I heard this was a good show……Parts I II and III
Dan Rather on Larry King

From CNN:

Dan Rather filed a $70 million lawsuit Wednesday against CBS, alleging that the network made him a “scapegoat” for a discredited story about President Bush’s National Guard service.

The 75-year-old Rather, whose final months were clouded by controversy over the report, says the complaint stems from “CBS’ intentional mishandling” of the aftermath of the story.

The lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, also names CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves, Viacom Inc. Chairman Sumner Redstone, and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward.

CBS spokesman Dana McClintock said: “These complains are old news, and this lawsuit is without merit.”

How many ways can the government screw it’s veterans? I don’t know, but I think this administration is trying to find out.

When in doubt, tilt toward the veteran.

That’s what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has suggested to government agencies in two cases involving federal employees who had served in the military reserves and petitioned for back pay because of improperly charged military leave.

The government has long encouraged civil service employees to join the National Guard and reserves, providing them with 15 days of leave for their annual military training. But agencies have not consistently interpreted the benefit, creating a muddle for judges and federal officials.

In 2003, in a case known as Butterbaugh, the appeals court ruled that the government should not count weekends and holidays as leave when the employees were away from their agencies for military training.

Putting that ruling into practice has proved difficult, and federal employees and retirees continue to file claims for back pay. Some federal employees who have served in the reserves and had to use their regular vacation time to cover their military training may be eligible for $3,000 to $10,000 in back pay, Mathew B. Tully, a lawyer who has filed claims on behalf of veterans, said.

More at the Washington Post

A US civil rights group filed a lawsuit Tuesday demanding the American military release documents about civilians killed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, accusing the government of trying to hide the human cost of war.

The American Civil Liberties Union’s legal move came after a request for documents related to civilian deaths under the country’s Freedom of Information laws was rebuffed by the US Navy, the Air Force and Marines. The US Army complied with the ACLU’s year-old request.

The group has already released thousands of documents obtained from the army showing compensation claims from families whose loved ones were killed by stray bullets or in traffic accidents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Tuesday, the ACLU released thousands of additional documents revealing court martial proceedings and military investigations in cases in which US soldiers were accused — and often acquitted — of killing civilians intentionally or through negligence.

More at YahooNews

What is it with this administration? They truly believe they are above the law.

A federal judge in Montana has ordered the Bush administration’s top forestry official to explain why he should not be held in contempt of court for the U.S. Forest Service’s failure to analyze the environmental impact of dropping fish-killing fire retardant on wildfires.

If found in contempt, Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, could go to jail until the Forest Service complies with the court order to do the environmental review.

Noting that Rey had blocked implementation of an earlier review, U.S. District Judge Donald W. Malloy in Missoula, Mont., ordered Rey to appear in his court Oct. 15 unless the Forest Service completes the analysis before that time.

More at the Boston Globe

Was the airport employee an asshole……or did Mr. Filner have that “I’m special” attitude?

From MSNBC:

Years ago, a local K-Mart where I lived gave a man the dose of coumadin and killed him. Lawsuit followed. I have twice received the wrong prescription at Walgreens. Both were prescriptions for my daughter, who has asthma. Both times we realized it was the wrong meds prior to her taking them. I don’t use Walgreens anymore. And I ALWAYS check prescriptions. One development in our country that really saddens me is the disappearance of independent businesses. The corner drug stores, grocery stores. Now, there’s a Walgreens on every corner, and they really don’t give a crap about customer service.

A jury awarded $25.8 million Friday to the family of a cancer patient who was given a wrong prescription, had a stroke and died several years later, lawyers said.

Beth Hippely was prescribed Warfarin, a blood thinner, in 2002 to treat breast cancer. The prescription filled at a Walgreens pharmacy was 10 times what her doctor prescribed, court documents said.

The Polk County Circuit Court jury found the prescription error caused a cerebral hemorrhage resulting in permanent bodily injury, disability and physical pain. The mother of three died in January at the age of 46.

A 19-year-old pharmacy technician, with little training, misfiled the prescription, according to court documents.

The lawsuit was filed in 2003 by Hippely, her husband Deane Hippely and their children against the Deerfield, Ill.-based Walgreen Co. for negligent breach of duty and wrongful death.

More at CBSNews

I used to think that if you enlist in the service, you get what you get. You have no reason to complain about being sent into combat. But I don’t think that anymore. Not with the evil bastards we have running this country. Not with the way they fuck our troops every step of the way. Kudos to this kid for getting home.

The Army has released a reservist from active duty and sent him home to Florida after he asked a federal court to block his fifth deployment to war zones, his lawyer said Tuesday.

The Army released Sgt. Erik Botta, 26, who served in Iraq three times and in Afghanistan once, because it determined he “was not medically qualified to remain on active duty,” said his attorney, Mark Waple.

