Here's another set of bad people who are making life in America worse. Last week, Arthur Jackson of Arlington, Texas, shot his estranged wife to death, and slaughtered his stepchildren while he was at it. Police pinned the suicidal Jackson down in a standoff, but he somehow managed to escape, and subsequently succeeded in blowing his own head off. But for some members of the Jackson family, this gruesome story is a money-making opportunity:
Jackson's family said they are talking with an attorney about a possible lawsuit against the City of Arlington. They said they believe Jackson would be alive if he had not managed to get away from the tactical team.
The. Nerve. Of. These. People.
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Is calling people "dirtbags" a Christian thing now?
I don't know whether Canada has "loser pays", but I do know that one of the main reasons there are fewer lawsuits and lower damage awards in Canada (whose legal system is in general identical to ours) is that medical costs are rarely an issue, since they are already presumed to be covered by the single payer system. In the US, it is prohibitively expensive to be injured, and one cannot blame victims for trying to hold those who cause the injuries responsible for the consequences of their actions. Actually, I thought that was a conservative value, but maybe that only works when we see the victim as "worthy" and when there is no risk that a damage award will move the said victim from a lower to a higher socioeconomic class.
"Is calling people "dirtbags" a Christian thing now?"
No, lots of people do it.
"Lawyers have a high incidence of alcoholism, divorce and other disfunction, and it is no wonder. I would be a mess too if my career was prostituting myself for money. What happened to honor and principle? I can't even begin to address the slime people who hire these lawyers." Excuse me, Bob, did it cross your mind for so much as a split second that some of your fellow posters here might be lawyers?
Alcoholism is a major problem for trial lawyers, but not for the profession in general. Divorce rates among lawyers are pretty much the same as in the general population at the same educational level. Divorce LAWYERS, btw, tend to stay married forever (fwiw). And lawyers are the only remaining profession still required to do substantial pro bono work. Just try to get a pro bono job on your plumbing or your electrical wiring sometime. Far from "prostituting" ourselves for money, lawyers make less money on the average than members of any of the other "learned professions." We are also the last bastion of liberally educated professionalism, the last career in which one can actually get points for knowing things outside one's official specialty.
I realize that liberals and people perceived to be liberals are fair game for groundless and vicious insults on any blog with "conservative" in its title, and I come prepared for that. I did not expect to have to deal with anti-lawyer blather here. Can we have some civility, please?
America's is about as legal of a society as any. If anyone is interested in reading more about the effects of such a litigious society, The Issue has a great Issue of the Day on it at http://theissue.com/issue/4864.html . It looks like something is gained with a society that is so litigious, or at the very least, all of the problems are a biproduct of a system that allows us to function as smoothly as we do as a society.
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