Stories like this provide a constant reminder of how important it is to vote against the activist left and their political supporters:

On June 20, 2006, William Bruce approached his mother as she worked at her desk at home and struck killing blows to her head with a hatchet.

Two months earlier, William, a 24-year-old schizophrenic, had been released from Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta, Maine, against the recommendations of his doctors. "Very dangerous indeed for release to the community," wrote one in William's record.

But the doctor's notes also show that William's release was backed by government-funded patient advocates. According to medical records, the advocates -- none of them physicians -- appear to have fought for his right to refuse treatment, to have coached him on how to answer doctors' questions and to have resisted the medical staff's efforts to contact his parents. As one doctor wrote, William told him his advocates believed he is "not a danger, and should be released."

William's father, Joe Bruce, obtained his son's medical records from Riverview eight months after the killing. "I read through the records and I just remember crying all the way through," Joe Bruce says. "My God, these people knew exactly what they were sending home to us."

Some doctors, hospital administrators and mental-health veterans argue that advocates are endangering the mentally ill and the public by too often fighting for patients' right to refuse treatment. Many advocates "have a strong bias," says Robert Liberman, a director of a psychiatric rehabilitation program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"I don't know if they are doing people a service when they assert the right of mentally-ill individuals to remain psychotic," says Ron Honberg, director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an education, support and advocacy group.

What galls me the most about this is that the patient advocates are getting my money. By enabling people deemed dangerously psychotic to roam about and kill, they're arguably as dangerous to society as the killers. And of course, the patients who end up not getting the treatment they need because of activist intervention are also victims.

This cruel scheme hurts everyone.

It would be bad enough if some group of crackpot volunteers ran around gratuitously freeing dangerous people. But forcing the taxpayers to pay for such antics strikes me as profoundly immoral.

It's worth noting that when the legislation enabling this nonsense (the "Protection and Advocacy for Mentally ill Individuals Act of 1986") was passed, President Reagan signed it. Did they realize that the result would be stuff like this? Perhaps Republican politicians will start thinking about the consequences, and perhaps they'll cut some of the funding that goes to these activist groups; I don't think the Democrats will.

That's because patient advocates and their ilk are one of the Democratic core constituencies.

Or am I exaggerating?

Are any of them Republicans?