next up: Kevin Bacon, playing bilmore
 

Bilmore Outed?
 

Add a bottle of wine and playing with kid and you've Ty's day.

Can I Bring a Backback?
 

SF proposal to charge for grocery bags

etfl -- no charge! -- t.s.

Can I Bring a Backback?
 

How about charging the store instead--give the baggers an incentive not to put one apple in each bag.

Can I Bring a Backback?
 

The store already pays for the bags once, and I'm not understanding why there's a market failure here that needs state intervention. Presumably stores don't want to charge by the bag, since the costs are small and doing so might prompt consumers to buy less. And there are the delays at the register, slowing down the shopper's transaction.

Can I Bring a Backback?
 

I don't understand. How can the board survive if you don't charge for this?

Can I Bring a Backback?
 

The secret is volume.

frivolous lawsuits
 

I'm a little surprised that there aren't more people itching to talk here about tort reform -- Hello! aside -- I mean, what could be more interesting? -- so perhaps I'll get the ball rolling a little. One of the tough questions is what kinds of cases are the "frivolous lawsuits" that the President keeps talking about. Take this example:

• A man provides a car for his teenage daughter to drive. Through no fault of her own, the daughter is involved in a minor fender bender. No one is hurt and the property damage is less than $2,500. The father could just turn the claim into his insurance company and be done with it. Instead, when he learns that the other driver was in a rental car and that the rental company provided the car to a driver with a suspended license, the father sues the rental car company for the property damage.

Frivolous or not?

Can I Bring a Backback?
 

Externalities (litter, landfills, pollution)? (not that they're borne by SF'ans)

frivolous lawsuits
 

This gave me law school flashbacks.

I say not frivolous, but I also think that the size of the claim makes it inefficient to sue on.

frivolous lawsuits
 

Are you saying you'd question the intelligence of the person who brought such a claim, or are you saying that you don't think people would bring this sort of claim because too little is at stake?

frivolous lawsuits
 

How can it be--if you tender to the insurance company, they'll raise your rates and not bother pursuing. By suing, you allocate the blame correctly (or more correctly). The insurance company's efficiency isn't necessarily just.

frivolous lawsuits
 

I think he is saying we need to find other P's and go class action on the bastards.

frivolous lawsuits
 

It is still inefficient from the harmed father's p.o.v. because it will cost more than $2,500 to pursue himself and getting fees & expenses is a crap shoot. The transaction costs are too high to make re-allocation of the loss (much less proper allocation of the loss) economically feasible.

Call it a market failure. But not a frivolous lawsuit. The amount of loss has nothing to do with whether the claim is frivolous, and the fact that a deep pocket is (to some extent) at fault and thus recovery is more likely doesn't make the claim more frivolous.

But I fight the hypothetical - in almost all states rental car drivers are required to get insurance covering third parties, aren't they? File the claim against the rental insurance.

frivolous lawsuits
 

The latter. It would cost more than that to bring and there is no guaranty that costs would be recovered.

I would actually choose (c) and make the guy pay directly.

frivolous lawsuits
 

Do car companies fight these suits through extended litigation?

frivolous lawsuits
 

No idea.

frivolous lawsuits
 

Not in George W. Bush's case. He was the plaintiff who sued Enterprise Rent a Car in 1999 when his daughter, Jenna, was involved in the fender bender. After filing suit in Austin, Texas, Bush settled with Enterprise for around $2000:

• Sunday, August 27, 2000 Associated Press
  
  NEW YORK--George W. Bush, who as Texas governor advocated and signed legislation limiting civil lawsuits, filed a case of his own against a rental car agency over a minor accident involving one of his daughters.
  
  Bush, the Republican presidential nominee, sued Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Austin, Texas, for the Sept. 8, 1998, accident, according to an article in Saturday's New York Daily News. The April 1999 civil suit was filed in Austin, the newspaper said.
  
  Lawyers familiar with Texas insurance law told the paper the type of lawsuit Bush filed probably was unnecessary because his insurance policy would have handled the costs.
  
  Bush's lawyer, Sean Breen, said the case was settled for about $2,000.
  
  No one was hurt in the accident. The lawsuit said that Bush's 1995 Jeep was hit while one of Bush's twin daughters, Jenna, was driving "in a careful and prudent manner," and that Enterprise shared blame because it had rented a car to a driver whose license was suspended.

linky

frivolous lawsuits
 

Nicely played.

frivolous lawsuits
 

You didn't see that coming?

frivolous lawsuits
 

Nope SS, this is a loss for Ty. he's linked to a blog he apparently reads that equates Bush to hitler- I guess the blogger feels that appropriate since Bush took out of power one of three people who have killed as many as did Hitler. You guys are too much. i'm disqualifying Ty from the superbowl Pool over this one.

frivolous lawsuits
 

If you read more of that blog than I quoted, then you are the loser here. Sorry, pal.

