It Looks Like This (sorry, no ice cream) 

Tort Reform

When you hear the words "Tort Reform," what most often springs to mind is the need to change our legal system to prevent "frivolous" law suits. You've heard dozens of what are largely made-up or over- simplified legal horror stories that illustrate how our legal system is rife with stupid or overly sympathetic juries willing to hand over multi-million dollars in awards to stupid people. What you rarely, if ever, hear of is the abuse of our legal system by corporate defense lawyers. This FindLaw article addresses one aspect of that side of the story.

One of the things the writer, Trevor Morrison, discusses, is the legal strategy employed by corporations with very deep legal pockets of employing stalling and diversionary tactics to exhaust plaintiff's resources.

I have written before here that I welcome an honest and open debate on the topic of legal reform. Articles like this, hidden though it is, help contribute something from the side of that debate that is usually overlooked.

Chavez Wins in Venezuela

Only in a country that has swung as far right as ours could this, "(Chavez)has diverted oil wealth to housing, medicine, education and food for the country's poor majority," be described as "left wing."

The good news is, Chavez, despite all the efforts of the international business community and yes, the US government, seems to have won the election.

The Bush T-Shirt Police Strike Again

I am boggled by how threatened the Bush campaign is by T-shirts worn at their man's rallies that oppose Bush or Republican positions. Last month, at a rally in West Virginia, a couple wearing anti-Bush t-shirts were booted by security. On Thursday a family was removed from a Bush rally in Saginaw because the mother was sporting a pro-choice t.

I guess I really shouldn't be surprised that a man who thinks America is so vulnerable to defeat at the hands of terrorists that he is willing to set aside two and a quarter century's march toward freedom would feel that his message can effectively be undermined by a middle-aged woman wearing a t-shirt at his rally. If he thinks American freedom rests on such shaky ground he would be justified in believing whatever it is he is selling is vulnerable.

In the New Yorker

This month's New Yorker features a story , "Two Soldiers" (sorry, not available on-line, but you can always pick up a copy or read it at the library), describing the military's method of handling the remains of soldiers killed in action, illustrated by its specific handling of the bodies of Specialists Solomon Bangayan and Marc Seiden of Bravo Company of the 82nd Airborne, killed in action together in Baghdad on January 2 of this year.

Mortuary affairs is a relatively small and, from the descriptions in the article, professionally and sensitively operated unit of the army that sees to it that the bodies of those killed make it home for burial. The respect displayed by those in this unit toward those in their charge. When Dan Baum, who wrote the article, mentioned to Douglas Howard, a civilian trainer in Mortuary Affairs, how ceremonious and expensive the handling of fallen soldiers is, Mr. Howard responded "it is, quite literally, the least we can do for them." And so it is. These fallen have given, as Lincoln said, the "last full measure of devotion." This nation owes them the respect shown them by Mortuary Affairs. My gratitude goes to those who have fallen, as well as to those who, in the name of all of us, treat them thusly.

George, John, and Woody Guthrie

More fun with animation.

Revisiting Plame

Do you suppose it's actually possible that the Justice Department can keep the lid on the Plame investigation until after the election? They seem to be doing their best.

The Press and Iraq

On the Daily Show tonight, Wolf Blitzer was admitting that the press let down the public before the war, that they should have been more skeptical, that they got caught up in a kind of group think. With "everybody" saying that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, "everybody" in the press came to believe it. I still don't understand this. I'm just a mook who gets his news like everybody else, from what I read in the paper and the newsmags, see on TV, and pick up on the net, and I distinctly remember spending the fall and winter before the invasion scouring these sources for some evidence that Iraq had these WMD. And it wasn't there. What I found was the UN inspectors not uncovering WMDs and, as Blitzer admitted, everybody "saying" that the weapons were there somewhere. No proof. Nobody offering proof. Nobody in the press much demanding proof. And people like me, asking "what is going on here?" being treated like kooks. There's nothing I see in the lame mea culpas coming out of the press for the last few months, or from the various investigations into pre-war decision making and intelligence gathering that leads me in any way to believe anybody would behave any differently faced with a similar set of circumstances.

It's become to easy to point fingers at the CIA or some other culprit and say "they did it, they're the ones who mislead us." And although that is true, it is just as true that all those people who were mislead were willing to be mislead. For whatever reason, they abandoned skepticism, they asked for no proof, they were willing to go to war on assurances that we were right. I can think of no greater proof of this than the commendations that were heaped on Colin Powell after his presentation at the UN in February of last year. Pointing at photos of innocuous buildings and trucks and declaring they were mobile chemical weapons labs and bomb factories, playing garbled tapes in which Iraqi officers may or may not have been discussing hiding weapons (what do you think now?), he declared that this unequivocably proved the administration's case. And the press and the people ate it up. And I remember, the next day when I read the paper, wondering "what did I miss?"

I now know that I didn't miss anything. That despite all my self-doubt and questioning at the time, I somehow was right. And after a decade in which the American press has failed the American people in its coverage of Whitewater and the Starr investigations, in its coverage of the 2000 election and its favored story line that Gore was a liar and Bush a straight shooter, after seeing the coverage of the 2004 election so far, in which far too many of our national stenographers have bought into the story line that Kerry, whose positions change when circumstances change, is a flip-flopper, after all that I am absolutely convinced that the National Press coverage of Iraq was not an anomalous failure but a part of the patterm. It exemplifies the press's coverage. Yes, Wolf, you and your companions were guilty of "group think" in Iraq. As you always are.

Rock Paper Saddam

Is this offensive? I didn't find it so.

Bush/Cheney...what a ride

Wow...bush bashing while listening to Green Day. That's cool

So That's What Freedom Looks Like in Texas

Charges have been dropped against five protesters who had violated Crawford's ordinance requiring 15 days notice to protest. The judge ruled the ordinance was overly broad. It has since been amended to require 7 days notice to protest.

You have to give official notice in Texas to protest?