Posted on 07/01/2002 6:33:33 AM PDT by SheLion
Solomon wouldn't be remembered as the wisest of all judges if, in the famous story, he had ended up having to actually split the baby in two.
Ramsey County Judge Michael Fetsch has made a somewhat Solomon-like, difference-splitting decision concerning Minnesota's tobacco settlement proceeds. We shall see whether the effort ultimately makes a mess of things.
Fetsch handed down a ruling last week that in blunt language describes how a private group handling hundreds of millions of public tobacco dollars has "ignored for four years... one of the pivotal reasons for the organization's existence, namely to prevent death and disease in the individual citizen." Instead, Fetsch found, the Minnesota Partnership for Action Against Tobacco has indulged a "misplaced commitment" to imposing bans on smoking in public places while allowing "serious questions about actual and apparent conflicts [of interest]" to result in the "clouding and inhibiting" of its effectiveness.
These are exactly the complaints offered for years by MPAAT's critics (including me) and brought to Fetsch by Attorney General Mike Hatch, who had asked the judge to strip MPAAT of the $202 million it received out of Minnesota's 1998 tobacco lawsuit settlement.
Yet while agreeing with every one of the attorney general's concerns about MPAAT, Fetsch decided to give the group another chance. MPAAT's board, he ruled, must be "radically restructured" to eliminate the pattern of grants going to organizations affiliated with board members.
MPAAT must also develop a "substantial" new plan, acceptable to the court, to help individual smokers quit. In the meantime, MPAAT is to stop spending money on smoking-ban crusades, Fetsch ordered.
There is not much optimism at the attorney general's office that MPAAT will reform itself as Fetsch hopes. No wonder. The group has a long record of brushing aside criticism as the work of the tobacco industry and its stooges.
That defiant spirit surfaced again in MPAAT's response to Fetsch's ruling. MPAAT's statement reads mostly like a claim of victory, saying Fetch gave an "unqualified endorsement" to MPAAT's desire for a "balanced approach" and that his order constitutes "a rejection of Big Tobacco and its allies."
In fact, Fetsch wrote that the balance MPAAT has struck — its "focus" on smoking bans and "derogation" on helping smokers — has been "without legal or factual justification." He called its conflict of interest policies "an abandonment of... responsibility."
An MPAAT spokesperson, asked about the curiously prideful tone of the response, says the group is eager to comply with the judge's order in every way.
Time will tell.
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Write Tice at dtice@pioneerpress.com or at the Pioneer Press, 345 Cedar St., St. Paul, MN 55101.
A lot of states now has these Partnerships For A Tobacco Free Everything!
Using the guise of education and finding cures, they are instead spending money feverishly to ban smoking in every venue they can get their grubby paws on.
Once they succeed in one town, they move on to conquer another. And another.
They are leaving death and destruction of businesses across the land. Do they care? Hell no! As long as that Tobacco Settlement money is keeping them in the style that they have become accustomed, they continue on in their merry way blaming all ills on tobacco from pimples to hemorrhoids.
Anything to justify their huge grants of the honey pot money. It’s time for America to wake up! It’s time for 55 million smokers to step on these coalitions, and the time is now!
And these coalitions are hiding behind the guise of "Tobacco Free Kids," so who can fault them?
It's all a bunch of deceitful lies to keep their pockets lined.
SheLion - I realize this is not a laughing matter, and you know just how seriously I take it, but forgive me for my laughter at this sentence fragment!!!
Many years ago I worked at a retail/wholesale ceramics company in Brooklyn. We were open to the general public, but were basically a warehouse operation and had a pretty reliable list of regular customers. Needless to say some of these customers were not exactly on our list of favorite people!!!
We had a failure proof warning system when one of them would appear. If it was before lunc who ever was up front would holler to someone in the back if they wanted their lunch on PITA. If it was after luch the person up front would ask someone inth back - at top of their voice about the most recent flare-up of their hemorroid problem.
It took the boss, who was a really sharp fellow, nearly 6 months to figure out what any of us were talking about.
PITA = pain in the a$$. And we all know what a hemorroid is!!!
Anti-smokers fall into both catgories. And actually cause the latter.
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