Insurance Coverage Blog

We had such an interesting array of comments on the proper use and meaning of "y'all" in the (Zach) Scruggs Nation post yesterday, I took some time last night to do a little independent research on the subject.  

The comments overwhelmingly favor "y'all" exclusively as a plural, although a few commenters thought it might be used as a singular pronoun on occasion. The private e-mails to me offline ran exclusively in favor of plural.  So when I found a scholarly article online in the journal American Speech entitled Can Y'all Function As A Singular Pronoun In Southern Dialect, I had to read it.

The article is from Spring 1984, and was written by Gina Richardson -- the article doesn't further identify her except to say she was affiliated with Georgetown University.  Also, from the article, one learns her father had an office of some sort in Columbia, South Carolina, so we might make an educated guess that is where she grew up.

Her conclusion? 

In short, the traditional interpretation of y'all is indeed the valid one -- y'all is an exclusively plural second person pronoun meaning "more than one." Careful examination of the reactions of 123 informants and informal conversation with more than twenty others  revealed not even one instance of y'all in normal usage that manifested anything other than a plural referrent.

She tells a story about how her confidence in this conclusion could have been shaken when she stopped by her father's place of business to greet some friends.  Her father led the way to the new office of one of these friends, John.  As the author's father stepped in, John did not know Gina was in the hallway and thought the father was alone.  John said to Gina's father, "Hi y'all."  However, as it turns out, John's greeting was a private joke: the father's name was Elwood, the same first name as the Jimmy Stewart character in the movie Harvey, about a man with a giant invisible rabbit friend.  So John had jokingly been greeting the father and his invisible friend -- a plural use of y'all. 

It is a good article.  If you care to read it, go to www.jstor.org and you can search for it by title.  If you don't have a login for the JSTOR website, it has links to your local public library, and you can log in by entering your library card number.

This article is not the first or last on the subject of "y'all" in American Speech, the premier journal on American dialects and idiom.  A 1928 article by Estelle Rees Morrison came to the opposite conclusion, as did a 1975 article in the same journal by Nancy Spencer. Gina Richardson also cites H.L. Mencken's The American Language, Supplement Two (1948) for the proposition that, although 99 percent of uses of y'all are plural, a tiny percent are singular. 

Richardson's answer to these views is that all of them are held by non-native speakers.  In her examination, including an empirical study employing a written test and follow-up interviews, she found that non-native speakers may confuse the fact that only one person is being addressed by a speaker with the fact that the speaker is using "y'all" to refer to a broader context, the addressee and some other person or persons not present but who are in some way contextually relevant to the conversation. 

Two things in Richardson's study convinced me she is right.  First, she employed a test using the following lines, in which respondents had to fill in the blank with a pronoun.

"That was quick! Mike must have given y'all good directions."

"He sure did;  _____ didn't have any trouble finding it."

The responses were overwhelmingly plural -- in other words, "we didn't have any trouble" dominated.  But second, Richardson also found that, in such situations, where the person answered "I," it was only because the person was taking it upon himself or herself to answer for the group, not because the person understood "y'all" as addressed only to the one who answered.  For example, the person who actually drove the group there would answer "I" on behalf of the group.

For more views, here is a post on the word y'all on a history blog; the Wikipedia article referred to by a commenter yesterday; and an entry on dictionary.reference.com, which is based on one of the great dictionaries, the Random House Unabridged Dictionary.

So there it is.  Might be a good plot for the next Grisham novel -- an ear-witness heard the victim say "This is not right what y'all brought me here, when I said I needed a delivery of sweet potatoes I didn't mean for y'all to actually bring me sweet potatoes" just before the fatal shot rang out, and the witness turned the corner to see the accused standing there by himself over the body. 

The questions for the jury: What was the difference in meaning, if any, between the two uses of "y'all"?

Did "y'all" refer to a second person the accused claims was present and who fired the shot before placing the smoking gun in the accused's hands and running off?

Did "y'all" refer to the accused, who was there by himself, and to additional criminal conspirators who were not present?

Or did "y'all" refer to only the accused, as the victim may have been merely impersonating a true Southerner but was in fact from Oregon and didn't know the right way to use the word? 

Could the Oregonian victim have been addressing the real killer who ran off, or perhaps the real killer and an accomplice unseen by the accused?

Or was the victim watching a video called "Best of Y'all's Bloopers" at the time of the killing, and was the voice that of a New Jersey-raised actor speaking with a fake Southern accent?

And what of the Manchurian Candidate "stealth" judge on the state supreme court who stands ready to review any conviction -- a hot supermodel turned jurist and secret linguistics expert who unbeknownst to herself is the twin sister of the victim, separated at birth and raised by sweet potato farmer "parents" who are really members of a criminal gang specializing in the brainwashing of children, and who have long been plotting the ultimate, perfect murder?   

Posted By David Rossmiller In Miscellaneous
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I'm going to be posting later today, some matters at work kept me busy last night and early this morning and time for blogging was scarce.  I've been getting lots of suggestions for posts, some Scruggs related, some Katrina related, some just generally insurance related. I appreciate getting these, but because of my workload and other responsibilities, sometimes it takes me a while to get around to them.  

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I still don't feel well enough to put in the after-hours, extra energy required to blog at a high level of quality.  Perhaps by Thursday that will change. 

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As today is a holiday and I'm still ill, I won't be posting today unless some startling development happens.  Also, and I know this will be disappointing to many, I will be returning to writing about insurance.  Not exclusively, you understand, I'll still write the Scruggs Nation, but I won't be devoting all my blogging time to the Scruggs Nation any longer.  I had a lot of time to think about this -- I wasn't able to get out of bed for four days -- and while I enjoy the Scruggs posts, I owe it to my family and my own health not to spend every second of my free time on them, which I have for a month and a half.  

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MS Smitty reminds me in the comments to the previous post today that I forgot to mention I'll be interviewed on the Paul Gallo Radio Show on the Supertalk MS Network at 8:05 a.m. Monday morning on the Scruggs mess. I'm looking forward to it.  For those of you across the state of Mississippi, and anywhere else you might care to listen to the program live streaming on the web, I hope you're able to catch it.  If you want information on the stations that broadcast Paul's show or on live streaming, check the web site at this link. And when you hear me talk, no, that accent is not Canadian, although many people say I sound like one.  I grew up a few miles from the NoDak border with Saskatchewan. 

UPDATE: It's 8:05 Mississippi time, Central Standard.  Which means I have an early day on the Pacific Coast, far from the first time that has occurred. 

