For those who believe our government has become a bad parody of itself, you now have proof. As noted by WTOP, Saturday Night Live featured a skit in which Kate McKinnon portrayed Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius speaking about the problems in registering for health care. In the skit, faux Sebelius notes that the website is visited by millions but is designed to only handle six people at a time. However, the media is reporting that in the first 24 hours, only six users were able to enroll of 4.7 million visitors. In the meantime, the Administration is delaying the release of enrollment figures while contractors are blaming Administration officials for the lack of testing and negligence supervision of the system.
Continue reading “Six Down, Three Hundred Million To Go: SNL Skit May Have Predicted The Actual Enrollment Figures For Obamacare”
Category: Society
The Virginia Supreme Court waited for Halloween to release a truly scary ruling where it overturned a jury verdict to families of the victims of the 2007 shooting massacre at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. We have previously discussed the absurd state cap on such verdicts which led to the reduction of the award to $100,000 for each family — an insulting amount of reduced damages that eliminated the deterrent impact of such legal judgments. Now the Virginia Supreme Court has gone further and wiped out the remaining award on the ground that Virginia Tech had no duty to warn the students despite national condemnation of the university for gross negligence before and during the shooting spree by student gunman Seung-Hui Cho.
Continue reading “Virginia Supreme Court Reverses Award Against Virginia Tech From 2007 Shootings”
While the public polls show a public disgusted with the two party duopoly on power and demanding change, the same figures are emerging as the choices for the next president. The most obvious is Hillary Clinton who is reportedly positioning herself now as a candidate of change — a curious role for one of the most establishment figures on the political scene. The other leading candidate is Joe Biden who has been a source of continued gaffs as Vice President and viewed as the other leading candidate of establishment interests. However, there is an effort to reinvent Clinton who supported various wars under Bush and Obama and did little to stop torture and surveillance programs. Indeed, the new MSNBC host Ronan Farrow has proclaimed that the “Clintons represent a style of honesty that the public craves.” Farrow does not appear to remember Bill Clinton’s public and sworn denials in the Lewinsky affair or other scandals. Indeed, the new Hillary Clinton is already attracting the type of influence seekers associated with the two parties. Just this last month, Goldman Sachs gave Clinton almost a half of million dollars for just two speeches in one week. The event is made more curious by fact that speech was described as “prepared remarks” followed by limited questions. It is doubtful that Clinton informed Goldman Sachs of anything other than the most predictable remarks from a politician — not some critical re-orientation of their investment strategy. UPDATE: Chuck Schumer has already endorsed Clinton to be the next president.
Happy Halloween to all of the ghostly regulars of the Turley Blog! Despite the theory that Halloween is just a cry for help from my rotting soul, I love this holiday and the house is covered with our annual display of skeletons, webs, and spooky items. Our 8 foot pumpkin/witch joined the land of the spirits after ten years on upper balcony. (I found her hanging, deflated on the side of the house after returning from Tennessee last week). After a panicked run out to a distant rural county, I was able to secure a 7 foot talking witch who now oversees our cemetery scene with rising ghouls and a witch coven (with cracking caldron). It looks pretty cool with floating ghosts, flying witches, and a moving black cat among the tombstones.
Continue reading “Happy Halloween!!!”
Here is our annual list of Halloween torts and crimes. This holiday remains a favorite for personal injury lawyers around the world and this year’s additions show why. Of course, with Sandy, our area is already looking pretty spooky with downed trees and tattered exteriors.
So, with no further ado, here is this year’s annual Spooky Torts list of actual cases from Halloween (with our past winners).
Continue reading “Spooky Torts: The 2013 List Of Halloween Litigation Horrors”
In Franklin County, Tennessee, children may want to avoid the house of Dale Bryant Farris, 65, this Halloween . . . or houses near him. Bryant was arrested after shooting a 15-year-old boy who was with kids toilet-papering their principal’s front yard. Bryant came out of his house a couple of houses down from the home of Principal Ken Bishop and allegedly fired at least two blasts — one hitting a 15-year-old boy in the right foot, inner left knee, right palm, right thigh and right side of his torso above the waistline.
For those ghosts and goblins heading out tonight, the blog wants to offer useful legal and practical guidelines for the risk averse as well as the wealth maximizing readers. The wonderful video below on how to trade candy falls into the latter category.
