Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Report from Louisiana: Why no tort reform?

Posted: January 27, 2020 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
Tags: ,

By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – You can not drive down any highway in Louisiana without being inundated with billboards encouraging you to sue someone. On I-20 heading into Texas you see a lot of “Truck Wreck?” billboards and as you go down south, along I-49 you see the same but also oil field accident billboards and maritime accident billboards.

Trial lawyers are in high cotton in Louisiana.

We need tort reform in the worst way. We pay the second highest auto insurance rates in the nation and trust me, it is crippling.

The litigation-happy environment in Louisiana is also crippling business and growth.

One series of billboards is particularly offensive to me in that they quote Bible verses (Matthew 5:5-9, for example), again, encouraging one to sue.

Even still, tort reform doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s agenda in the state legislature. Why is that? One answer: John Bel Edwards, himself a trial lawyer and with many cronies who are trial lawyers who have donated heavily to his war chest.

Attempts to introduce tort reform have gone nowhere. One example:

Last year, State Sen. Sharon Hewitt, a Slidell Republican, introduced a bill ridding the state of the seat belt gag law. Her bill would allow as evidence the role not wearing a seat belt played in the litigant’s injuries. The bill never made it to Gov. John Bel Edwards’ desk. Then Senate President and Republican in name only John Alario stacked the Senate Judiciary Committee with trial lawyers guaranteeing tort reform legislation died in committee. This saved Edwards the embarrassment of having to veto a bill that would have lowered insurance premiums for so many.

Good old John Alario who has been in control of the legislature for longer than some of you have been alive is retiring now, so will things change?

Dan Fagan from The Advocate:

It’s clear personal injury lawyers have more clout than the rest of us with those running our state. But it’s unfair to put this all on Edwards. The governor could very well bend to public pressure to lower insurance premiums and sign a tort reform bill if one were ever to make it to his desk. Favoring his big-money attorney donors over Louisiana motorists doesn’t go well with his campaign slogan, “people over politics.” But the Republican-controlled legislature hasn’t sent Edwards any tort reform legislation. Alario is gone. Republicans are running out of excuses…. In the House, Republican Clay Schexnayder has cut a deal with Edwards and Democrats to win his speakership. Did he promise to keep tort reform legislation off the governor’s desk? If tort reform doesn’t make it to the governor this year, we’ll know why. Enough Republicans like things just the way they are. High insurance premiums and all.

The regular legislative session convenes in March.

Meanwhile, we will have to put up with these absurd billboards for a while longer.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

How left wing hackery killed Doctor Who…

Posted: January 26, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized

…in 1989. (orig posted feb 10 2010)

Sylvester McCoy, the actor who played Doctor Who for two years in the 1980s, has revealed that left-wing scriptwriters hired by the BBC wrote propaganda into the plots in an attempt to undermine Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.

Shades of the Adventures of Robin Hood circa 1955:

“The idea of bringing politics into Doctor Who was deliberate, but we had to do it very quietly and certainly didn’t shout about it,” said McCoy.

“We were a group of politically motivated people and it seemed the right thing to do. At the time Doctor Who used satire to put political messages out there in the way they used to do in places like Czechoslovakia. Our feeling was that Margaret Thatcher was far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered. Those who wanted to see the messages saw them; others, including one producer, didn’t.”

And the Doctor wasn’t alone in this belief:

Sophie Aldred, who played Ace, the Doctor’s feminist companion, said a shared contempt for right-wing ideology had inspired “a real bonding process” for cast and crew.

“Thatcher was our prime minister and we weren’t happy,” she said.

Well of course they weren’t, after all you had people like Sakharov repressed not to mention people shot trying to cross the wall. Thatcher had much to answer for, oh wait that was East Germany and the Soviets the people Thatcher was opposing wasn’t it?

Well it didn’t matter after all it wasn’t as if a leftist tilt would kill a British institution that had existed for 26 years…oh wait:

However, ratings slumped from a high of 16m, when Tom Baker was the Doctor a decade earlier, to 3m and the show was taken off air twice: in 1986-7 by Michael Grade, then the director of programmes — who said it had “no redeeming features” — and again in 1989, two years after Grade had left the BBC.

Ah the joys of the left managing to make a British institution so unpalatable that it could not survive. One interesting thing to note, You see that same tilt in a few of the 7th doctor audios such as The Fearmonger. I wonder if this will come up in some of the commentaries?