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"Blegging" is the term used to refer to the act of using your blog to ask for a favor. Normally, I pay no attention to internet awards and even less to the American Bar Association, but I see that Walter Olson, my co-blogger at Point of Law, is in hot competition for best general law blog in the ABA Journal Blawg 100 for his blog Overlawyered, and needs some votes to pull into the lead on this, the final day of voting.  You may have read Walter's great posts on the Scruggs scandal, or you may have followed his blogging at Overlawyered over the years -- he is one of the pioneers of legal blogging and Overlawyered is one of my favorite stops on the internet, right up there along with www.shredderchess.com.  If you enjoy Walter's Scruggsblogging and other writing, please visit  http://www.abajournal.com/blawgs/blawg100 and cast your vote, it only takes a second.

UPDATE: As often happens, I got to thinking about this post after I posted it, and I neglected to mention the outstanding work of Ted Frank at Overlawyered, not to mention some great regular contributors like Jason Barney.  It's a truly fine site, consistently excellent.

Posted By David Rossmiller In Miscellaneous
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I'm back from vacation and back to work, I'll be starting regular posting again today.  Don't know exactly when I'll post today or what about, but I'm back. If you need to contact me, my e-mail address is dpr@dunn-carney.com.

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One of the bright lights of legal writing and insurance coverage writing in particular is Randy Maniloff, a coverage lawyer in Philadelphia.  With a truckload of new readers here, this is a good time to bring you Randy's annual look at the year's ten most significant coverage decisions, the seventh consecutive time he was written this really difficult piece for Mealey's Litigation Report.

I read it all -- you've got to really like a writer who can make you laugh aloud when writing about insurance (the item on the global warming case broke me up) -- and I guess I can't disagree with the selections, except that if I was writing it, the Top 10 would all be Katrina cases, because that's mostly what I've written about for the past year, so much so that I haven't paid much attention to anything else.  I'd probably also make it the Top 11 and include Woo v. Fireman's Fund, the case about Dr. Woo, aka " the pig-slayer," a dentist who put fake pig teeth in an anesthetized patient's mouth and took pictures, which I wrote about at length here and here. 

Randy has been a good friend of this blog since back in the day, when my daily visitors were measured in the dozens (if I was lucky) rather than the thousands.  If you like the piece, let him know, his e-mail address is in the article.  When you've got a long piece of careful analysis that is also written with style and humor, you've got something pretty rare on your hands. It took a lot of effort and skill to do what he did.  Without further ado, here it is, 2007's Top 10 coverage cases.

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Several people reported problems accessing Insurance Coverage Law Blog this morning, and when I checked on this, there were indeed some server issues that now have been resolved.  Thanks for your patience and thanks for letting me know about the problems.  Funny thing about a blog, it's not all that different from my time on the farm in NoDak as a kid: blogs, like farm animals, seem to require constant feeding and watering. 

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Unless I hear that Mississippi AG Jim Hood has run off with Paris Hilton, that outgoing Mississippi Insurance Commissioner George Dale is demanding that Dickie Scruggs retract his assertion that Dale is a pig with lipstick, that State Farm is suing Sen. Trent Lott, or some such, today's posts are my last until Monday.  It's been quite a November at Insurance Coverage Law Blog, four months' worth of Katrina theater piled into a few weeks -- and all this in addition to working my day job.    Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, friends.  Thanks for reading, thanks for the e-mails, thanks for the calls, thanks for the news tips.  I hope you have a special holiday with all the people that got you to where you are -- life is a precious gift, don't ever take it or your loved ones for granted.  We only have both for a short while.  I'm looking forward to a great Thanksgiving with my family in Portland, although I wish I could also see all my people up in NoDak.  I'm also looking forward to a little rest. (But if you hear of anything big, let me know.  You know how to reach me).  

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As the father of two girls who are 8 and 3, I found this Newsweek story about slutty Halloween costumes for little kids extremely disturbing.  Have parents lost their minds?  What kind of mother or father sends their kid out dressed as a strumpet?  After 40 years of feminism, how did we get to this weird place where you don't get stomped when you glorify slatternly behavior and project it onto young girls?

Posted By David Rossmiller In Miscellaneous
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I was honored to see Insurance Coverage Law Blog listed as one of Ted Frank's 10 favorite legal blogs in a post at Overlawyered.  The kind words are much appreciated, particularly in that the other nine include some pretty amazing sites.  I've never done one of those Top Tens, I guess I'm afraid of leaving some people out, but certainly any list I would put together would include Overlawyered and its sister blog Point of Law, and I don't say that merely because I'm lucky enough to be a contributor to Point of Law.  Ted Frank and Walter Olson are among the outstanding legal bloggers, and Walter was a pioneer of legal blogging.  The Becker-Posner Blog, with Gary Becker and Judge Posner, is always good with highly intellectual posts on a variety of topics, usually with lots of provocative comments.  Peter Lattman at the Wall Street Journal Law Blog does an incredible job of reporting and writing really interesting posts. 

There are others I like a lot, not all of which I read regularly, what with my day job and the need to focus my internet reading on insurance as much as possible.  Any list I would put together therefore would vary from one three-month span to another, depending on where my attention happened to be directed at a particular time.  So it would be unjust and only partially true for me to put together a Top Ten -- however, the four blogs named above would appear at the head of any list if I ever do put one together.  

I am prepared to say, however, what I like and don't like in a legal blog.  Some of the things I look for: 

• good writing first and foremost, which includes proactive measures to avoid being boring and to arrange things so the writer, not the reader, does the work; 
• some degree of interactiveness, either with a comments feature or links to other blogs discussing the same topic; 
• a tone that suggests the writer is more interested in discussing ideas than blatantly shilling to sell legal services or aggrandize himself; 
• a willingness to take a stand on issues.  A lot of legal bloggers make the mistake of writing with a painfully "objective" voice that may steer well clear of offending anyone but also provides no value and no sense there is a person behind the blog the reader can connect with (in addition, one might point that this voice, along with its other faults, is horribly, unspeakably boring -- as the great Tanya Donelly once sang, if you bore me, you lose your soul to me); and
• either a sense of humor or tacit acknowledgment that the writer knows a sense of humor would be a good thing to have, if one were available. 

Readers? What are your favorite legal blogs?  Favorite non-legal blogs? 

Posted By David Rossmiller In Miscellaneous
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Stuff has been piling up that I want to write about, and I've got to post on these things before they get stale.  There is only one possible solution -- a Potpourri Wednesday.  So here it is.

• This story from the Boston Globe is fascinating, it's about Bay State insurers trying to learn how to advertise after emerging from a state-controlled market.   Here's an excerpt:

But with auto insurance competition scheduled to launch April 1, local companies are starting to adopt much higher profiles, unveiling branding campaigns designed to tell drivers who they are and what they stand for.

Unlike Geico's off-beat cavemen and gecko ads, the local ads are very serious, stressing safety, responsibility, and knowledge of the local market.

"When you grow up in a socialist system, it's hard to be light-hearted," quipped Peter Robertson, Massachusetts legal counsel for the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America.