The decision was surprising because Botta never claimed any medical disqualification and suffers from no illnesses, Waple said.

Botta had said at the time he filed his court petition in July that he wasn’t against the war, but simply felt he had done his duty. He was granted an initial exemption from deployment last year, allowing him to pursue an electrical engineering degree at Palm (nasdaq: PALM - news - people ) Beach Community College and work as a senior technician on Blackhawk and Seahawk helicopters at Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.

But his latest exemption request was initially denied by the Army.

In his court petition, Botta had said he thought the Army should consider his previous tours “to assure a sharing of exposure to the hazards of combat,” and contended that the Army’s refusal to exempt him “constitutes unlawful custody.”

Botta, who was stationed at Fort Jackson near Columbia, S.C., returned to his home in Port St. Lucie on Monday night, his attorney said.

“We’re very happy to have Erik home with his family, headed back to school and back to his job,” Waple said.

More at Forbes

From Boston.com:

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. –A U.S. attorney on Wednesday declined a federal judge’s request to prosecute a prominent Mississippi attorney on allegations of criminal contempt in a Hurricane Katrina insurance dispute.

U.S. Attorney Alice Martin said in the letter to U.S. District Judge William M. Acker Jr. that he chose not to prosecute Richard F. Scruggs and his firm “following a serious and thorough review of the facts.”

In his June 15 request, Acker said he would appoint another attorney to handle the prosecution if Martin declined the court’s request. His office did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment Wednesday.

Acker ruled in June that Scruggs willfully violated a Dec. 8 preliminary injunction that required him to deliver all documents about State Farm Insurance Co. that two whistleblowers secretly copied. Sisters Cori and Kerri Rigsby were heavily involved in processing claims for State Farm, and said they duplicated the documents to back up their allegations the company wrongly denied claims after Katrina.

Acker said that instead of complying, Scruggs sent the documents to the Mississippi attorney general’s office “for the calculated purpose of ensuring noncompliance with or avoidance” of the injunction.

A spokeswoman for Martin’s office, Jill Ellis, said the U.S. attorney had no further comment beyond the letter.

Scruggs, a highly successful plaintiffs’ lawyer who is the brother-in-law of U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., is suing State Farm on behalf of hundreds of Mississippi residents.

His son and law partner in Oxford, Miss., Zach Scruggs, said that Martin’s letter “says all that needs to be said about this matter, and it would be inappropriate for us to say anything else at this time.”

Had to look him up…….

From Wikpedia: As a District Court Judge, Bates dismissed the GAO’s effort to learn with whom Cheney’s energy task force conferred. On July 19, 2007, he dismissed a lawsuit filed by Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband against Vice President Dick Cheney and other top Bush administration officials.
Judge Bates spent two years working for Kenneth Starr and the Independent Counsel’s office during the investigation into President Bill Clinton, specifcially Deputy Independent Counsel under Ken Starr from September 1995 until leaving in March 1997.

A federal judge today dismissed a lawsuit filed by former CIA officer Valerie Plame and her husband against Vice President Cheney and top administration officials over the disclosure of Plame’s name and covert status to the media.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates said that Cheney and White House aides cannot be held liable for the disclosure of information about Plame in the summer of 2003 while they were trying to rebut criticism of the administration’s war efforts levied by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The judge said such efforts were certainly part of the officials’ scope of normal duties.

“The alleged tortious conduct, namely the disclosure of Mrs. Wilson’s status as a covert operative, was incidental to the kind of conduct that defendants were employed to perform,” Bates wrote in an opinion released this afternoon.

Bates also ruled that the court lacked the power to award damages for public disclosure of private information about Plame. The judge said that was because Plame and Wilson had failed to exhaust other remedies in seeking compensation from appropriate federal agencies for the alleged privacy violations.

More at the Washington Post

This is not your Father’s military………..so the saying goes. 4 deployments in less that 6 years…..and I wonder how many of them were 15 month deployments. I wish this young man good luck with this lawsuit! I hope he doesn’t end up in Gitmo!

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — A Florida soldier who enlisted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks plans to sue the military, fighting his fifth order to combat, according to a Local 6 report.

Twenty’six-year-old Erik Botta, who is a Port St. Lucie reservist, signed up for the service days after the Sept. 11 attacks. He did a tour in Afghanistan and three in Iraq, but he said enough is enough.

Botta plans to file suit this week, asking for an exemption or delay so that he can complete his engineering studies.

He’ll also ask the court to prevent the Army from requiring him to report for duty until the legal questions are settled, according to WJXT-TV in Jacksonville.

An Army spokeswoman said the service evaluates “each request independently to determine if the mobilization will cause undue hardship for the soldier or the family.”

