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Bush is seeking to make the important advances that are desperately needed by this country, and that few politicians have the courage to address. This is another big win.
The House overwhelmingly passed the Class Action Fairness Act yesterday, setting the stage for President Bush to sign into law as early as today the most sweeping federal tort reform measure in more than a decade.
“After 10 years of tireless work on multiple fronts, our efforts are finally paying off, and the Republican Congress has passed the first substantive lawsuit abuse reform bill,” said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Texas Republican. “This bill is a major accomplishment and it will make history.”
The bill, which passed the Senate last week and is the first major policy push by Republicans in this Congress, aims to halt some of the largest frivolous lawsuits in which lawyers bag huge fees and plaintiffs score pittances. It passed the House yesterday on a 279-149 vote.
Specifically, the bill diverts large, multistate class-action lawsuits from state courts into federal courts to stop lawyers from shopping their cases around the country in search of generous state judges and juries known for awarding huge verdicts. One such jurisdiction—Madison County, Ill.—reported a glut of suits filed in recent months as the legislation appeared likely to pass into law.
The law also will enhance judicial scrutiny of settlements where coupons are awarded to plaintiffs to ensure that legal fees are not too generous by comparison.
Yesterday’s vote was a major victory for Mr. Bush, for whom tort reform has been a linchpin policy goal. He campaigned vigorously on the issue and this bill in particular. He is expected to sign it as early as today.
”[The bill] will help protect people who are wrongfully harmed while reducing the frivolous lawsuits that clog courts, hurt the economy, cost jobs and burden American businesses,” he said yesterday.
“Junk lawsuits have driven the cost of America’s tort system to more than 240 billion dollars a year—greater than any other major industrialized nation,” Mr. Bush said. “This bill is an important step forward in our efforts to reform the litigation system and to continue creating jobs and growing our economy.”
A new site has been launched by David Horowitz:
When you click on the link in today’s lead to www.DiscoverTheNetwork.com you will see the fruit of more than two years of labor and more than 50,000 man and woman hours of work. It is, in effect, a book I’ve dreamed about writing for more than 20 years. But it could never be put between the covers of a book. And it could never have been written by one man. Only a collective effort and only the magic of the Internet could contain and display all the information necessary to capture the left and do it in digestible form. The publication, or rather posting, of DiscoverTheNetwork definitively ends what has always been to me the surreal discussion of whether there actually is a left in America and whether, if there is one, it is powerful. There is and it is.
MOSCOW—Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Moscow will continue its nuclear cooperation with Iran and that he is convinced Tehran does not intend to develop atomic weapons.
Yeah, right.
A Russian analyst questioned whether Putin’s statement was based on actual information or on expediency.
“To my mind, it’s hard to find arguments to support Putin’s declaration,” said Anton Khlopkov, director of the PIR Center, which studies weapons issues. He noted that “Iran is potentially an important strategic partner for Russia … (with) a whole series of coinciding interests.”
Why do Hillary Clinton and John Kerry want to allow ex-felons to vote?
Currently an estimated 4.7 million Americans are barred from voting because of their criminal records.
This seems like another irresponsible move by the Dems. It doesn’t seem to be in the interests of the nation to have criminals helping to make key national decisions.
A year ago I talked about the bias of mainstream media to friends who had never heard of the subject before. Today a top administration official has discussed the subject in detail with a leading national magazine.
In an interview for The New Yorker, Karl Rove discusses in detail his views on the bias of mainstream media. From a NewsMax discussion of the interview:
The Times employed the underhanded technique of surveying new registrants in the most heavily Democratic and Republican ZIP Codes in Florida and Ohio – an unnecessary effort in Florida, where voters register by party, and misleading in Ohio, where the Republicans were finding most of their new voters in precincts (not ZIP Codes) that had not voted heavily Republican in the past.
Rove told Lemann that he believed the Times had allowed itself to be fed its data by Democratic organizations.
Lemann makes the point that from the president on down, the Bush campaign, not surprisingly, all but ignored the self-proclaimed newspaper of record. He reports that Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff, for example, “found that it had no room for the Times reporter even to travel in the press section of its plane.”
This could not have happened without the emergence of the blogosphere, documenting publicly for the first time the bias of MSM.
[Interviewer] Lemann concludes with the observation that “journalists in the mainstream media are starting to worry ‘what if people don’t believe in us, don’t want us anymore?’”
The journalists are starting to catch on that this isn’t going away.
See also this related article, posted here in November: White House to NY TIMES: You Have to Play Fair if You Want to Play.
Theo Van Gogh’s 11-minute film “Submission,” is here.
(Hat Tip to J.C.)
