Big Dogs Weblog

I have a new post over at tryontheglasses.

Great piece about peace!

Tags: General

Well, it looks like the era of extortion by Jessie Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition of thugs is falling upon hard times. NewsMax is reporting that the New York Stock Exchange refused to allow Jackson to hold his annual Wall Street fund raising event and is rebuffing Jackson’s annual demand for $100,000.

In the past, big businesses came out in droves for Jackson’s minority business outreach. This was especially true during the Clinton years which begs the question: Given the sexual escapades of Jackson and Clinton, shouldn’t they have called it a “FUN RAISING” event? This practice changed rapidly when a Jackson supporter inside the exchange stepped down earlier this month.

In 1998, the debut year of the Project, Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, Securities and Exchange Chairman Arthur Levitt and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, along with Donald Trump, showed up to support Jackson’s so-called “diversity agenda.”
But as Investor’s Business Daily noted earlier this week, with Jackson friend Richard Grasso no longer running the Big Board, the Wall Street Project gravy train has chugged to a halt.

It would appear as if the big wigs at the NYSE have decided that enough is enough. Their actions will make it a bit more difficult for Jackson to hold businesses hostage. If he keeps losing targets to exploit, he might have to actually get a real job and start paying taxes….

The actions of the NYSE also put individual companies on notice. The actions will call into question why a responsible business would hand out its money so recklessly.

“The NYSE cutoff is a dramatic step that puts the individual companies that bankroll Jackson on the spot,” noted Peter Flaherty, president of the National Legal and Policy Center, in comments to CNSNews.com.

“It is a lot harder for the Verizons and PepsiCos to argue that there’s nothing wrong with supporting Jackson’s groups.”

Bill O’Reilly had this nailed on his show and he expands on it in his book The No Spin Zone. Jackson has been using that race card for a long time to extort money from American Businesses. Perhaps now they have learned that they do not need to make Jackson wealthy at the expense of thier bottom lines.

Tags: General

If anyone is interested, I just posted at tryontheglasses. Good piece about the attack on Christian Students in a Florida College.

Tags: General

I don’t know why I bother going over to LostAdam. Everytime he publishes something I have to go through it and pull out the inaccurate statements. I comment on them and then I am dismissed as a partisan hack or troll.

After some banter about the cost of drugs in this country (the pharmaceuticals, not the recreational ones the hippies on the left use) I made the comment that if they wanted cheaper drugs we needed tort reform. I stated that 19 out of every 20 dollars spent on developing a drug was spent on something legal. I don’t know anymore if this number is completely accurate. I read it when I was in nursing school and some things have changed. However, it is not difficult to figure out that if people sue any company and get enough money out of them, then the company’s costs increase. This is just common sense and a little economics. I’ll make it simpler for Adam’s readers. If your company pays out more money you have to raise the cost of your products to compensate.

Adam was kind enough to respond with this:

I’d like you to back that up with some figures. I’ve been looking into this a little and more than a few people are saying the whole idea is Bus**t (expurgated by the Big Dog). More Republican lies.

The following links go to sites that talk about lawsuits in medicine. Some of them are very anti drug company. However, they show some of the enormous amounts of money these companies pay out.

Interestingly enough, many of these sites show that the cost of litigation is, in part responsible for the cost of drugs in the US. There is also evidence to show that the FDA is responsible because of the process used to approve drugs. As a side note, if drug companies can’t market a drug without FDA approval, shouldn’t people be suing the FDA for allowing harmful drugs out there?

I know there will be people who say that the drug companies should pay through the teeth if someone has a problem. I don’t think this is right. If the drug company was negligent or dishonest then they are certainly culpable. On the other hand, if they acted in good faith there should not be these huge awards. But I will ask this, If it is OK for a drug company to pay out a fortune when their product causes a problem, why can’t they make a lot of money when their product is good? To take it a step further, why should a company that spends millions of dollars on research not be allowed to make a profit on their work? Especially when you consider they can only hold the patent on the drug for seven years. Then other companies can market generics and benefit from someone else’s research.

I know that it is useless pointing this out to Adam and his readers. When they can not come up with a valid argument or they do not like what you say they start calling names. That does not bother me but it is an ineffective method of debating. Anyway, I responded to the post so they would know I was not fabricating the link between drug costs and lawsuits. I did not want them to use the h approach of saying that “I destroyed your argument and that is why you are silent.” This is done just after you are banned so you can not post.

This is from the AHRP article:

Plaintiffs’ lawyers can now finance enormously complicated suits that require years of pretrial work and substantial scientific expertise, in the hope of a multibillion-dollar payoff. Scores of firms collaborate on a case, with some responsible for finding claimants, others for managing the millions of documents that companies turn over, others for the written legal arguments, and still others for presenting the case to a jury. Some 60 firms have banded together, for example, in the Baycol litigation.

And even when they do not form explicit partnerships, plaintiffs’ lawyers are working much more closely together than they once did. At conferences around the nation with names like “Mass Torts Made Perfect” — that one was organized by Mr. Papantonio and the lawyer-celebrity Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. — and “The Knowledge to Conquer,” lawyers trade information and legal strategies.

“The plaintiffs have learned how to communicate and share information,” said Robert J. Gordon, of Weitz & Luxenberg in Manhattan, which is among the largest plaintiffs’ law firms in the country, with about 400 employees, including 70 lawyers.

In addition, the plaintiffs’ bar has refined a technique in drug lawsuits that it has used effectively against many asbestos companies. Lawyers file a few cases with very sick plaintiffs in states and counties considered favorable to plaintiffs, while building big “inventories” of less seriously ill patients, or so-called pill-taker cases, even people who have used the drug but are not sick.

If the lawyers can win large verdicts in the early cases, they then refuse to settle the claims of their other very sick clients unless the defendants also agree to pay the claims of people who are less sick. Under those circumstances, the companies face a difficult choice. If they go to trial in a case that includes a few seriously injured plaintiffs and hundreds more who are less affected, they risk losing hundreds of millions of dollars in a single case, frightening Wall Street and spurring more suits. But if they settle cases without a trial, they risk being perceived as an easy mark for lawyers.

It appears to me that these lawyers are targeting rich drug companies in rather slick methods to extort BILLIONS of dollars from them.

Once again, if the company has higher costs then those costs get passed on. I think drug companies should scale back research for a few years. The really sick people who would benefit from the new drugs will die off and there will be fewer lawsuits. Then, when people are begging for new drugs to help with their illnesses, they might just get rid of their lawyers. Perhaps people might even change the habits they have that contribute to the illnesses they sue over.

Tags: General

A friend of mine at work emailed me a few items that are meant to be a joke. I have to admit that they are very funny. Perhaps the thing that makes them hysterical is that they are closer to the truth than one might actually think. Below are all three items he sent. They are something like a thought for the day, but I’ll give you three days worth.

COWS
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that our government can track a cow born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she sleeps in the state of Washington. They also tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give them all a cow.

THE CONSTITUTION
They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don’t we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it’s worked for over 200 years and we’re not using it anymore.

TEN COMMANDMENTS
The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a Courthouse. You cannot post “Thou shalt not steal”, “Thou shalt not commit adultery”, and “Thou shalt not bear false
witness” in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment!!!

The Cow thing is probably the most efficient thing the government has done. If they could keep track of our money this well they would not have to keep putting their hands in our pockets. Maybe the cows are terrorists. They belong to Al-Cowda. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Thanks TM for this great eye-opener!

Tags: General