Personally, I get tired of efforts to sound serious.  So much of what passes for legal writing and legal discourse is a desperate attempt to act serious to cover up what you don't know with that false, boring "voice of authority" persona.  This is often what I deal with all day.  So ads that lighten my day, that show recognition of my personhood, are ones that I remember. 

• This is a good story by Becky Mowbray of the Times-Picayune about a forum on coastal insurance that drew members of Congress, state insurance commissioners and officials from insurers such as Allstate, State Farm and Travelers.  The discussion about a national catastrophe fund is interesting, as was the reaction of state insurance commissioners to Travelers' proposal involving limited federal regulation -- I've said it before, states will scream like banshees if you try to take away their profitable regulation of insurance.

But Travelers' plan was met with skepticism by the insurance commissioners, who would lose territory under the proposal. They questioned whether it was a back-door way for insurance companies to get a long-desired system of federal regulation -- a suggestion that Miletti denied.

Alabama Insurance Commissioner Walter Bell, president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, questioned why Travelers couldn't accomplish its goals through a system of interstate compacts and accreditation under the existing state regulatory structure.

Donelon expressed concern about what would happen to local regulations, such as Louisiana's statute that makes it difficult for insurance companies to drop customers after three years. "I'm very concerned about the Travelers approach being a vehicle for federal regulation, which I believe to be the same as deregulation of the industry, which would leave the consumer at greater risk," he said.

• Florida's insurance fiasco continues. Watch out, there have been calls for Gov. Crist to exercise leadership, so things might get much worse! 

•  This story from Kentucky is about a $1.4 billion lawsuit against Allstate.  This is another one of those stories that deals with a plaintiff lawyer that is going around the country with wild tales about Allstate.  I don't really know about the allegations that get made in stories and some lawsuits, except that when I try to focus on them, they seem just a little like a headline in the Weekly World News -- "Abe Lincoln Was A Witch," or something of that sort.  As I said, I don't really know.  Maybe someone who knows more about this case can leave a comment or send me an e-mail.   

• You know, the state election in Mississippi is just next month.  Attorney General Jim Hood and challenger Al Hopkins have been ripping each other to shreds.  Witness this story, where Hopkins says Hood is engaged in illegal activity regarding awarding state legal contracts.  This story says the state may seek to recover some of the money.  In the first story, Hood says Hopkins got his own no-bid state contract for $100,000.  Hood has also accused Hopkins of padding his resume to make it seem he has more legal administrative experience than he actually does.  Y'all Politics has this entertaining riposte to those charges.

This is going to be a fun race to watch.     

•  Lastly, I've liked Chrissie Hynde since way back when the Pretenders sang Talk of the Town.  Always looked tough, like she would smash a guitar over your head as soon as look at you.  Reminds me a lot of people, men and women, boys and girls, that I grew up with.  The band around her changed over the years, wasn't as innovative, but she actually got better as an artist and a singer.  Most singers, I don't believe a word they say, it's all technique.  But she's different, totally sincere, totally believable.  Take a look at these two videos and see if you agree.  Here she's singing Back on the Chain Gang and here she's singing I'll Stand By You.

Posted By David Rossmiller In Miscellaneous
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I've had requests for an update on United States of America v. Richard F. Scruggs -- the criminal contempt case against attorney Dickie Scruggs.  The latest news is that last week Scruggs filed his response to an order requiring him to show cause why he should not be held in criminal contempt. More on this after this brief reminder of what we are talking about here. 

(Remember, the reason for the charges is that Scruggs allegedly violated an injunction by federal Judge William Acker requiring him to turn over documents to lawyers for E.A. Renfroe, a State Farm contractor.  The documents were claims files taken from Renfroe by two employees, the so-called "whistleblower" Rigsby sisters, who while working for Renfroe secretly copied thousands of pages and gave them to Scruggs, Mississippi AG Jim Hood and the FBI.  Renfroe sued the "whistleblower" Rigsby sisters for breach of their confidentiality agreements, and in that civil lawsuit, Judge Acker ordered that the documents be returned to Renfroe's counsel.  However, instead of turning them over, Scruggs called Hood and sent his copies to Hood -- keep in mind Hood already had his own copies).

Not a really big surprise here -- the Scruggs response says the charges should be dismissed for various reasons, such as:

1. He didn't do anything wrong;
2. Judge Acker had no jurisdiction in the underlying E.A. Renfroe lawsuit against the "whistleblower" Rigsby sisters;
3. Judge Acker's injunction was ambiguous;
4. Scruggs lacked the requisite intent to violate the injunction;
5. The independent counsel that brought charges against him were not truly independent but rather puppets of Acker;
6. Etc., etc. Here's a pdf of his response brief.  

The brief deals extensively with what Scruggs sees as a saving loophole in Acker's injunction in the Renfroe case, which Scruggs allegedly violated -- the documents could be disclosed to law enforcement.  Instead, as mentioned, he called his good friend Mississippi AG Jim Hood and arranged to give them to Hood, who already had copies, in what looked to Judge Acker like a ploy to evade the judge's order.  As you might remember, earlier this year Hood tried to bail Scruggs out and asked the U.S. Attorney not to prosecute Scruggs because he is a "confidential informant" of Hood's and, well, it just wouldn't be right to break up a great crime-fighting team.  After all, what would Batman be without Robin?  What would the League of Justice be without the Green Lantern? Sherlock Holmes without Watson? Inspector Clouseau without Cato?

The United States is due to file a reply brief October 12.  I'll let you know what it says when it is filed.  Here is an Associated Press story on developments in this case. 

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I saw this question discussed at a recent post on Sam Friedman's blog at National Underwriter.  Plenty of comment by readers, both pro and con.  You might be able to predict what I think.  The question itself arises from a misconception of what anti-concurrent cause language is and what it addresses -- in other words, I don't believe the question makes sense.  Is the notion of exclusions in insurance policies unethical?  Is the notion of covering collapse but defining collapse extremely narrowly, and excluding many causes of collapse, unethical?  Is it unethical to define a policy's coverage as excess to any other available insurance? Is it unethical to define ongoing property damage as uncovered if any part of it began before the policy period commenced?  Is it unethical to define an intentional act as one that is expected and intended by any insured, meaning one who did not intend the harm is excluded from coverage along with the one who did?  Answer all these questions, and then we can have a debate about the ethics of anti-concurrent cause language.  

As the above questions make plain, insurance policies contain all kinds of provisions that normal people don't expect or think about.  So do other contracts.  You ever gone on a cruise?  Chances are your ticket contract contained a forum selection clause stating you have to sue in Florida if you have a beef with the cruise line.  Does the average person have a clue about choice-of-law provisions in contracts or their significance?  How many investors anticipate that they will have to engage in NASD arbitration instead of going to court? 

