"A Manhattan jury on Tuesday found former President Donald J. Trump liable for the sexual abuse of the magazine writer E. Jean Carroll..."

The NYT reports.

The jury has found that Carroll did not prove Trump raped her, but they did determine that he had sexually abused her. The jurors also found that Trump had defamed Carroll when he called her accusations false. They awarded her $5 million damages....

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said that for the jury to establish that Trump raped Carroll, she had to prove that Trump engaged in sexual intercourse with her, and that he did it without her consent. The judge said that sexual intercourse includes “any penetration of the penis into the vaginal opening.”...

This means that the jury did not believe part of her testimony. They somehow found her story credible enough to believe partially but not totally. Was this a compromise verdict? 

"Courts have long recognized that reporters are entitled to engage in legal and ordinary news-gathering activities without fear of tort liability — as these actions are at the very core of protected first amendment activity,."

Wrote the trial judge, Justice Robert R. Reed (State Supreme Court in Manhattan), quoted in "Judge Dismisses Trump’s Lawsuit Against The New York Times/Former President Donald J. Trump, who had sued The Times, three of its reporters and his niece over an investigation into his tax returns, was ordered to pay The Times’s legal expenses" (NYT).

Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander said: "It is an important precedent reaffirming that the press is protected when it engages in routine news gathering to obtain information of vital importance to the public." 

Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, said they'd "weigh" his "options," but not specifically whether he'd appeal, and they continue to assert that the Times "went well beyond the conventional news-gathering techniques permitted by the First Amendment."

Whoa! My bad law talk alarm went off! Don't say "permitted by the First Amendment."

The Times was free to do what it did unless there's some valid law that forbids it. Trump made a claim that what the Times did was not permitted because it violated tort law. If he was wrong about that and no tort law or other law was violated, then what the Times did would be permitted, regardless of constitutional law. Fortunately, the First Amendment protects against encroachments on freedom of speech and freedom of the press that might occur if tort law limits what is permitted. If. If tort law or other law doesn't limit, then you don't need permission from the First Amendment. The First Amendment is the defense against encroachment, not the source of permission!

I like the quote from Justice Reed because it's precise about the role of the First Amendment: It relieves us of the fear of aggressive interpretations tort law.

"In gold jewelry and luxe-looking riffs on traditional businesslike silhouettes like the suit, cardigan and turtleneck sweater, her hair loose and makeup modest..."

"... Paltrow has effectively split the difference between demure propriety and power glam. She has simultaneously telegraphed two messages that very well could have been at odds: 'Look, I’m just a mom who tried to take her teenagers on a nice ski vacation,' and 'Yes I am wealthy and famous, and I shan’t be wasting my time on this.'... Paltrow’s soft, gentle silhouettes also presented a subtle contrast to the allegation that she had crashed into another skier and then bolted away. On Thursday, Paltrow wore a soft-looking relaxed-fit gray double-breasted suit over a thin scoop-neck shirt of the same color. Friday, when Paltrow sat listening to witness testimony in a collared, dark long-sleeved top with slight puff sleeves, lips pursed and cheekbones jutting, she looked pleasant and non-threatening — if also mildly annoyed to be missing a Goop staff meeting, or a farm-to-table vegan lunch reservation, or a crystal sound bath...."

 
Such are the subjective observations of Ashley Fetters Maloy, writing in WaPo, in  "At trial, Gwyneth Paltrow is dressing for where she’d rather be/The Goop founder’s clothes have telegraphed two messages at once: She was just a regular mom on a ski vacation, and she is too famous to waste her time on this." 

The question in the case is who skied into whom — that is, who was uphill. The plaintiff sued Paltrow for $3 million, but it got reduced to $300,000. Why didn't she just settle? She counterclaimed for $1 plus attorney's fees. I think it's because she's telling the truth.

I watched this clip of her testimony on TikTok, and I predict she'll win — as one commenter says, "I'm with bone broth lady":

"It’s an exceptional bridge, and they should keep it like this. Beauty must save the world"/"We can’t always do poetry. We must give security"/"A Venetian would have never built such nonsense"/"That is not a bridge."

