Jesse Taylor at Pandagon has an idea for Democrats: "[P]ropose a series of easy, supportable consumer protection laws, with which the crapola shall be smacked out of the 900th push for tort reform this year." He continues:
Tort "reform" has not only not worked anywhere it's been implemented, but its sole point is to remove protections for consumers and make companies, doctors and contractors less responsible for their actions. The last thing we need is for the government to step in and say we need less protections against bad doctors, negligent corporations, and incompetent builders. Want less medical malpractice suits? Get bad doctors out of medicine. Want less class-action suits? Get the FDA to police food supplies, drug makers, etc. Want fewer asbestos suits? Get builders to comply with asbestos laws.
David Sirota adds his own two cents to the tort reform debate, prompted by a Knight Ridder account of yesterday's White House economic summit. Ron Hutcheson reported (registration required) that remarks by Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli about trial lawyers and tort reform elicited laughter from conference participants. Says Sirota: Customers and employees injured at Home Depot may not find efforts to block their right to sue quite as funny, and he provides links to a series of 2003 articles published by American City Business Journals detailing safety issues at Home Depot stores.
And, in case you haven't gotten enough of the Bernard Kerik saga (we can barely keep up!), Josh Marshall supplies a nice little wrap-up of new revelations. Over in National Review's Corner, Jonah Goldberg also weighs in on the White House's apparent lack of due diligence on its Department of Homeland Security nominee:
Okay, here's what I don't get. Rudy [Giuliani] had to have known that Kerik had all these problems. Hell, I knew about Kerik and Judith Regan. His sketchiness may not have been a matter of public record, but it was certainly something Rudy knew about. Why on earth would Giuliani back a guy for DHS Director who he knew had to have a high probability of exploding in his face? The failure of the White House to foresee this is baffling enough, but this seems like a multi-front breakdown in political intelligence.
Ralph Taylor at Nathannewman.org points us to Tina Brown's take on the subject in today's Washington Post:
It turns out that all that Capitol Hill huffing and puffing for three weeks about how our mighty intelligence agencies should share information was irrelevant. They have no information to share, whether it's about Iran, Iraq -- or Bernie Kerik.
For New Yorkers the Kerik saga is a nice moment of one-upmanship at Washington's expense. To know that the former police commissioner and current partner in Rudy Giuliani's post-9/11 money machine was a disaster waiting to happen, you don't need the bureaucratic talents of an army of FBI agents and White House lawyers. All you needed was to be a reader of the New York Post's Page Six. Over the years, Bernie has garnered more blind items than Paris Hilton. No one in this town believed for more than 10 minutes that Bernie gate was just another nannygate.