The issue is not one of ethics, but public policy.  If a contractual provision is not against public policy, there is nothing wrong with including it in the contract.  Anti-concurrent cause language merely defines the causation analysis that must be used by the court.   Other potential choices for causation analysis, such as efficient proximate cause or concurrent cause analysis, were neither carved into stone tablets by God, nor have courts found the specific type of causation methodology used in property insurance causation to be a mandatory contract rule, or in other words, a matter of public policy. 

To all who would say anti-concurrent cause language is unethical, answer these questions. Why is the efficient proximate cause methodology of defining the cause of a property loss superior analytically to the methodology contained in anti-concurrent cause clauses?   What endows efficient proximate cause with greater moral stature than anti-concurrent cause methodology? For property insurance contracts with no defined method of analyzing property loss causation, is it ethical not to reveal to the consumer that the default method will be efficient proximate cause?  Come on, I don't really need to go on, do I?  You can see the whole ethics argument can be shredded like cheesecloth without even breaking a sweat.  Who can answer these questions, and having answered them, will anyone then argue to me that anti-concurrent cause language is unethical?  

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Look for Mississippi AG Jim Hood to strap on a gun belt, wear a 10-gallon hat, and ride into his next press conference on a steer while saying "that ain't no bull,"  after his campaign spokesman called out Hood's challenger this way:

"There's an old saying that applies to make-believe cowboys who dress and talk the part, pretending to be what they aren't. Alben Hopkins is 'all hat, no cattle.'"

Read this great story by John O'Brien of Legal Newsline for more details.  Just as a point of future reference for the spokesman, however, I would like to point out that the correct phrasing is "pretending to be what they ain't."  I like how the candidates in the Mississippi AG race aren't fooling around, pretending to respect each other, and how they realize that negative campaigning is what we all really want to see, no matter what we say.  The campaign isn't quite up to Citizen Kane levels yet ("Gettys! I'm going to send you to Sing Sing! Sing Sing, Gettys! Sing Sing!"; "Candidate Kane found in love nest with quote, singer, unquote") but give it some time. 

For his part, Hopkins has been pointing out Hood's fondness for campaign contributions from folks who, as luck would have it, happen to get state contracts.  In a hilarious satire of a dumb explanation of this phenomenon, Hood said as follows, according to the story:

Hood has said state contracts are given on a "first-come-first-serve basis."

"It's kind of like intellectual property. They're bringing you an idea," Hood said. "And we give it to whomever it is, and if they've got the ability to handle it and the wherewithal to handle it and the money to back it, they've got the case."

That's pretty funny, he got us real good with that one.  That's the key to a good joke -- why, just imagine if he had been serious!  I've said it before, Hood has real comedic talent -- he's the best straight man since maybe Bud Abbott, or at least Bob Newhart. 

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I think this will be the third time in a year and a half of blogging that I haven't had a real post during a non-holiday weekday -- posts saying I'm not going to post don't count.  One of those times, I was too sick to get out of bed.  This time, due to a confluence of work, deadlines, lack of sleep and internet access problems, I can see it's not in the cards.  Thanks for stopping by, see you tomorrow.

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Here is the final version of the article appearing next month called Interpretation and Enforcement of Anti-Concurrent Policy Language in Hurricane Katrina Cases and Beyond.

Because this is an exception to the Lexis policy of not allowing stuff to be seen until it actually is published by them, I agreed to post the following copyright notice.  Below is also some information on how you can sign up for an Appleman's teleconference where I am going to talk about this article, as well as some of the later developments that aren't covered as extensively in the article,  like the Fifth Circuit's recent Katrina decisions.  

Copyright © Matthew Bender & Company, Inc., a member of the LexisNexis Group.  Republished with permission from New Appleman on Insurance: Current Critical Issues in Insurance Law.  All rights reserved.

This article is also the subject of a New Appleman's™ Insurance Coverage Teleconference: The Impact of Mass Catastrophies on Insurance Coverage to be held on October 16.  Click here for information on how to attend.

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One of the highlights of my day is receiving e-mails from readers -- although I've been lucky in that a fair number of people post public comments, a lot more send me private e-mails, and that is one of the great joys of blogging: meeting new, interesting people, with fascinating takes on the issues we discuss here.  Doesn't matter whether they agree or disagree with me, I enjoy hearing from people, and I keep their identities to myself, and the information too, unless they say it's OK to use it. 

Thanks especially to those who read my anti-concurrent cause article and commented to me on it, including correcting a few errors I had in it.  I took these comments to heart and made a few changes for the final draft that will appear in Appleman's.   That is one of the new paradigms of the internet, to put out a product and invite public comment before it's set in stone, and that is something I hope to do again.  I will be writing a follow-up article on the implications of Katrina appellate decisions for the April edition of Appleman's Critical Issues, and I'm still forming my opinions on those decisions, so input is always welcome -- writing this blog is a continuing education for me.

This blog and the reader response I've received is just another reason why I say I must be the luckiest man on Earth to have had the life I've had -- growing up in NoDak with the finest folks in the world, then getting paid to be a journalist and then a lawyer, not to mention the great family I have and living in Portland, Oregon, the friendliest city I've ever seen.  Life is a great adventure, with the oddest twists and turns -- never did I imagine in my younger years I would be writing about insurance and having a ball doing it.  Always feel free to e-mail me at dpr@dunn-carney.com with questions, comments, ideas for posts, news or criticism.  I read every e-mail, and I try to respond to each one, with the exception of those that ask me to send money to bribe Nigerian customs officials for the purpose of extracating a large fortune from the country.  I currently have all my money tied up helping some folks get a large fortune out of Malaysia, for which -- I think it's OK to reveal this -- I have been assured I will shortly receive some rather handsome compensation!

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The posts have been getting lengthy recently, so to mix it up, just a few short items today:

• This item in a Massachusetts newspaper is on the subject of car insurance reforms in the state and is apparently some sort of column, but without a point and without a clue.  It lost me when it came to this part:

Driving and auto insurance rates are definite problems in Massachusetts. But at least the auto segment isn't as messed up as homeowners insurance, where anyone who lives within a certain distance of the ocean has to buy inferior coverage from the state. All homes on places like Cape Cod were dropped by their insurance companies a few years ago even if they hadn't put in a claim in 50 years.

I suppose we should be grateful the auto insurers have not followed the same philosophy and put disclaimers on policies stating they won't be covering motor vehicle accidents occurring in high winds or hurricanes.

Like I said, no point, no clue.

• Some group of homebuilders is backing the bill in the U.S. House that would add wind insurance to the National Flood Insurance Program.  They figure it will create more home building.  You know, actually, if the people didn't live on the coast wouldn't they just build a house somewhere else?  I'm just sayin'.  
• Florida insurance officials are subpoenaing records from State Farm after the insurer, which has a million homeowners policies in the State, says it is dropping 50,000 coastal customers. 
• Florida's no-fault auto insurance appears to be riding off into the sunset.