Did Alberto Gonzales lie in his confirmation hearings about helping to get then-Gov. Bush out of jury duty? I wouldn't know, but that's the gist of this story in Newsweek by Michael Isikoff. "The judge and other lawyers in the case last week disputed a written account of the matter provided by Gonzales to the Senate Judiciary Committee. 'It's a complete misrepresentation,' said David Wahlberg, lawyer for the dancer, about Gonzales's account."

• While Gonzales's account tracks with the official court transcript, it leaves out a key part of what happened that day, according to Travis County Judge David Crain. In separate interviews, Crain—along with Wahlberg and prosecutor John Lastovica—told NEWSWEEK that, before the case began, Gonzales asked to have an off-the-record conference in the judge's chambers. Gonzales then asked Crain to "consider" striking Bush from the jury, making the novel "conflict of interest" argument that the Texas governor might one day be asked to pardon the defendant (who worked at an Austin nightclub called Sugar's), the judge said. "He [Gonzales] raised the issue," Crain said. Crain said he found Gonzales's argument surprising, since it was "extremely unlikely" that a drunken-driving conviction would ever lead to a pardon petition to Bush. But "out of deference" to the governor, Crain said, the other lawyers went along. Wahlberg said he agreed to make the motion striking Bush because he didn't want the hard-line governor on his jury anyway. But there was little doubt among the participants as to what was going on. "In public, they were making a big show of how he was prepared to serve," said Crain. "In the back room, they were trying to get him off."

By getting excused from jury duty, Bush was able to avoid disclosing his 1976 DUI arrest and conviction.

What a fucked-up world, that this story has a better chance of scuttling Gonzales' nomination than does his support of torture.

I read that and didn't really see the issue vis a vis his testimony.

I'm a dumb transactional guy, but aren't chambers discussions confidential?

The problem comes if he misrepresented his role to the Senate:

• Asked by Sen. Patrick Leahy to describe "in detail" the only court appearance he ever made on behalf of Bush, Gonzales—who was then chief counsel to the Texas governor—wrote that he had accompanied Bush the day he went to court "prepared to serve on a jury." While there, Gonzales wrote, he "observed" the defense lawyer make a motion to strike Bush from the jury panel "to which the prosecutor did not object." Asked by the judge whether he had "any views on this," Gonzales recalled, he said he did not.

Sounds like that's what actually happened, at least on the record (or whatever the proper term is). This is a non-issue, and NW is grasping here.

It sounds like he failed to tell the committee a whole bunch of stuff, and instead left them with a different impression about the episode. Other people would say he misrepresented the truth. Now he's saying he can't recall any of it.

eta:
Actually, it's worse than simple omission, because he told the Senate that the judge asked for his views and he said he had none. But there was that whole other conversation with the judge, where he said his piece . . . .

frivolous lawsuits
 

Whenever I look beyond what you quote, it seems your stories fall apart factually, or the authors reveal themselves as being very wormy.

frivolous lawsuits
 

The "author" of that story was the AP, no?

Next, tell me Isikoff is a member of the vast left-wing conspiracy.

I still don't see any of this as material, but it also brings me back to my question - what is the status of chamber discussions? Are they confidential?

How Will This Play and What is Going on Here?
 

torture
 

Your dim law school memories are better than mine, apparently, and I have less intervening time as an excuse.

Bilmore Outed?
 

I would be willing to put my hours worked per year up against that guy's.

Although I would like to know how to get the job he describes....

frivolous lawsuits
 

The thing that gets me about the tort reform crowd is that their attention is horribly misdirected. The major frivolous costs to society are not in personal injury and med mal, where at least there is an injured person being compensated, even if we feel sometimes excessively.

The big drain is the class action bar. The miniscule injury that gets blown out of proportion due to lawyer with no clients and nothing but a fat contingency on their mind. Not to mention the possibility of punitive (products liability) and treble (antitrust damages). And then there is Milberg...

Anyone have more information on this:

• The new movement has urgency: Because of a December court ruling, Johnsson and other attorneys contend, women convicted of indecent exposure [toplessness] could find themselves listed as sex offenders under Megan's Law, alongside rapists and child molesters.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...=la-home-local

Nope. Although I am curious about why this has such urgency for you.....

All the better to see me, my dear.

you know how a Megan's law guy on a street normally hurts property values? Well this might actually increase them, you know?

How Will This Play and What is Going on Here?
 

The last time I posted on politics, I think I posted the precursor to this. Basically, google "abortion" and "Roemer" in the google news section and you'll get the background over the last 6 weeks. Lots of surprising names come up in support of tolerance on the position.

I'm not positive, but I think part of the impetus was Kerry's people saying he was surprised at the number of conflicted D constituents who would be a lot less conflicted if the party's position was a bit less strident on this issue.

And then there is the pro-life D Senate minority leader. Its gonna be interesting to see who comes out as the DNC chair.

Hello

Empty promises... the story of my life...