Source

How law firms are failing New Orleans

By Lisa Lerer
from Slate magazine

Law firms are the cavalry of the legal world. Disaster strikes, and the firms, with their thousands of lawyers and millions of dollars, ride into town to clean up the mess.

But what happens when the cavalry doesn’t show?

That’s the situation in New Orleans, where almost two years after Katrina, the criminal-defense system is still in a state of emergency. Public defense was never the city’s strength: When the levees broke, there were about 7,000 criminal defendants waiting to see a state-appointed lawyer. Immediately after the storm, the city jailed roughly 5,000 of them, many on shaky legal grounds. Most remained locked up for over a year before speaking with a lawyer. The public defender’s office is slowly working through the backlog, but is still overwhelmed. It’s a situation public defenders bitterly call “Gitmo on the Bayou.”

In response to the crisis, more than 2,700 law students traveled to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, on trips a bit reminiscent of the famous civil rights freedom rides. The students do just about everything but appear in court, including interviewing defendants and collecting evidence. Public defenders from different parts of the country took sabbaticals from their day jobs to come down as well. But however welcome, this is as effective as washing the bathroom floor with a toothbrush, say New Orleans public defenders. Eventually, you’ll clean up the mess, but a mop could take care of the problem a whole lot faster. The law firms are far stronger and richer than anyone else in the legal world. Why aren’t they helping the Bayou’s criminal-defense bar recover?

read more at SLATE MAGAZINE

from Think Progress

In April, Think Progress noted that Fox News morning show “Fox & Friends” aired at least eight segments about a fake news story claiming a school in Maine had formed “an anti-ham A-response plan-” after a Muslim student complained of being harassed with a ham steak. After the Fox report, the school’s superintendent received threatening calls and hate mail. He’s now suing Fox News:

Lewiston School Superintendent Leon Levesque is seeking $75,000 in federal court in Portland to deter what his attorney Bernard J. Kubetz characterized as irresponsible reporting by Fox News Channel. […]

“It appears to me that Fox News acted in a grossly irresponsible way and took some information that was really not very plausible, did not do any substantial fact-checking, and put it out as hard news,” Kubetz said. […]

Fox did a brief on-air retraction, but Levesque called it unsatisfactory. A Fox News spokesman in New York said the company does not comment on pending lawsuits.

By LUBNA TAKRURI, Associated Press Writer
from YAHOO! NEWS

WASHINGTON - A judge ruled Monday in favor of a dry cleaner that was sued for $54 million over a missing pair of pants.

The owners of Custom Cleaners did not violate the city’s consumer protection law by failing to live up to Roy L. Pearson’s expectations of the “Satisfaction Guaranteed” sign once displayed in the store window, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Judith Bartnoff ruled.

“A reasonable consumer would not interpret ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’ to mean that a merchant is required to satisfy a customer’s unreasonable demands” or to agree to demands that the merchant would have reasonable grounds for disputing, the judge wrote.

Bartnoff ordered Pearson to pay the court costs of defendants Soo Chung, Jin Nam Chung and Ki Y. Chung.

Pearson, an administrative law judge, originally sought $67 million from the Chungs, claiming they lost a pair of trousers from a blue and maroon suit, then tried to give him a pair a pair of charcoal gray pants that he said were not his. He arrived at the amount by adding up years of alleged law violations and almost $2 million in common law fraud claims.

Bartnoff wrote, however, that Pearson failed to prove that the pants the dry cleaner tried to return were not the pants he taken in for alterations.

Pearson later dropped demands for damages related to the pants and focused his claims on signs in the shop, which have since been removed.

The court costs amount to just over $1,000 for photocopying, filing and similar expenses, according to the Chungs’ attorney. A motion to recover the Chungs’ tens of thousands of dollars in attorney fees will be considered later.

Chris Manning, the Chungs’ attorney, praised the ruling, which followed a two-day trial earlier this month.

from United Press International

SANTA ANA, Calif.(UPI) — A California jury awarded $11.7 million to a man who sustained brain damage from a stroke after an infection was left untreated.

The Orange County Superior Court jury awarded the money Friday to Joey Crumes, 45, who suffered a stroke after the physicians failed to treat an infection in 2004.

The Los Angeles Times said Crumes presented at the Mission Hospital emergency room in Mission Viejo with an acute headache. He informed the treating physicians that the year before he had an operation for cancer in the right sinus area.

He was sent home with some pain medication and a warning to seek further treatment if his condition did not improve. Five days later, the man fell into a coma and it was discovered an infection had reached his brain.

The resulting massive stroke left him paralyzed on the left side, which forced his confinement to a wheelchair and landed him in the hospital for 11 months.

The lawsuit was filed against Mission Hospital radiologist Charles Aucreman and emergency room physician Dr. Andrew Lawson.