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Here are some stories that may be of interest:

• In Massachusetts politicians recently became unhinged over Insurance Commissioner Burnes' plan for limited auto insurance competition and made numerous dumb statements to the press -- what a surprise.
• In Florida, Gov. Charlie Crist and other state officials continue to be in shock that they have not been able to alter human nature and economic self-interest with central planning.  More than seven months after the state's latest insurance fix, insurers continue to drop homeowners policies.  The latest? Nationwide announced it is dropping 40,600 homeowners and business insurance policies next year.  A year ago, Nationwide had 261,300 home policies, but it has only 176,000 now.
• Louisiana has finally fired the top official of the state's high-risk auto pool, "after auditors told the agency's board that an audit will show he may have been involved in questionable spending practices."  He was earlier removed from the top spot for the state-run property insurer after auditors found that the entity's books had not been balanced for two years and had a computer program that could not retrieve information the auditors wanted. 
• Did you see this story, the one about the insurance company that hired detectives who joined a church and tape recorded support group sessions in an effort to uncover possible fraudulent claims by a couple who attended the church?  You know, this is going too far, as the head of the company acknowledges, but how come the story doesn't mention what led the insurer to suspect fraud in the first place?  It's legit to hire detectives to investigate fraud, as long as it is done by means that don't violate social values: it's OK to videotape someone who is supposedly injured working out at a public gym, it's not OK to plant secret microphones in the baseball cap of the guy's son to catch secret conversations in their home.  
• You remember that Bloomberg story a few weeks ago, the one about insurers ripping people off,  committing fraud just for fun and stealing old ladies' purses, as their evil laughter echoes through the land while their plans to rob the world blind go off with nary a hitch?  At that time, I wrote that I didn't care for the story: for one thing, the lead anecdote was poorly chosen as an example of insurer rip offs, when in fact it appeared to be a case of someone who got caught short on their coverage and never read their policy.  As human beings, we can all surely sympathize with this homeowner,  because I'm sure we've all made our fair share of mistakes too, but I don't confuse my sympathy with analysis of insurance contracts. As you may know, I used to be a newspaper reporter, have many friends that are journalists and respect and like journalists, so my bias is to avoid finding fault unless I can't help it.  But in this case I can't help it.  I thought the story was deficient and that it got carried away with a premise that was assumed rather than proven.  The Bloomberg story used evidence very selectively and contained gaps in both knowledge of the subject and logic.  I recently saw a Sam Friedman piece in National Underwriter that made me think of this again: Sam calls out insurers for sitting back and taking it when it comes to stories like this, a point I made yesterday when talking about Katrina issues. 

However, I see that State Farm has on its website a pretty good "Fisking" of the Bloomberg story -- this is the kind of thing insurers should do more of, and if they don't get anywhere with traditional media, the internet not only allows them to tell their own story, but contains numerous new media that may be more receptive. Here's my favorite part of the State Farm piece, because it talks about those e-mails from the McIntosh v. State Farm Katrina case that have been endlessly hyped as definitive proof of fraud, when to an observant reader all they show is a guy who is completely clueless and who is hardly an authoritative source:

Further, as evidence that there was wrong-doing, the reporters cite an e-mail from a Mr. Down at Forensics Engineering questioning motivations.  What the reporters fail to provide is the under oath deposition of Mr. Down where he denies there was any problem and says that his e-mail inquiry was taken out of context.  Robert Kochan, President of Forensics Engineering, additionally has made this clear.  We further gave your reporters copies of AP news articles that confirm Mr. Down did not even work Katrina claims and had written the so-called incriminating emails based on rumor.  So why didn’t Bloomberg include this information or an excerpt from sworn deposition?

I know that to some saying anything that is remotely favorable to insurers, or suggesting how insurers might better communicate with the public, is equivalent to defending the New York Yankees to the Washington Senators.  But to me, discussing insurance coverage is not about good guys vs. bad guys.  Precepts of logic, reason and fairness have to apply across the board -- and these standards apply even when discussing those one may not agree with or like.   

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I don't know much about criminal procedure -- just what I learn watching Boston Legal, Law & Order and The Wire -- but this Associated Press story has got me wondering if Dickie Scruggs is going to be doing a perp walk. Here's a couple grafs so you can see what I mean: 

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Special prosecutors charged prominent Mississippi attorney Richard F. Scruggs and his law firm with criminal contempt Tuesday in a Hurricane Katrina insurance dispute.

A motion to summon Scruggs and the Scruggs Law Firm was also filed Tuesday by the prosecutors, who requested that the court schedule an arraignment in the contempt of court case.

If you are new to this story, or just want to refresh your memory, here's a link to one of the posts I've written on this matter, with a ton of other links to answer any questions you may have. 

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That's the title of one of the great World War II propaganda posters, sometimes mistakenly referred to by the title "When you drive alone you drive with Hitler," which sounds better.  That's our modern idiom, and probably was back then too, but it's evidently not what the government agency that produced the poster considered proper English. It's fairly hilarious now, but some variation of it was used in other posters, and you can well imagine it must have worked.  

Northwestern University has a collection of these propaganda posters available online, and while this poster apparently isn't part of the collection, there are a lot of good ones there. I find these posters fascinating and many of them I find very moving, which is a testimony to how good they were, and are, as propaganda.   Here are some from the collection.

I'll leave you with one last poster, one of the most famous, that for some reason is not in the Northwestern collection. 

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There's been too much going on for me to blog about everything I would like to, so I'm going to stuff it all in this post like I'm a college student again jamming my laundry in a duffle bag to take home to Mom.

Mississippi elections. I thought this was a fine story by John O'Brien of Legal Newsline about the defeat of Mississippi Insurance Commissioner George Dale by a Dickie Scruggs-backed candidate.  Here's another story about results from the Sun Herald.

Bloggers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains! This is perhaps the stupidest thing I have heard this summer.  Some bloggers want to form a bloggers union because they are spending a lot of time blogging and not getting paid for it.  Check this out from the story:

Few bloggers are paid for their posts, and even fewer are able to make a living doing the work. But many say they often devote as much energy and time to their online musings as they do to their salaried careers.

I think they have a word for that -- a hobby.  Do you think there is a reason they aren't earning a living from their blogging? Such as -- and I'm just taking a wild guess here -- that no one places enough value on it to pay for it? Another supposed benefit of the union: health benefits. How would the union get the money for benefits, go on strike against readers of the Internet? Another demand: press credentials and being taken seriously as journalists.  You know, you can't make people love you and you can't make people take you seriously, they either do or they don't.     

