Originally Posted - June 27, 2006

return home

Has China somehow annexed the northern Ohio counties of Cuyahoga, Erie and Ottawa?

China's censorship polices omit politically sensitive information that might be retrieved during Internet searches such as details about the 1989 suppression of political unrest in Tiananmen Square.

Does the United States capture and hold its own citizens as political prisoners?

In the case of Elsebeth Baumgartner, an Oak Harbor, Ohio attorney disbarred for blowing the whistle on corruption and speaking about a prosecutor's prohibited conflict of interest in a Port Clinton contract with a ferry line, the answer is resounding affirmative.

Once again, Dr. Baumgartner has been incarcerated from exercising her constitutional rights and once again the government has retaliated, specifically the judicial branch of the government, the focus of much informed, knowledgeable and well founded criticism by Dr. Baumgartner.

It's hard to believe that the Baumgartner free speech case is in the America's courts where the U.S. Constitution is supposed to be the Supreme Law of the Land. Aren't we protected by the Constitution. Can't we freely speak out to expose governmental wrongdoing? Is the U.S. really no better than China and its Communist counterparts?

We recently read an article about Fu Xiancai, a Chinese farmer who was forced off his land by China's Three Gorges Dam project because he expressed his opinion and wouldn't shut up.

As a result, he was attacked by an unknown thug on June 8 and is in a hospital, likely paralyzed for life. His neck was broken as he was leaving a police station where he had been called for questioning. His crime? He had been interviewed in May by a German public television station for a program about the grand opening of the dam.

He committed the cardinal sin in China, he criticized the government and said that he and thousands of others were forced off their land by the government who didn't pay them the compensation for their land that they were promised. During the interview, Fu said he had been repeatedly threatened and beaten for exposing the injustices, being a whistleblower.

China doesn't want its people involved in politics and they certainly don't want them to express their opinion. There's a lot of talk about the "slippery slope" in the right to die sector in America but while citizens aren't looking, under the leadership of smirking George W. Bush, more and more freedoms are diminishing and disappearing. The ACLU has said that Bush needs a lesson in Civics 101, to learn about the Constitution, the separation of powers as he uses "signing statements" to subvert his constitutional duty to uphold U.S. law.

Bush has subverted the Constitution's Fourth Amendment to engage in warrantless surveillances of Americans and apparently believes he is above the law.

The tactics of China and Bush are similar to those being employed against Baumgartner who continues to speak out about the pervasive corruption in the court system in Ohio, starting at the top with Chief Justice Thomas Moyer and radiating down into the Common Pleas Courts and the retired visiting judge system.

Time after time, Dr. Baumgartner has continued to speak out and the state has repeatedly retaliated, denying her constitutional rights to due process, right to counsel, engaging in Fourth Amendment violations of search and seizure. When the government had an overwhelming need to learn what evidence Baumgartner had amassed against the officials and judges, they teamed up with her former business partner who had become a government informant against her and seized her computers.

They have unconstitutionally imposed heavy financial sanctions on her, imposed a blatantly unconstitutional probation condition that denied her the right to enter a county courthouse for the purpose of using the law library. The tag team match of Erie County prosecutor Kevin Baxter and his former assistant Daniel Kasaris, handpicked by Baxter to prosecute Baumgartner, have worked with retired visiting judges to try and make Baumgartner "go away" but she's like a Timex watch: she takes a licking and keeps on ticking. They keep trying to claim that she's mentally unbalanced and incompetent but she's passed three evaluations and has just completed another after visiting judge Richard Knepper sentenced her to jail for 45 days after he violated her Sixth Amendment right to counsel in a closed courtroom out of the sight and hearing of the public. That by itself is a violation of the Constitution and the judicial conduct code. Why doesn't Knepper want the public to see and hear the proceedings against Baumgartner?

According to Baumgartner, the psychologist assigned to evaluate her said that the wrongdoing in the retired visiting judge system is well known and that the courts are illegally using competency exams to skirt a defendant's constitutional right to a speedy trial. It's obvious in the Baumgartner trial, they don't want to take the matter to trial because first of all the charges are facially insufficient and secondly, there's absolutely no doubt if somehow she should be convicted, that the convictions would be reversed on appeal due to the egregious violations of her rights. And in the meantime, Kasaris, Markus and the rest are spending tax dollars to harass and retaliate against Baumgartner…..an abuse of power and position to attempt to get even with a critic.

Baumgartner has the goods on these officials, just like Fu does in China. And like Fu, she won't shut up and go away so they're trying to put her away. By subjecting her to the ongoing legal abuse and violations of her rights, they are trying to hold her up as an example to others who might decide to speak out, to endanger the corrupt enterprise that is being facilitated by a corrupt court system and its players.

When coin dealer Thomas Noe, GOP fundraiser and longtime friend and ally of Ohio Gov. Bob Taft was indicted, charged with 53 counts in connection with the alleged mishandling of a $50 million investment of the Ohio Workers' Compensation Bureau, it didn't surprise Baumgartner.

Neither did the allegations that Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro was involved in a "Pay to Play" situation whereby attorneys who gave to his election campaign received generous state contract work in return. Those who refused to contribute to Petro's 2002 campaign lost their contracts with the state.
http://www.northcountrygazette.org/articles/021406Validation.html

She's been pointing the finger at that wrongdoing for years.

A long-time critic of Ohioan government, Dr. Baumgartner alleged massive federal and state grant fraud as well as abuses of power and position by public officials such as Erie County prosecutor Kevin Baxter and Judge Richard Markus. Both then used their positions to retaliate against her. She's paid the price for speaking out, just like Fu, first being disbarred for speaking out, then losing her license as a pharmacist and now saddled with numerous criminal charges on such charges as allegedly intimidating a judge because she sent him an email asking him to obey the law, a fundamental exercise of First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

The charges multiplied when she financed and co-published the Erie Voices, a website that published articles and opinion alleging misconduct by public officials in northern Ohio. In a further attempt to shut her up and discredit her, in addition to disbarring her, the Ohio courts labeled her a "vexatious litigator", prohibiting her from filing any legal motions or actions. In fact, in one instance she was even denied her Sixth Amendment right to file an appeal in her own criminal matter.

What is curious in the Baumgartner case is that none of the media organizations are reporting the abuses despite the national attention that Noe, Taft and Petro have brought to Ohio. Where's the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Judicial Watch and other organizations which are dedicated to preserving and protecting individual and human rights?

Fu has been quoted as saying "I will continue to sue (the local government) and fight with the corrupt officials as long as I am alive".

As no doubt will Dr. Baumgartner.

She deserves the support of her fellow Americans because if the government is successful in silencing her, then we are no better than China and its censorship and we are indeed on a slippery slope.

Anyone wishing to write Dr. Baumgartner while she is serving her latest 45-day sentence for contempt may do so at: Dr. Elsebeth Baumgartner, 2800 Columbus Ave., Sandusky, Ohio 44870.    6-27-06

© 2006 North Country Gazette