Quotes from "Venice Gets a Grip on a Star Architect’s Slippery Bridge/The city will replace the glass on Santiago Calatrava’s footbridge across the Grand Canal with stone after too many pedestrians fell" (NYT). 

Calatrava is not a Venetian. He was born in Spain. Apparently, there's a notion that Venetians do not design impractical — dangerous? — things.

According to one person who fell — "like a bag of potatoes" — Calatrava "ruined the most beautiful years of my old age."

I didn't watch Trump's interview with Chris Wallace, but I'll read the transcript.

Why didn't I watch?! I told myself to watch, but I did not. I've turned away from watching the news on television. It's becoming a real aversion. I prefer to get my information from reading, so let's look at this transcript. I'll just do a few excepts, I think:

WALLACE: But -- but this isn't burning embers, sir? This is a forest fire.

TRUMP: No, no. But I don't say -- I say flames, we'll put out the flames. And we'll put out in some cases just burning embers. We also have burning embers. We have embers and we do have flames. Florida became more flame like....

Ugh. They're debating about the metaphor — the ember/flame distinction.

They don't talk about Mexico.... But you take a look, why don't they talk about Mexico? Which is not helping us. And all I can say is thank God I built most of the wall, because if I didn't have the wall up we would have a much bigger problem with Mexico....

He wants to tell you about this wall he built "most of."

They have a dispute about how high the "mortality rate" is in the United States. I think that means the number of deaths in proportion to the population (not in proportion to the number of detected cases), and the website I look at puts the U.S. in 10th place. Wallace said we were in 7th place. Trump asserts, "I think we have one of the lowest mortality rates in the world." That's just wrong and Wallace tells him so. Trump doubles down, "I heard we have one of the lowest, maybe the lowest mortality rate anywhere in the world."

That sound crazily wrong, but he might be thinking the "mortality rate" is the ratio of deaths to cases. We do so much testing that we get a very high number of cases, and that causes the percent who die to look very low. Trump asks Kayleigh to get the numbers and insists, "I heard we had the best mortality rate... number one low mortality rate." Knowing this disarray looks bad, he says: "I hope you show the scenario because it shows what fake news is all about." Ridiculous to attack Chris Wallace like that, to call him "fake news" to his face.

"The mountains of studies Partridge cites place the scientific consensus about the lack of a link between glyphosate and cancer on par with the vast evidence demonstrating the safety of GMOs generally and with the overwhelming consensus that manmade factors cause climate change."

From "Rounding Up the Science Behind the Monsanto Glyphosate Ruling/'Irrational and even hysterical' reporting about glyphosate has served to poison the well of public opinion, says one researcher" (Reason).

Why didn't Maureen Dowd's article on Uma Thurman explain what happened to Thurman's legal claim over the car crash (which is portrayed as Quentin Tarantino's fault)?

Yesterday afternoon, I put up a post about the first half of Maureen Dowd's article about Uma Thurman, which is about Thurman's accusations against Harvey Weinstein, but I only flagged "the strange story about the car crash."

Dowd has an amusing way of writing, but sometimes it seems as though she's got a technique for obscuring questions and omitting information. This article is especially puzzling. First, why didn't Dowd stick with the Harvey Weinstein story? Dowd mentions at one point that she's talking to Thurman at 3 a.m. on the second day of the interview. What didn't make the cut? In yesterday's post, I highlighted quotes from Thurman that showed — even though the headline called Thurman "angry" — that Thurman had "complicated" feelings that included what sounded to me like guilt over allowing other women to fall into Weinstein's clutches. Where is the depth of analysis on this subject?  

Halfway through, the article switches to the topic of a car crash that occurred in the making of the movie "Kill Bill." Here, the villain is Quentin Tarantino (whose name does not appear in the article title or subtitle, which promise to give us the story of Thurman's outrage at Weinstein). The problem with Tarantino has nothing to do with sexual harassment or even anything personal. It's completely professional: Tarantino the director was a taskmaster who talked her into driving a car down a dirt road at 40 miles per hour when she wanted a stuntperson to do it:

“Quentin came in my trailer and didn’t like to hear no, like any director,” she says. “He was furious because I’d cost them a lot of time. But I was scared. He said: ‘I promise you the car is fine. It’s a straight piece of road.’” He persuaded her to do it, and instructed: “ ‘Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won’t blow the right way and I’ll make you do it again.’ But that was a deathbox that I was in. The seat wasn’t screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road.” (Tarantino did not respond to requests for comment.)

