Well, there goes one of my Final Four: Louisville’s out.
NY Times reading –
training and directing workers to skilled work: as a mechanic. Apparently, our increasingly computerized world means we need car mechanics who can diagnose car illnesses with computers and with other mechanics retiring, there’s a real need. I liked that the article gives a little hope to getting people attracted to fields again. We might even get more women in a field long male dominated. Now, if only our public education system can jump on this idea, maybe we could develop a skilled labor force rather than moan how the kids can’t seem to do anything.
Plus – Richard F. Scruggs, one of the country’s most successful litigators, whose house was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, is using his litigating skills against those we probably all don’t admire – the insurance industry:
Mr. Scruggs, 60, slim, often folksy and smooth as molasses in court, is using techniques that he honed in his earlier legal fights. He is arguing now, as he did before to such good effect, that he is fighting for the little guy who cannot stand up alone to big anonymous companies.
“These are not just legal wars,” Mr. Scruggs said in a recent interview. “They are public relations and political wars.”
The insurance companies counter that Mr. Scruggs has portrayed them unfairly and misleadingly.
“Mr. Scruggs has taken a tiny portion of the claims associated with Katrina and tried to paint the entire insurance industry with a brush of malfeasance,” said Robert P. Hartwig, president and chief economist of the Insurance Information Institute. “And that is an entirely incorrect characterization.”
Joseph Annotti, a spokesman for the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, whose members provide 40 percent of the home insurance in Mississippi and the rest of the country, calls Mr. Scruggs an opportunist. “People are looking for someone to blame and someone to pay,” Mr. Annotti said. “He’s playing on that anger and people’s raw emotions. On our part, we underwrite policies that go through strict regulatory approval. Every word is approved by the state regulator.”
The insurance dispute centers on two main kinds of damage in a hurricane: wind and flooding. People along the Mississippi coast say they thought their policies covered any type of hurricane damage. The insurers, with the backing of the courts, have insisted that flooding is not included.
But in some cases insurers have also refused to pay when a house was wrecked by both wind and flooding — and there, a federal judge has ruled, they were wrong. Flood insurance is sold by the federal government. But fewer than 20 percent of the coastal residents in Mississippi bought it. [….]
Mr. Scruggs conceded he has used “every trick in the book” to gain advantage over the insurers.
“This is very personal,” he said. “This is about my family, my friends, the people I grew up with. I wake up at 3:30 every morning thinking of ways to get at this thing.”
In what some of his critics sniff at as unlawyerly decorum, he missed no opportunity to bash the insurers in newspaper and television interviews and press releases. He embraced two whistle-blowers who walked away from their jobs as claims adjusters, taking with them thousands of State Farm documents. Then he turned over the information to the attorney general of Mississippi, who began a criminal investigation.
In his talks with State Farm, Mr. Scruggs regularly dropped the names of two of his clients — his brother-in-law, Senator Trent Lott, and his friend, Representative Gene Taylor, who both lost houses to Katrina and had their claims rejected by State Farm. [….]
Scruggs conceded that his career hasn’t been based on altruism, but he is more Public Interest Minded after the horrific stuff to him and his neighbors, and is now working on getting more changes from the insurance industry. Like him or not, things do happen when you piss off the people with power.
An interesting look at Senator Barack Obama’s Hawaiian upbringing.
William Grimes’ reviewing annotated books – you know, those big, fancy, schmancy items with footnotes to explain, say, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Cool. I was (and remain) one of those suckers who’d read the footnotes, if only to better understand what on earth was I reading. Plus, Grimes is turning out to be a great writer/book critic. I guess it’s much different (even more relaxing?) than it was back when he was a food critic?
Time Magazine: the new layout is introduced in this weekend’s issue. First of all, I still don’t quite like this whole “get Time on Fridays!” thing. I preferred it when I got it earlier in the week. Secondly, the new layout… well, it’ll take some getting used to. Calling your Letters to the Editor section the “Inbox” in honor of our e-mailing world… well, sorry, that’s just tacky. Time.com is now increasingly cooler (all those blogs… but Andrew Sullivan’s now joined another magazine, so, oh well), but the idea of making your print magazine and your website conform… well, like I said, I don’t quite like the new layout yet.
On TV: watched NBC’s “Raines” on Friday night, the Jeff Goldblum vehicle. Not a bad show – seems entertaining. But, really – why must everyone go with the House idea? Have Quirky Personality and Watch Him in His Element. Maybe he even dislikes people, like House. So, CBS’ “Shark” has James Woods as Quirky Prosecutor and now there’s Jeff Goldblum as Quirky Cop. At least you got to hand it to Goldblum’s Detective Raines for being a sensitive and imaginative sort.
