THE WEIRS TIMES, Thursday, July 15, 2010
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PARASITIC TORT LAWYERS Tort lawyers lie.
by John Stossel Syndicated Columnist
They say their product liability suits are good for us. But their law- suits rarely make our lives better. They make law- yers and a few of their clients bet- ter off -- but for the majority of
us, they make life much worse. Years back, as one of Ameri-
ca’s first consumer reporters, I’d avenge harmed consumers by bringing cameras to the offend- ing business and confronting the crooks. My work warned others about the dangers in the market- place but didn’t do much for the victims. So I thought about those per-
sonal injury lawyers. They could do more good -- they could sue bad companies, force them to change and get the victims money. I started referring hurt consumers to lawyers. Imagine my shock when con-
sumers called to say their lawyers took most of the money! Even when the lawyers do help
their clients, they hurt everyone else because fear of their lawsuits takes away many good things: Swimming pools, playgrounds and gymnastics programs close because liability insurance is so expensive. Kids lose their favorite places to hang out in the sum- mer. More importantly, innovators
dump potentially life-saving inven- tions. Companies that started work on a safer asbestos substitute, an
SURRENDER AT THE BORDER GEORGETOWN,
by Oliver North Syndicated Columnist
S.C. -- My Fox News baseball hat and sun- glasses no lon- ger work as a disguise here in the Carolina Lowcountry. As I stepped out of the Kudzu Bak- ery this morn- ing, a fellow ear-
ly-morning shopper accosted me with an accusation and an inqui- sition: “You’re from Washington. What the devil are those people up there thinking?” Unwilling to accept responsibility
for what passes for governance in the federal city and unsure what had raised the ire of my acquain- tance, I conceded that we live in Virginia and that I am indeed “based” at Fox News’ Washington bureau. Nonetheless, I demurred at being held accountable for the misdeeds or malfeasance of the potentates on the Potomac. As it turned out, my interlocu-
tor was a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate, now a commercial airline pilot from Tennessee. He’s here be- cause his family’s Florida vacation plans were wrecked by the as-yet unresolved Gulf oil spill. But that wasn’t the singular source of his frustration. “It’s bad enough that
these clowns can’t figure out how to stop oil from flooding over a beach in Florida, but suing Ari- zona because they tried to stop il- legal aliens from flooding into their state is just plain crazy.” And just to make sure I got the point, he added: “Yesterday we took our kids to Charleston. We went to The Citadel and out to the point where they fired on Fort Sumter in 1861. I’m a ‘damned Yankee.’ I be- lieve slavery was evil. But the way our government is acting today, I think I understand why the South seceded.” That’s strong stuff from an edu-
cated man who took an oath to “support and defend the Constitu- tion of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and who served our country in uniform. The April 12-13, 1861, bombardment of Fort Sumter he referred to began the bloodiest confrontation in American history. Academics still debate whether President James Buchanan and his successor, Abraham Lincoln, could have prevented the cata- clysm over states’ rights. Sadly, the Obama administration, by ineptness or design, seems intent on enflaming similar disputes through repeated assertions of federal “authority.” Last year, when the government See NORTH on 32
by Thomas Sowell Syndicated Columnist
AIDS vaccine and a Lyme disease vaccine gave up the research be- cause any work in those areas risked stirring up the lawyers. The liability risk was too great. It’s why I’ve come to think of
lawyers the way I think about nuclear missiles. We need them to keep us safe. But we avoid using missiles because we understand the collateral damage they do. We ought to avoid lawyers for the same reason.
Look at health care. The lawyers
claim they punish bad doctors and win compensation for in- jured patients, and their suits add “less than 2 percent to the cost.” But there is another side to that story. Dr. Manny Alvarez, chairman
of obstetrics at Hackensack Uni- versity Medical Center, points out that 1 or 2 percent is just the di- rect cost. The indirect costs are far
See STOSSEL on 44
SANTA AND FRANK People who
remember the old comic strip “Peanuts” will recall an often repeated situa- tion where Lucy offers to hold a football for Charlie Brown to kick. Then, as Char l i e comes run-
ning up to kick it, Lucy snatches away the ball and Charlie Brown loses his balance and goes crash- ing on his backside. The reason this same scene re- mained funny, despite how often it was repeated, is that in the later repetitions Charlie Brown would express suspicion at Lucy, recalling how she had tricked him before. She would then come up with some claim that she wasn’t going to do that any more-- and of course she did. There is a similar routine that
has been repeated many times in Washington, over the years, with the Democrats playing Lucy and Republicans playing Charlie Brown. It goes like this: Democrats
start spending money wildly, handing out goodies to a wide range of people who they want to vote for them, while Republicans complain about deficits and the national debt. Then, when the public becomes alarmed about the debts that are piling up, the Democrats get the Republicans to vote for higher taxes to deal with the debt crisis, in the name of “fiscal responsibility.” Sometimes the deal is sweet- ened by the Democrats promis-
ing to make spending cuts if the Republicans vote for higher taxes, so that there can be one of those “bipartisan” solutions so beloved by the media. But, after the Republicans vote for the tax increases, and come running up to find the spending cuts, the Democrats snatch away the spending cuts and the Republi- cans fall right on their backsides, just like Charlie Brown. This old trick is now being un- veiled by the Obama administra- tion, like so many other old politi- cal tricks used in this “change” administration. In one of President Obama’s
many prissy little sermonettes, complete with finger wagging, he has declared: “Next year when I start presenting some very dif- ficult choices to the country, I hope some of these folks who are hollering about deficits step up. Because I’m calling their bluff.” There is already a bipartisan commission set to provide politi- cal cover for the Democrats’ wild spending that has increased the national debt from 63 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product in 2004 to 83 percent in 2009-- and official estimates of more than 90 percent this year, with more increases in sight. Why Republicans join such
transparent attempts to rescue the Democrats from the political consequences of their own ac- tions is one of the many unsolved mysteries of human nature in general and the Republican Party in particular. What this political game boils
down to is that Democrats get all the political benefits of playing See SOWELL on 35
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