There is embedded video at the link — film shot from the back of the car — showing Thurman attempting to control the car and driving it into a palm tree.

“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” she says. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again,’” she says. “When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”

Clearly, Thurman had grounds for a lawsuit, and we're not told when Thurman got a lawyer and how the lawyer initially interacted with the production company Miramax. Dowd employs a jump cut, straight to this:

Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, she had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue.

So there's already a lawyer. It's 2 weeks later, and they'd like the footage, but everyone knows of the potential for an expensive lawsuit (and the need to keep Thurman on board finishing the movie and promoting it).

Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document “releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,” she says. She didn’t.

Signing a document and paying a settlement? Obviously, the footage is evidence in the lawsuit, so if the lawsuit is not settled, the footage will come out in discovery, so what happened? Dowd says absolutely nothing and just makes it sound as though Thurman and Tarantino had a long personal struggle:

Thurman says her mind meld with Tarantino was rattled. “We were in a terrible fight for years,” she explains. “We had to then go through promoting the movies. It was all very thin ice. We had a fateful fight at Soho House in New York in 2004 and we were shouting at each other because he wouldn’t let me see the footage and he told me that was what they had all decided.”

Her mind meld with Tarantino was rattled??? There was a lawyer in the picture. When you're suing somebody or threatening to sue somebody it's not a matter of a rattling mind meld! Rattled mind meld sounds funny, and tort lawyers in car-crash cases sound dull. It's like Dowd is swerving us into a palm tree because continuing to drive at 40 miles an hour down the dirt road isn't interesting. But what the hell happened? A lawyer dropped in, but get that guy out of here! Bring back Tarantino! Here's an exciting sceen: Soho House, shouting, a fateful fight!

Lest you think about the boring lawyer, here's a very long sentence. See if you can read it. It may cause you not to think about the other question that could be nagging you — why does Thurman's old grievance about a moviemaking car accident and a mysterious settled/not-settled lawsuit belong in an article about what Thurman knows about the sexual harassment reckoning and Harvey Weinstein? Here, read:

Now, so many years after the accident, inspired by the reckoning on violence against women, reliving her own “dehumanization to the point of death” in Mexico, and furious that there have not been more legal repercussions against Weinstein, Thurman says she handed over the result of her own excavations to the police and ramped up the pressure to cajole the crash footage out of Tarantino.

Dowd's answer to my question is: The Reckoning reminded Thurman of this other dispute she has with Miramax. It can be portrayed as similar because it happened to her body, but one story is about a man who (she says) intentionally imposed sexual violence on her body, and the other is about a different man who (at most) meant no harm but was a link in a causal chain that ended with her crashing a car into a tree.

I would add that the stories are also similar in that evidence remained suppressed for years, but one involves Thurman herself declining to go public with accusations (and herself becoming causally connected to the sexual abuse of other women), and the other involves film footage that was relevant to a subject that Maureen Dowd is hiding from us: the at-least-threatened lawsuit over the crash.

“Quentin finally atoned by giving it to me after 15 years, right?” she says. “Not that it matters now, with my permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees.”

Atoned? I'm assuming Miramax suppressed it as the lawsuit progressed — "permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees" means, in lawyer talk, very high damages. Thurman had a lawyer, threatening a lawsuit, so it wasn't a personal relationship anymore.

And I wonder what's going on now. Is Thurman still trying to collect damages and using Dowd and the NYT? Is there a pending lawsuit? Why didn't her lawyer get the footage years ago in the normal (and very boring!) process of discovery?

This drama about Tarantino atoning himself — unrattling the mind meld — by turning over the footage is offered for our amusement, but to me it's ridiculous, because I'm seeing this phantom lawsuit and wondering whether that's the main thing going on now.