I am not from the South and I've never been there, but I like to say y'all. Southerners, is this OK? Does it offend you to have someone with a NoDak Norwegian accent say y'all? It's such a great word, I don't think Southerners should have exclusive rights.  Maybe someone can give me pointers on the proper use of the word, so at least I don't dishonor it by misuse.

The "whistleblower" Rigsby sisters are starting to bore me. I saw a story by Mike Kunzelman of the Associated Press earlier this week about another one of those qui tam lawsuits alleging insurers ripped off the Treasury in Katrina claims by pushing wind payments onto federal flood policies.  Here's a version of it I saw yesterday in the Insurance Journal.  I've written a whole bunch about this wind-water-federal flood policies issue and, frankly, this lawsuit just seems like more of the same old.  We'll see.  This one involves the Rigsby sisters -- about whom I have one question: isn't their one year, $150,000 consulting contract with Scruggs just about up? Is the contract going to be renewed? This lawsuit should just about cover all the potential political, public relations and legal fronts Dickie Scruggs can create to enhance his leverage. 

I thought the reasoning here was pretty weak.  This Times-Picayune story on the Fifth Circuit's decision in In Re Katrina Canal Breaches Litigation made no sense to me: the decision was wrong because two of the three-judge panel were appointed by Bush and all three are from Texas and therefore don't understand Louisiana law.  I guess I really don't need to say any more than that, nothing I could say would make that argument look as flaccid as just repeating what it says.

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I'll tell you what, before I started blogging about Katrina issues, I never would have dreamed that I would spend a Tuesday night in August watching streaming TV coverage of a Mississippi primary election.  But that's exactly what I did last night: heck, I know more about some of these people than I do the elected officials in my own state. Plus I got to hear all the great inside dope on the live feed, like the election anchors on WAPT-TV bickering at the break -- the phrase "Stay with me, Joyce" comes to mind. 

The race I was most interested in, of course, was the Insurance Commissioner position.  For those that don't follow this much, the eight-term incumbent, George Dale, ran afoul of tobacco, asbestos and policyholder lawyer Dickie Scruggs and many other Mississippians who believed he was too soft on insurance companies. In the Democratic primary, I watched as Dale started out at 45 percent and then began creeping up, slowly, slowly, slowly as the night went along, like a guy fighting his way forward in the face of hurricane force political winds fueled in part by big Dickie Scruggs dollars, but ultimately stalling about 11,000 votes short out of 400,000 cast.  Those 400,000 votes were by far the most in any of the statewide races.  Speaking of Scruggs, did you see the news about the Mississippians for Fair Elections, the anti-Dale PAC? According to Y'all Politics, here's the scoop:

Mississippians for Fair Elections, the inaptly christened PAC that is supporting Gary Anderson in his Democratic campaign challenge to Insurance Commissioner George Dale, missed Tuesday's filing deadline for its campaign finance disclosure. When the Mystery PAC finally did file, late, its disclosure showed only two transactions: the $250,000 contribution bragged about by Dickie Scruggs, and a $250,000 disbursement to Murphy Putnam Media, LLC. Neither the contribution nor the disbursement is dated as required by law. And no one other than Scruggs has given a dime to the PAC.

Remember when Scruggs called Dale a toadie of State Farm and a pig with lipstick, and said he was "political toast"? You remember when he did that?  Although this PAC looks a little like a pig without lipstick, it was effective.  It may not matter in the general election this fall, however. One of the commentators on WAPT said that "Republicans are on the march" in Mississippi and are expected to sweep all the statewide offices, with the possible exception of Attorney General.  

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Judge Acker's appointment of special prosecutors in the Dickie Scruggs criminal contempt matter has been generating the following buzz:

Jonathan Adler at Volokh.  The real fun is in the comments, make sure to read them. One commenter calls it a "minor . . . infraction." Minor? For a lawyer, it's never a minor thing to willfully disobey a judge's order, if that is what Scruggs did. 

The InsiderExclusive TV show "is currently investigating how the U.S. attorney in Alabama [Alice Martin] earlier this week declined a federal judge’s request to prosecute Dickie Scruggs and his Mississippi law firm for criminal contempt in a case relating to Hurricane Katrina insurance claims." I don't know of this show but I'd certainly be interested in the results of the investigation.

Here's a post called "Alice Martin: Queen of Schemes."  This post is at a site calling itself "Legal Schnauzer," it has a picture of a schnauzer jumping in the air with the caption "You want to mess with me?" and bills itself as "One couple's encounter with corrupt judges, slimy lawyers, and incompetent prosecutors in Alabama. . . and how you can avoid being cheated by the vermin who make a mockery of our justice system."  Have to admit I've never liked schnauzers, especially ones that jump. 

John O'Brien of Legal NewsOnline has a story on developments. 

Amir Efrati has a good post at the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, including comments from one of the special prosecutors.  Again, check out the comments.

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I found out late Friday about Judge Acker's decision to appoint special prosecutors in the Dickie Scruggs criminal contempt matter, and I wrote posts about that Friday evening both here at this blog and at Point of Law.  Seeing as how these took a lot of time to write -- especially in that I like to write it a little differently for each blog so I don't get bored -- and also seeing as that except for you weekend readers no one has seen them yet, I think I'll let those posts stand as my work for today. 

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U.S. Attorney Alice Martin of the Northern District of Alabama has declined Judge William Acker's request to prosecute Dickie Scruggs for alleged criminal contempt  stemming from the E.A. Renfroe lawsuit against the "whistleblower" Rigsby sisters. 

According to this story, Martin didn't say much about her reasons. Acker, of course, has a back-up plan: he said he would appoint another attorney to prosecute if Martin declined.  No word yet on when that is going to happen or who will be chosen.  You can read more about this whole hullabaloo at this post I did earlier this year.  I looked for Martin's declination letter to Acker on Martin's website, but didn't find it.  I was relieved to find, however, that the website lists a "Kids Page" so youngsters can get the full flavor of the justice system.  Among the useful information on the Kids Page is this:

What does the judge wear?

Judges wear robes in court and under the robe the judge wears regular clothes.

I notice they left out one important fact, however -- the best thing about wearing that black robe has got to be that you never have to worry whether your belt matches your shoes. 

I know what some of you are thinking, I'm a day late with this story.  Well, it's true, but you try finding a place to get decent Wi-Fi in Newport, Oregon, where my family was vacationing this week.  After sitting in the Newport Public Library for two hours trying to keep connected, I just about whipped out that reserve telephone cord I keep to try dial-up, but to be honest, I couldn't face doing that.  It would be unbearably primitive, like plowing a field with a mule instead of a tractor, or writing on a typewriter instead of a laptop.  I mean, if we're going to go back to caveman days I might as well forget about blogging and try to communicate with a big drum, a newsletter or some such other troglodytic accoutrement. 

