Royals revoke credentials - UPDATED AGAIN

That's an awful cynical view of the justice system. I mean, we're not a theocracy, so we really can't pray on whether a bank robber should get 10 years or 25, or whether a major cock-up by the surgeon is worth $10 million.

But it is a bang-on summing up of "Whitlock."

 

dooley...I'm not addressing crime, but lawsuits.

As far as praying on whether a surgeon's screw-up is worth 10 million...I suppose it is better that firms spend millions of dollars researching how to select random people for juries so a given result can be manipulated. So random, untrained people can select some arbitrary amount that will be appealed and never really paid and shifted through a million channels. Yes. I agree. This works.

My Christian faith is merely instructive here, but unnecessary to the larger point. Bottom line: This is between the Royals and whoever decides to support these journalists. Journalists will sit there and go to jail for sources, but they want the courts to figure this out? Good God.

 

So a doctor's screwup kills my kid, I should only have faith, and maybe karma, on my side?

 

Meanwhile, Dayton Moore must be feeling like someone sold him a bill of goods, because he's now working for these clowns.

 

dooley,

My answer to that is longer and more complicated than a message board, but I'll say this: name any random dollar amount, and that's the money getting shifted incrementally from the American people into your hands. That's a procedure that works 99 times out of 100 removed from insurance lists because of one mistake. That's one doctor out of a job and one dead kid and a lot of money you'll probably waste or blow one way or another.

Or you can forgive the error. No blood money, no repercussions.

I dunno. Say you got a kid, best friends with the next-door kid, whose parents are your best friends. Say your kid cuts their hand on a rusty nail sticking out of the deck they built themselves, gets an infection, dies. Gonna sue em?

 

No, the macroeconomy and the medical/insurance maelstrom are not my responsibility, thank you very much. And you surely are not that much of an automaton that you would think of the macroeconomy than about making the person who killed your child pay. That kind of thinking rightly got Dukakis whacked. Heck, I'd be in favor of manslaughter charges, but that's not what the system dictates. So you're saying that doctors should not be accountable?

 

dooley,

Of course you're not going to think about the maelstrom. You're going to think about getting yours for your kid. My only point is what getting yours costs. It doesn't mean a better industry, it means a more diminished one. Less lives saved because of the medical industry refuses to do out of fear of a mistake.

 

Alma, just so you know. I never said a lawsuit was a good thing. I said it was the only thing that would probably get the Glasses to budge, and it's less about a lawsuit itself than it is about money. Money makes people move. It's terribly unfortunate.

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But I've been thinking about results, and what about a battle of a different sort?

The other thing I always think about with Major League Baseball is the big chip: The anti-trust exemption. When Congress made noise over drug-testing and sprayed the air with the whiff of removing the exemption......... you've never seen MLB move so fast.

The exemption is a big, huge honking deal that-- via the Supreme Court-- the people of this nation gave MLB as a gift. In return, it's the league's responsibility not to take advantage of the public trust. It's doing a shitty job right now.

MAYBE-- and that's a big MAYBE-- if all those organizations, plus the BBWAA (which leo mentioned on page 2, and Knighthawk subsequently brought up)-- If all those got together to put pressure on Congress.... Maybe something could be done. The big group in b'casting is the RTNDA.

But for this to happen, somebody would have to get really passionate and really organized. I don't see the BBWAA getting involved, and most of these other organizations are made up of fulltime working "journalists" who have little time to lobby Congress.

But it's a thought.... a very lofty thought. ;D

 

And, not to mention, a clearly aberrational, absurd ruling by the Supreme Court in the first place.

Not only does MLB (actually all professional sports, but specifically MLB) do a shitty job of "not taking advantage of the public trust," much much much to the contrary, MLB is doing everything it can to fuck the public over with a king-sized slippery dildo every chance it gets.

Through continual use of the taxpayer-extortion technique to force taxpayers to supply them with stadiums at virtually no cost, and then appropriating all (ALL - every goddamn dime) of the resulting revenue, the industry of professional baseball has siphoned approximately Fifty Billion Dollars ($50,000,000,000.00) out of the economy of the United States.

Add in the other professional sports and it's more, much much more. Hundreds of billions of tax dollars, pumped directly into the pockets of silver-spoon born-on-third-base rich boys. And people piss and moan about fat black women buying potato chips and malt liquor with food stamps.

 

Sorry, BBWAA is too busy voting on awards and organizing the big NY banquet.

 

alma, as a future lawyer (i've got one year of law school and a passing score on the bar exam until i can call myself an attorney), i just want to say that people you are part of the problem.

yes, our society is too litigious. yes, people file stupid lawsuits for stupid reasons. yes, society suffers the consequences of the system that allows anyone to have their day in court.

but millions more lawsuits are filed for legitimate reasons -- parents sue the doctor whose error killed their kid, a small business owner sues a supplier whose failure to deliver goods drove the small business guy out of business, a global mega-corporation sues another global mega-corporation over patent infringement for an obscure part the size of a pinhead, a landlord wants to evict a poor family who wants to withold the rent because the landlord refuses to fix the heater in the winter. these are disputes that need to be settled. you're living in a non-existent utopia if you expect our society to survive without a form of dispute resolution. unless you have a better way, simply decrying the litigiousness of our society - and even less helpfully pointing out that other societies are less litigious - adds nothing to the discourse.

 

so, the time has come for the man who ate my great dane. you going back to kc to deal with the glasses or are you going to take your enormous appetite to dallas and the buffet table?

are you going to back up your words or fill your gut and ego? this story is growing colder and colder by the day. i thought you worked out of kansas city.

money talks, whitlock and bullshit walk.