As she sits by the fire on a second night when we talk until 3 a.m., tears begin to fall down her cheeks. She brushes them away.

“When they turned on me after the accident,” she says, “I went from being a creative contributor and performer to being like a broken tool.”

So there's Dowd, lured into Thurman's "elegant apartment in River House on Manhattan’s East Side" by the promise of a story about Harvey Weinstein's sexual abuse (and, perhaps, Thurman's complicity in the abuse of other women), and what Thurman wants is something else entirely — to go on about a tort case.

“Harvey assaulted me but that didn’t kill me,” she says. “What really got me about the crash was that it was a cheap shot. I had been through so many rings of fire by that point. I had really always felt a connection to the greater good in my work with Quentin and most of what I allowed to happen to me and what I participated in was kind of like a horrible mud wrestle with a very angry brother. But at least I had some say, you know?” She says she didn’t feel disempowered by any of it. Until the crash.

"Mike is a deep believer in the idea that 'kids have to find their own balance of power.'"

"He wants his boys to create their own society governed by its own rules. He consciously transformed his family’s house into a kid hangout, spreading the word that local children were welcome to play in the yard anytime, even when the family wasn’t home. Discontented with the expensive, highly structured summer camps typical of the area, Mike started one of his own: Camp Yale, named after his street, where the kids make their own games and get to roam the neighborhood."

From "The Anti-Helicopter Parent’s Plea: Let Kids Play!/A Silicon Valley dad decided to test his theories about parenting by turning his yard into a playground where children can take physicalrisks without supervision. Not all of his neighbors were thrilled" by Melanie Thernstrom in the NYT Magazine.

What about lawsuits?

Mike tells me that people sometimes ask him if he is afraid of lawsuits in the event of an injury on his property. He would never let fear of being sued dictate how he lives his life, he says.

What about second-degree manslaughter, I asked: an accident enabled by negligence, if, say, another child — or even one of his own — broke his neck leaping from the playhouse onto the trampoline. (Unenclosed trampolines are a staple of personal-injury law; an estimated 85,000 children under 14 were hurt on trampolines last year.) Does he ever worry about that?

He flashed me a look, then snorted with laughter.

I guess for an adult, living without fear of lawsuits is like, for a child, climbing up on a playhouse roof and jumping off onto a trampoline. Are you going to live or not? 

Corey Lewandowski — who got into so much trouble touching a woman — tells a woman "Don’t touch me."

Here's a reminder of what Lewandowski did that got him arrested for touching a woman. The situation involved a female reporter getting at Trump and Lewandowski's brusqueness in moving her away. In the end, he was not charged.

The woman in this new video clip is former New York Assembly Speaker Christine Quinn. After expressing her empathy with Ghazala Khan, she gets very emotional when Lewandowski attempts to take a turn speaking. Lewandowski calmly says "You’ve got to relax a little bit," which flips Quinn out.

Compare the time Lewandowski touched a woman to this woman's touching Lewandowski.

The old touching was wrong, this touching was OK, and I'm not saying that based on gender.

The old touching was justified, this touching was wrong, and I'm not saying that based on gender.

The old touching was wrong, and this touching was OK, and I'm saying that based on gender.

The old touching was justified, this touching was wrong, and I'm saying that based on gender.

Both touchings were wrong.

Both touchings were OK.

 

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"I think I'll pass on getting legal advice from a Trump shill. Thanks tho."

Tweeted Michelle Fields — she of the Lewandowski-yanked arm — about Greta Van Susteren, who'd said: "Anyone encouraging this young woman to bring a lawsuit is irresponsible to her."

What really happened in this grope-punch-pepper-spray incident at yesterday's Trump rally in Janesville?

Video and descriptions at USA Today and at The Daily News. And here's the police press release.

The young woman is pepper sprayed, which looks terrible, but she's also seen smacking or trying to smack a man on the head. There's some confusing discussion of "groping." There might be a groping off camera. I've looked at several of the available angles, and I do see 2 hands holding her back, touching her on one shoulder (as she is getting very fervent vocally, aiming the word "fuck" right in the face of the white-haired man).