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If you long to return to that college setting you remember so fondly, the White and Williams firm, in Philadelphia, will be holding a Coverage College at the University of Pennsylvania on September 19.  The subject of the discussions will be claims handling, as the attached brochure shows.

Best features of the Coverage College:

• Includes discussions led by Randy Maniloff, my good friend and one heck of a coverage lawyer and insurance writer.
• No tuition -- totally free of charge. You will emerge from this program no further in debt than you already are!
• No need to hit up Mom and Dad for spending money.
• No pants worn at thigh level; ball caps may not point backwards or to the side, bills must face the front.  
• No SATs.
• A very comprehensive-looking one-day program.
• Easy curve in grading. 
• I have been assured there will be no freshman hazing this year.
• No worries about how you are going to support yourself when you get out of school -- you already have a job!

I'm informed that space is limited, and those who wish to attend should sign up soon, or as they used to say on ESPN's Sports Center: those who are late will not get fruit cup.

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I wrote about the passing of Judge Robert Keeton, an outstanding scholar, teacher and jurist in this post recently.  I just found out about this fine tribute to him on the University of Texas website, and thought you might like to read more about him.  As you may or may not know, he was the younger brother of W. Page Keeton of Prosser and Keeton on Torts renown, and was himself involved with revisions to the book.  

UPDATE: After I wrote this post, I was doing some thinking and reading about mentor programs in law firms -- specifically why they so seldom work -- and was reminded of a question someone asked me once: what's the primary characteristic of a good teacher?  The answer: a good teacher is primarily a student himself. One who is always looking for more answers, and better answers, knows the questions you will ask, because he has already asked them of himself. From what I hear and read, Judge Keeton certainly fits that description.     

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I no longer can read French well enough to get much more than a general sense of what is going on at NewsRe, a new French reinsurance blog, but it's a good looking product and for you multi-lingual folks, it looks worth checking out.  I notice they do have a column with links to stories on reinsurance in English.  

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It's not so surprising when surveys show that the public doesn't understand what their auto or home insurance policies cover -- frankly, many people only have them at all because the law or a mortgage or car lender requires it.  If the law didn't require minimum limits on auto insurance, what percentage of people do you think would buy it anyway? I don't know if anyone has ever tested for that answer, but my guess is a third to a half of the public would not buy any liability insurance at all. 

Here's a survey done on behalf of MetLife that contains a perplexing fact.  About 45 percent of people who rent cars purchase one form or another of insurance over the counter, even though most of them are covered by their own primary auto policies.  What is the thinking behind these purchases?  Let me ask the question this way.  If someone knew their auto policy had lapsed, but needed to drive to work that day and wouldn't be able to renew the policy until tomorrow, what percentage of folks would go ahead and drive the car uninsured for just one day?  A lot.  After all, we drive every day and the chances of being in an accident on any given day are small.  So why, even leaving out the fact that most people are covered for collision and liability by their own primary insurance, does the analysis change when it comes to renting a car? You tell me, I don't know the answer.

This post on Slate concerns a similar phenomenon -- people overinsuring against small risks.  This is something that has been measured in a variety of contexts: for example, if you ask people how much they would pay in the increased price of a product to reduce the chance of being severely harmed by that product from one in a million to one in 10 million, it is surprising that most people would pay a substantial premium for this, even though their chance of being hurt is already so small as to be disregarded, and even though they nonchalantly face much greater risks every day.  Some see this a evidence that models that assume rational economic behavior in all instances are incomplete at best and at worst examples of foolish intellectual pride and blind faith in the cosmos of rationality.  Or perhaps it is not the assumption of rationality that is flawed, but the implementation of it: people may misunderstand basic facts that lead their calculations of rationality to false conclusions.  

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One of the great intellects of the law, Judge Robert Keeton of Massachusetts, died earlier this week.  Back when he was a professor at Harvard in 1970, Keeton, in a pivotal law review article, gave a name to the "reasonable expectations" doctrine, which he said was merely an empirical observation of what courts were already doing in insurance contract cases.  Although the doctrine is recognized in some form by half to three-quarters of the states -- depending on who is doing the counting and when -- the "hard" form of the doctrine as explained by Keeton has actually been repudiated in the overwhelming majority of states.

The reasonable expectations doctrine was summarized by Keeton as follows: "The objectively reasonable expectations of applicants and intended beneficiaries regarding the terms of insurance contracts will be honored even though painstaking study of the policy provisions would have negated those expectations."  In other words, even when the policy is unambiguous and clearly does not cover a loss, in some cases a court could find the policy nevertheless should provide coverage based on the insured's reasonable expectations at the time of contracting.  An example of a state where this  doctrine was used for some time and then discredited as a tool for judicial rewriting of contracts is Michigan, where in Wilkie v. Auto-Owners Ins. Co., 469 Mich. 41 (2003), the court had this to say:

In contrast to this legal pedigree [of strictly enforcing the clear language of contracts] extending over the centuries, the rule of reasonable expectations is of recent origin. Moreover, it is antagonistic to this understanding of the rule of law, and is, accordingly, in our view, invalid as an approach to contract interpretation.

The rule of reasonable expectations had innocent origins in 1970. Professor Robert E.Keeton of Harvard Law School wrote an article entitled Insurance law rights at variance with policy provisions, 83 Harv. L.R. 961, 967 (1970), in which he examined and attempted to rationalize a number of cases in which the results appeared to defy the principle that contracts will be construed according to their unambiguous terms. To explain this phenomenon, as best he could, he concluded that certain courts would evidently not enforce clear contract language in the face of one of the parties' “reasonable expectations” of coverage . . . .

Whether Professor Keeton intended this analysis to spawn a frontal assault on the ability of our citizens to manage, by contract, their own affairs, it had that effect because numerous courts, to one degree or another, adopted some form of the rule.

I have always thought there might have been an easier explanation to the phenomenon Keeton said he observed -- what most would simply call results-driven judging, or perhaps in some instances, simple boneheadedness.  That would not have made for an explosive law review article, however, because it focuses on the judge's motive or competence rather than the safe harbor of applying a purportedly objectively observable principle. 

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My thanks to Walter Olson for having me as a guest blogger at Point of Law last week -- a very enjoyable experience -- and thanks to Walter for the kind words in this recent post.  Walter is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and one of these days I will have to ask him if he can use his influence to get me a copy of the Institute's quarterly magazine, City Journal, autographed by Heather Mac Donald, a resident scholar and one of the great writers in America today.  

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One of my favorite insurance blogs is blog-re, written by Mark Geoghegen.  I was startled to learn that the recent attempted terrorist bombing in London took place right outside his office.   Glad that Mark and everyone else in London was unscathed.  

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I continue my guest blogging at PointofLaw.com today and tomorrow, if you're shocked by my meager output here I have a number of posts up at PoL. 