Below is today’s column in USA Today in which I discuss the increasing revenue acquired through car searches and seizures. Some of these stops are thinly disguised drug checkpoints where a sobriety stop quickly turns to questions about drugs and drug money. Police are using pretextual stops and DUI stops as a way to circumvent the Supreme Court decision in City of Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U.S. 32 (2000), where the Court drew the line at drug checkpoints and ruled that such stops were unreasonable even though it ruled a few years earlier that DUI checkpoints were reasonable. The DUI ruling was denounced as an all-to-familiar ruling from the Court which abandons principle for convenient compromises. Many warned the Court that it was placing the country on a slippery slope where road blocks would be thrown up around the country in the name of fighting drunk driving while searching for other things. The Court ignored the warnings and soon roadblocks appeared across the country. There is admittedly limited data on such practices but there is sufficient antedoctal evidence to raise a concern of the emerging pattern.
Law professors at Cleveland-Marshall are alleging Dean Craig Boise has crossed the line from the merely sarcastic to the outright satanic in issuing $666 raises to professors who were members of a labor bargaining unit. While others received raises of $5,000 or $3,000, the six professors who were union organizers received the increases that reflected the “sign of the beast.”
The Dallas Safari Club has come up with its own version of the Gourmet Club featured in the hilarious comedy The Freshman. However, rather than pay to eat one of the last animals of an endangered species, the Dallas Safari Club is auctioning off the right to shoot one of the most endangered animals in the world: a black rhino. The auction is being done in conjunction with the Republic of Namibia to sacrifice one of 5,055 remaining rhinos to raise money. Thus, ostensibly to raise money to protect the rhinos from continued illegal hunting, Namibia and the Club are advertising the thrill of shooting of an endangered rhino.
Continue reading “Dallas Safari Club To Auction Off Right To Shoot An Endangered Black Rhino”
There are news reports out this morning on a new poll stating that “76 percent of Americans are True Believers.” However, I find it more remarkable that basically one-fourth of Americans said that they do not believe in God. Given the continued lure of faith-based politics, it is remarkable that atheists and agnostics still have so little influence on politicians. There are few groups that can claim one out of four Americans and yet politicians continue to denounce those who do not believe in God. That includes people who simply say that they do not know one way or the other. The poll has some other interesting facts.
NSA documents released by Edward Snowden have revealed years of false statements by the government, the capture of calls and emails from every citizen, the monitoring of tens of millions of people globally, the surveillance of world leaders including close allies, and the perjury by National Intelligence Director James Clapper. It has caused the Obama Administration — after denials of violations — to admit violations of U.S. laws and abuse of surveillance powers. Now General Keith Alexander, NSA director, says enough. We simply cannot stand any more disclosures of wrongdoing so Alexander wants to see actions taken against the media to prevent further disclosures.
There is a troubling story outside of Washington where journalist Audrey Hudson’s home was searched by federal agents who took documents related to stories and reportedly asked her about stories that she had written that were critical of the Federal Air Marshal program. The agents had a warrant to search for unregistered firearms and a “potato gun.” That apparently required a pre-dawn raid by armed agents of the U.S. Coast Guard, Maryland State Police and the Department of Homeland Security. Presumably, the family was believed to have a whole bushel of potatoes that were considered an arsenal.
We have another trademark fight where a major company demands the sole right to a common feature or phrase or lettering. In this case, it is Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey that is going after the small distiller of Popcorn Sutton’s Tennessee White Whiskey. The objection is that the white whiskey named for a famed Appalachian moonshiner is using a square-shaped bottling with similar labeling that looks like the square-shaped bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
As the world joins in opposition to the U.S. attack on privacy worldwide, President Barack Obama has to face awkward meetings with world leaders of allied countries who were subjects of his surveillance. Some reports have stated that Obama personally approved the monitoring of Angela Merkel’s telephone three years ago. Now, the National Security Agency (NSA) is insisting that Obama did not order the monitoring personally. I am not sure what is worse: that Obama ordered interceptions of allied leaders like Merkel or that the surveillance state is so large that functionaries now have the discretion to order such surveillance. Merkel may not find it as more assuring that Obama didn’t order her monitoring than the notion such she is just another target delegated to discretion of lower level officials. It is also not clear if Mike Rogers is going to suggest that Merkel should also thank us for the monitoring.
Continue reading “U.S. To Merkel: Don’t Worry A Functionary Ordered Your Surveillance”