I'm connecting this incident with the San Francisco State dreadlocks confrontation — blogged here — and the charging of Corey Lewandowski. In the SFSU case, the woman grabs the man, and in the Corey Lewandowski case, the woman is touched only after she touches Donald Trump twice. There seems to be a traditional stereotype at play that ignores or minimizes battery by a female and holds the male responsible to refrain from doing anything physical, even in self-defense. It's an interesting stereotype. Perhaps you support it. The man should never hit the woman, even if she is hitting him. But how does that traditional model work in modern conditions of demanded equality, in which a woman actively participates in a rowdy protest or pursues journalism aggressively or instigates a confrontation with a passing stranger?

About that police officer who has the temerity to sue the estate of the person he killed.

I've got a problem with this NYT headline: "Chicago Officer, Citing Emotional Trauma, Sues Estate of Teenager He Fatally Shot." And this first paragraph, boldface added:

The Chicago police officer who fatally shot a black 19-year-old and an unarmed bystander in December has filed a lawsuit seeking more than $10 million in damages from the teenager’s estate, an unusual legal approach based on a claim that the young man’s actions leading up to the gunfire were “atrocious” and have caused the officer “extreme emotional trauma.”

Sounds unfathomably cruel, doesn't it?

There are 4 more paragraphs, including a statement from the estate's lawyer — "It’s a new low for the Chicago Police Department.... First you shoot them, then you sue them. It’s outrageous. I can’t believe that this police officer has the temerity to turn around and sue the estate of the person who he killed." —  before you get to the real structure of the lawsuit. Paragraph #6:

Officer Rialmo’s lawsuit, filed Friday in Cook County Circuit Court, was a counterclaim to a wrongful death case brought weeks ago by Mr. LeGrier’s estate....

It's a counterclaim! Rialmo didn't file the lawsuit. The lawsuit was filed against him. When someone sues you, you're required to answer, and you are intensely motivated to think through whether you have any counterclaims. In fact, if the defendant has claims against the plaintiff that arise from the same incident, he's forced to assert them now or lose them.

I understand why the estate's lawyer wants to portray this as outrageous, but it's not as if the police officer reached out and dragged this family from its private condition of mourning into the brutality of litigation. The officer — who has his own tragedy (especially having unwittingly killed an innocent bystander) — is (and, in his telling, was) responding defensively.

"I see little difference between a drone hovering near my window, and someone standing across the street with a pair of binoculars."

"Both can peer into my office. But I may be in the minority here. When I mentioned it to my wife, she was outraged by the intrusion and briefly contemplated buying a shotgun, should my neighbor’s drone reappear near our bedroom window. Unlike binoculars, she argued, a drone can actually enter your property and see from more invasive vantage points...."

From a NYT column (in the "Style" section for some reason), "When Your Neighbor’s Drone Pays an Unwelcome Visit." The author, Nick Bilton, refers to a recent Kentucky case in which a judge dismissed charges against a man who shot down a drone that came into his property where his 16-year-old daughter was sunbathing.

Bilton takes a stab at the legal issues, but doesn't get very far. Can you destroy someone else's property when it trespasses into the air above your land? I wrote the question that way to exclude the distinct issue of discharging a firearm. Assume you have a device that catches the drone and you smash it with a hammer or drive your car over it. What if you just capture it and sequester it (or call the police)?

Here's another NYT article about a bill in Congress aimed at regulating drones:

Hobby groups are trying to peel back recreational registration rules, while airline pilots are pushing for more mandates that drone makers like DJI and GoPro put safety technology on machines. Amazon and Google, which want to use drones for delivery, are asking permission to test their technology....

Here's a CNN article from last fall: "Is it OK to shoot down a drone over your backyard?"

[Lawprof Michael Froomkin]... argues that self-defense should be permissible against drones simply because you don't know their capabilities....

And here's an article in The Atlantic: "If I Fly a UAV Over My Neighbor's House, Is It Trespassing?":

Drones -- as flying, seeing objects -- scramble our 2D sense of property boundaries....