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As many of you know, I am a NoDak in exile and keep tabs on what goes on back in paradise, a word I use in all sincerity because I had a great time growing up in NoDak. This item intrigued me: it says Dickie Scruggs is among the top six contributors to North Dakota Democrats.  His contribution: $10,000.  Politics is pretty cheap in NoDak, if any of you are thinking of making a run for U.S. Senator, that's the place to go.  If you weren't born there, of course, that is going to be a huge handicap because it will be assumed you are crazy and know little to nothing about what really matters in life, but the voting population is less than half a million, and with some effort you could meet nearly everyone and convince them you're not some wacko with weird big city ways.  Below are some guidelines.

Fashion tip: get used to wearing jeans, solid color dress shirts or blouses are OK, plaid is better.

Choice of campaign vehicle: club cab pickup is mandatory.  Do not wash pickup too often: too flashy.

Headgear: male candidates should have cowboy hat handy, I am willing to serve as paid consultant to tell you when it is appropriate to wear it and when you should merely have it nearby, it's too complicated to explain here.  For women, no headgear is necessary, but always don baseball caps with "fun" slogans and sayings when they are presented to you. 

Accent: Norwegian accent is best. High Plains nasal intonations work -- if you can fake a Canadian accent without using "Eh" or saying "beauty" or "hoser,"  that will be close enough. 

Drink: Soda is "pop." Do not forget this. Repeat: do not ask for "soda."  Avoid potential faux pas by drinking only coffee or alcohol, both are very popular beverages.

Meals: breakfast, dinner, supper.  There not only is no free lunch, there is no lunch at all.  You must drop "lunch" from your vocabulary. UPDATE: A reader was perplexed by this and asked whether NoDaks don't eat at noon. The noon meal is called dinner, supper is the evening meal.  Breakfast is eaten in the morning, or according to the advertising of certain restaurants, anytime.  Thus, there is no lunch, and I might add, also no "brunch."  SECOND UPDATE: Someone else asked me why this is.  I don't know, it has never occurred to me to wonder why, it just is a fact of life in North Dakota like lots of wind, lots of cold and lots of mosquitoes.   Wondering why would be crazy, like asking my dad why I had to haul hay bales or drive tractor when I was a kid -- that's just the way it is.  By the way, you must master this thought process or you will not make it in NoDak at all, much less be elected senator.

Tips on driving on gravel roads: speed up when a vehicle approaches, it will build an air pocket that will deflect flying rocks and keep your pickup from getting pelted.  When vehicles approach at high speed in the middle of the road, do not pull further to the right, you may lose control in the soft gravel of the shoulder. Instead, drive fast down the middle of the road yourself -- they will probably eventually get over to their own side.  Hold the wheel casually with three fingers of one hand to show passengers and other driver you have no fear: avoid the two-handed white-knuckle death grip at all costs, it will brand you as unfit to drive and to lead.    

Political affiliation: Republican is best, moderate to conservative Democratic also works well (both senators and the state's lone U.S. Representative are Democrats).  Pro-farm subsidy is mandatory,  as is pro-Second Amendment stance and demonstrated ability to use guns.  The local definition of moderate to conservative may surprise you -- state's heritage is being stepped on and mocked by the powers that be, and most residents are descendants of semi-serfs who fled oppressive regimes: radical populist talk goes over very big.   

Where to be seen: county fairs, high school and college sporting events, duck hunting season, fishing derbies, demolition derbies (people drive old cars and crash into one another in a big dirt arena), tractor pulls, rodeos, parades, senior citizen centers, American Legion posts, lutefisk suppers.  If the idea of eating lutefisk -- codfish soaked in lye -- shocks you, rethink political plans. Remember that secretly, no one else really likes it either, it is merely a cultural artifact.  

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By the way, I am guest blogging this week at PointofLaw.com.  If you don't regularly read the site already, you should, it's one of my favorite stops on the Web.  

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Some people have a way with words; for others, words have their way with them.  You decide which category Sen. Trent Lott falls into.  Here's a story from the Sun Herald about his latest, and here is the money quote:

"I don't worry about offending anybody anymore, " said Lott, "because I've already offended everybody." 

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I recently became aware of this fine coverage blog written by the Lewis Johs firm on Long Island.  This is a new blog with some excellent posts on New York coverage cases.  I've talked with the folks at Lewis Johs and they are good people with a good product, check it out.   

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Back on May 1 when I did this post, I wrote on my electronic calendar to check in a month if anything had been done.  The subject of the post is something you may remember: Mississippi AG Jim Hood announced that he was in the final stages of drafting a new lawsuit where he would sue State Farm for allegedly breaching its agreement to get a class of hurricane victims certified, and then settle the class action.  Well, today is June 8, and I haven't heard of this lawsuit being filed. Did it get filed and I missed all the stories on it? I thought it was in the "final stages" a month ago, what is Jim Hood doing, billing by the hour?

I ran across this verbiage yesterday that looks like a newspaper editorial about the Hood lawsuit, but it's difficult to tell from the words what is going on, which is not an attractive quality in a newspaper article. Part of it speaks of a "plan" to renew Hood's lawsuit against State Farm.  Another part suggests the lawsuit has been filed, otherwise why would one "withdraw" it?  But seeing as I have a word search on my feedreader that combs the Web 24/7 like hungry electronic ants looking for stories about Jim Hood to bring back to the ant hill, I would think it is about as likely that I would miss this news as that I would fail to hear the relentless jackhammering of the street under my office window for the past three months as Portland installs more light rail tracks. 

Posted By David Rossmiller In Miscellaneous
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I thought you might enjoy this story from the San Francisco Chronicle about a California state senator's alleged ride of destruction, in which cell phone talking played a large part.  Best irony: she voted for a bill that will go into effect next year and require drivers to use hands-free devices when talking on a cell phone. I also really liked the part where she screamed at the driver of the car she hit that she was a senator -- what is it about public figures that makes them mess up in a highly visible way and then call attention to their status, as if that is calculated to do anything but make sure someone tells the media?  Here's a second story that includes additional details of alleged reading while driving 80 mph and running people off the road. 

Posted By David Rossmiller In Miscellaneous
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My workload crunch finally did it -- I have had no time to blog last night or this morning and the rest of the day looks extremely dicey as well, so I'm not going to be able to come up with a post today.  I'll make it up to you with a two-fer tomorrow.

Posted By David Rossmiller In Miscellaneous
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I wrote the post below last year for Memorial Day as a tribute to my Dad, who served as a soldier during World War II.  I've thought of his service often, and have read many books about war and military history to try to understand what he did, what he went through, and also who he was.  As Dickens pointed out in A Tale of Two Cities, the human heart is a mystery even to those closest to us, and there are many things I know about my Dad,