one person, one vote can begin to work again. Wrong -0,, green breath.. According to the Texas Right to Life Committee, the Senate tabling of the McCain-Feingold legislation was a historic defeat of ruthless pro-abortionists. Joseph Graham, president of Texas Right to Life, congratulated Senators Phil Gramm and Kay Bailey Hutchison for helping to defeat the legislation, which would have restricted the use of “soft money” to run thinly disguised “issue advertising” actually intended to influence elections. The reform legislation, said Graham, was being promoted by “special interest groups such as the League of Women Voters and Common Cause in an effort to silence the growing, organized voice of common Pro-Life/Pro-Family citizens.” Next time you hear those smiling reformists promising that public campaign financing would mean less special interest influence on government, don’t believe them they’re only trying to silence the unborn. DUNCANVILLE TO D.C. Donovan Campbell Jr. has successfully sued the Duncanville school board on behalf of students’ “right to pray” before and after each basketball game. In Del Rio, he countersued for a church that had excommunicated a woman because she left her husband and four children to live with another man. The woman, who had sued the church for slander, claiming the congregation labeled her “an adultress,” lost and agreed to apologize to the church and pay its legal expenses. Now Campbell is representing Paula Corbin Jones, and according to a profile in the March 1 addition of The New York Times, Campbell’s “cleverest move [in the Paula Jones case] may have been his successful effort to amend Ms. Jones’s complaint against the state trooper she said took her to Governor Clinton’s suite.” The lawsuit, which Campbell picked up from the lawyers Jones fired, no longer contends that the trooper’s remarks to a magazine damaged her reputation. Her claim of a damaged reputation could have allowed the trooper’s lawyers to introduce evidence of her previous sexual behavior. The President’s past sexual history, however, is still fair game in the lawsuit. Campbell was recruited by the Rutherford Institute, based in Charlottesville, Virginia. His legal practice, Rader, Campbell, Fisher & Pyke, has been organized to reflect the religious beliefs of the law partners, according to the Times. THE TEXAS OBSERVER 17 MARCH 13, 1998