"This idea of a reasonable expectation of privacy has always been accepted as the standard and the interface of that privacy right and emerging UAV technology is fascinating," [said aviation lawyer Timothy Ravich]. "There is not an answer. The best we can do is arrive at laws and practices of the then-existing sensibilities of the population."

Ravich said that in 2012, when "the then-existing sensibilities of the population" were whatever existed then. Who knows what the now-existing sensibilities of the population are? Wait a few more years and there won't be any at all.

AND: Those who, like Nick Bilton's wife, care about privacy, tend to appear late in the time line. First come the tech fans with their toys and devices, figuring out new things to do, becoming interested and invested. It's hard for the privacy people even to understand what's going on, let alone jump into the regulatory process and make themselves heard. That's why I cringe at the Ravich's "then-existing sensibilities of the population"... and why, I think, we're seeing the defenders of privacy going for a self-help, self-defense approach.

IN THE COMMENTS: robother said:

I'm always struck by the geeky proposition that because it's a new, cool technology using wifi or the internet, that makes it different, automatically exempt from prior legal categories. Uber isn't gypsy cabs because...it's an app!

Drones are cool tech-toys, so using them to take pictures of neighbors sunbathing in their backyards or taking showers isn't the same as a peeping tom.

Downloading free music from an app isn't the same as stealing a CD from a music store because... The Internet! 

"I am a prince and I do what I want! You are nobody!"

Majed Abdulaziz Al-Saud allegedly yelled at 3 female servants in his mansion near Beverly Hills.

“Perpetrators of abuse often use humiliation, shame and fear to induce silence,” the women’s attorney Van Frish said. “It’s unfortunate that Mr. Al-Saud’s criminal defense attorney publicly accused our clients of a “shakedown” and fabricating their horrifying experience.  Our clients refuse to allow Mr. Al-Saud or his attorneys to humiliate them and publicly shame them into silence.”

The woman who sued her 8-year-old nephew for his reckless hug loses as the jury returns a verdict that "may have hinged on a plate of hors d’oeuvres."

"'We just didn’t think the boy was negligent,' said [a] juror, who declined to be identified as she left the courthouse."

“When you’re talking about young children, you’re talking about a subjective standard - not an objective standard,” [said Quinnipiac University law professor William Dunlap]. “The child is not required to conform his behavior to the way a reasonable adult is expected to behave.”...

Judge Edward Stodolink instructed the jury to consider what a “prudent” 8-year-old boy would have done when his aunt came to his birthday party. “Prudent,” the judge emphasized.

Is there such an animal as a "prudent 8-year-old boy"? I guess it means a boy as prudent as an 8-year-old can be... or is it a child as prudent as an 8-year-old boy can be? I'm not a Connecticut torts professor. I don't know how specific the reasonable person standard can be. Is the jury allow to say, maybe a prudent 8-year-old girl would no better than to leap into the arms of a 50-year-old-aunt, but 8-year-old boys, even at their most nearly prudent, wouldn't know any better than to leap?

But what was the role of the plate of hors d’oeuvres? The linked article is a tad deceptive in its teasing. It wasn't that a plate of hors d’oeuvres was the more proximate cause of the fall that broke the aunt's wrist. It was that the jurors might have been put off by her testimony complaining about the difficulty she still has holding a plate of hors d’oeuvres. I guess she should have envisioned something less snooty on the plate. A plate of cheeseburgers.

ADDED: Isn't "prudent 8-year-old boy" an objective standard?

AND: "The aunt who sued her nephew for damages said that she was forced to do so by Connecticut law when the insurance company only wanted to pay her one dollar."

"Inside the museum, Nader personally escorted bewildered townspeople through the exhibits."

"He stopped in front of the McDonald’s Coffee Cup Case exhibit. 'The lawyers didn’t tell people that McDonald’s kept their coffee that hot for commercial advantage. So it would stay hotter than Burger King’s as you drove along the highway. They’d already gotten seven hundred complaints about the burns.' Nader shook his head and looked at his guest, who nodded. He had changed one mind. He seemed satisfied."