Update: I just realized that I neglected to give the deserved hat tip to Life Dr. Who and Combom. Very much my bad.

The Pro-Life movement needs to expand

Posted: January 25, 2020 by ng36b in Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,
President Trump at the 2020 March for Life. From denvercatholic.org

The March for Life, despite featuring President Trump as the main speaker, was nearly buried in the Google News Feed this morning. While I was digging details out of the different articles, it became very obvious that different language was used by different sides to describe each other.

For example, NPR’s headline reads:

Trump Speaks At March For Life, An Anti-Abortion Rights Demonstration

A local ABC station out of Pennsylvania had:

Locals Head to Historic March for Life in Washington D.C.

It wasn’t hard to see why. The NPR article linked Trump and being “anti-abortion.” Its deliberately linking him to opposing something, which is a negative. We are hard wired to have issues with negative people. If you sit around someone who is whining a lot, you get tired of it. The ABC station has a positive link, with people headed to something “historic” that features “life.”

It’s not just these two headlines. A search of CNN revealed the top headline as:

At March for Life, Trump shows he gets the power of abortion issue

…focused here on Trump wanting power. And Huffpost, never dissapointing me, posted this:

Trump To Attend Anti-Abortion March For Life In Person, Group Says

…insisting on inserting the “anti” portion, removing the President’s title and only saying he’s “attending,” a passive action.

This sounds like semantics. And who cares what others say? But its important, because it frames discussions we have with people. I see it when my kids tell me what their teachers push at their classrooms. I hear it when people bring up different subjects. Every conversation starts from a person’s level of understanding, and that, too often, comes from how they read an article. The article’s title often primes a reader to read it in a certain way. And if the person simply browses the title, even worse.

Although pro-life movements have made a lot of ground, they have an uphill battle against the media. They will have to change to continue to expand, especially when President Trump eventually leaves. Conveniently, Democrats have made abortion a binary issue to be in the party, and essentially no Democrat can openly support the pro-life movement. But abortion, which is a key issue for many conservatives, isn’t so for many liberal voters.

To change that, the pro-life movement should frame its movement as a scientific one, add adoption reform and also push for expanded maternity leave.

Any browsing of pro-life pictures will inevitably feature a christian cross, and likely reference the Catholic Church. That’s not a bad thing, but with so many young people not identifying with a religion, it will only serve to put the movement in a corner. Pro-life organizations should focus on adding lots of scientists to their numbers. Focus on how advances in science enable us to save babies when they are tiny. The fact that babies at the 22-24 week point can live outside the womb is a powerful scientific advancement that nobody can argue with. Seeing pictures of these children in the NICU is powerful imagery. An ultrasound picture can never compare to this. Doing this begins to make the pro-life movement the movement best linked to science, and adds further legitimacy.

Adoption reform would be an easy add to the pro-life movement. I know several people that have navigated the adoption process, and it is sad when its easier to adopt a baby from Africa than from the US. How can we call ourselves a modern society when we run good families through the ringer, especially financially, to adopt a child that needs a good home? Making adoption easier complements the pro-life movement, removing one more reason to kill a growing child. This is an easy vilification of an antiquated process, a reform that is needed, and a chance to add people who are on the fence about abortion into the pro-life movement.

While the media continues to paint pro-life as the “anti-woman” movement, the last easy win for the pro-life movement would be to advocate for maternity leave reform. More women are working outside the home, but struggle to balance having a family with a career. Children should be breast feeding for at least six months and require a lot of attention during that time. Giving women that opportunity, and finding a way to not punish businesses for that (perhaps some tax incentives?) is another great way to both remove pro-life opposition and bring more people to the pro-life side.

It’s sad when our modern society has to fight for basics like the right to live, but its a fight that should be fought.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

It’s Time to Play “Name that Speaker”

Posted: January 24, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Yes it’s time once again to play Name that Speaker where you the reader are given a quote by us the bloggers and invite you to Name that Speaker:

Our quote today comes via former Newspaperman Don Surber quoting a Washington Examiner Piece and is from a person whose face most Americans would recognize instantly but it’s now ifor YOU to read a quote from that person and without any other clue, NAME THAT SPEAKER:

Today’s quote:

I think the Democrats make a mistake when they cry outrage time and time again. If everything is an outrage, then nothing is an outrage.”

Who could that speaker be? Is it Lindsay Graham? It it Donald Trump Jr. Is it Rush Limbaugh? Well all you have to do is click on the More button and you can find out if your guess is correct:

(more…)
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