From "Ralph Nader’s Tort Museum" (in The New Yorker), about the American Museum of Tort Law in Winsted, Connecticut.

ADDED: If you're like me, the first 3 words of the post title started a Bob Dylan song playing in your head: "Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial/Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while/But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues/You can tell by the way she smiles/See the primitive wallflower freeze/When the jelly-faced women all sneeze/Hear the one with the mustache say, 'Jeeze/I can’t find my knees'..."

If you can’t find your  knees/I'd say, jeeze/That's a tort that that someone did fease/Help me, Ralph Nader, please...

"Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit."

"Most people agree that the hit-to-kill phenomenon stems at least in part from perverse laws on victim compensation. In China the compensation for killing a victim in a traffic accident is relatively small—amounts typically range from $30,000 to $50,000—and once payment is made, the matter is over. By contrast, paying for lifetime care for a disabled survivor can run into the millions. The Chinese press recently described how one disabled man received about $400,000 for the first 23 years of his care. Drivers who decide to hit-and-kill do so because killing is far more economical. Indeed, Zhao Xiao Cheng—the man caught on a security camera video driving over a grandmother five times—ended up paying only about $70,000 in compensation...."

More at the link, including gruesome descriptions of drivers who, having hit a person by accident, proceed to drive over him repeatedly to get a dead victim.

"The number of medical malpractice lawsuits filed in Wisconsin fell to 140 last year, a drop of more than 50% since 1999."

"At the same time, a state-run malpractice insurance fund — created because of fears that medical malpractice insurance premiums would skyrocket without it — has grown to more than $1.15 billion, a total larger than all the money it has paid out during its entire 39-year history."

Mayor Bill de Blasio meets a campaign promise to fulfill a "moral obligation to right this injustice" — the imprisonment of 5 men convicted in the Central Park jogger case.

The settlement of $40 million represents about $1 million for per year in prison for each man. By contrast, Mayor Bloomberg had fought the civil lawsuit arguing that the men were prosecuted in good faith at the time:

In 2011, a senior corporation counsel lawyer said that the charges had been supported by “abundant probable cause, including confessions that withstood intense scrutiny, in full and fair pretrial hearings and at two lengthy public trials.”

In early 2013, the city’s Law Department echoed those views. “The case is not about whether the teens were wrongly convicted,” a department spokeswoman said. “It’s about whether prosecutors and police deliberately engaged in misconduct.”

The convictions were vacated after an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, who "found DNA and other evidence that the woman had been raped and beaten not by the five teenagers but by another man, Matias Reyes, a convicted rapist and murderer who had confessed to acting alone in the attack."

So, on the one hand, you have de Blasio approach, which I think is that the city has a moral obligation to pay compensation, based on the years spent in prison for a crime we now feel sure these men did not do. On the other hand, you have the Bloomberg approach, which withholds compensation except where there is a violation of law giving rise to a civil claim, and that did not happen if the prosecutors behaved ethically in seeking the conviction based on the evidence they had at the time.

Choose one.
	The de Blasio approach.
	The Bloomberg approach.
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"Detroit has Washington pretty greased."

Says Ralph Nader, interviewed by The Nation about the GM scandal.

The first is they knew years ago about a deadly defect that could cause death and injury. Then they got reports of the deaths and injuries, and did nothing. Under law they were supposed to inform the government about it, and they did not do so. Then more deaths and injuries occurred, and they still did nothing. [General Motors CEO] Mary Barra says that she didn't learn about it until January 31! And she's the CEO. So the best view of what happened inside GM is bureaucracy—committees passing the buck to one another, nobody responsible, stifling whistleblowers.

"Why all the attention now?" The Nation asks. Nader says:

I think Mary Barra is a factor. They’re fascinated by this new woman, and how she’s going to handle it. That’s part of it. 

What does that mean? Fascinated by a woman?!

 The second is that it’s such a simple thing to understand: don’t put anything on your keychain, otherwise you may lose your engine and your airbag will not deploy when you crash. It isn’t like it’s a complex handling problem or an engine problem or something like that. 

Wow.