BJ, that is the most horrifying thing I have seen in weeks.

So for the rest of you, here you go:

Look! Medical malpractice insurance rates stabilized!

Good thing we enacted all that “tort reform” and stopped all those dirty, dirty trial lawyers from bringing their frivolous lawsuits and… waitaminute. No we didn’t. (1)

Huh. Funny how that worked out.

(1) well, maybe not nationwide. Here in Ohio, we of course have Senate Bill 80, signed in December 2004 and effective April 2005, which made some kind of inroads against supposed frivolous suits and skyrocketing damage awards, but I’m kind of having a hard time seeing how that bill, or any other like it that might have come up in the 2004 election cycle contributed to the already-steeply declining trend in insurance rates shown on the report.

Also, this post is of course a HUGE snark on my part, and the subject deserves a lot more actual thought than I’ve put into it here — so I promise that I’ll address it in more detail in the near future.

Do you drink socially? Do you like beer? Do you like beer some of the time but not all of the time? Are you a beer snob?

I’m looking for willing participants to either submit themselves to an in-depth interview (20 to 30 minutes, can be done over the phone).

Let me know if you want in on the action, I have to complete these puppies by next week. Specify if you are are a beer aficionado or a multi-alcohol consumer.

Merci!!

Val reminded me this morning that the Maurice Clarett gag had disappeared. Didn’t show up in the Blogger list of posts, and though it was showing me the text in Google’s clip, it wasn’t showing up in Google’s cache.

On a whim, I tried to find its original permalink page, and lo and behold, there it was.

I reposted the text back into its place in line, but we’ll see if there’s any more Blogger hiccups…

Some other odds and ends here in the C-O (as my pal Tony calls it):

*** Dude, I went to law school with this guy and now he’s running for the House (Ohio 22).

*** Thought I was PO’d about the so-called “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre“? There’s allegations surfacing that the Brown campaign not only was behind Hackett’s abrupt exit but that they were actually floating rumors of war crimes.

***

Kind of speaks for itself.

As a followup on the earlier post about the Danish cartoons and the escalating crisis (Dad and I had a good back and forth about this — I’ve been meaning to post up the link to Bill Kristol’s piece) — Warren’s note reminded me that I have been remiss in not pointing you all to the continuing coverage that Tom Spurgeon is providing of the whole story. Pretty much hitting it from all angles, and Tom is of course uniquely suited to providing the comic/cartoon world’s perspective on the subject.

EDIT: Sorry, everyone. I broke it. Bad content removed.

Via waxy, a tale of a camera lost and then found:

“Hello,” I said, when I reached the woman who had reported the camera found, “I got your number from the park ranger, it seems you have my camera?”

We discussed the specifics of the camera, the brown pouch it was in, the spare battery and memory card, the yellow rubberband around the camera. It was clear it was my camera, and I was thrilled.

“Well,” she said, “we have a bit of a situation. You see, my nine year old son found your camera, and we wanted to show him to do the right thing, so we called, but now he’s been using it for a week and he really loves it and we can’t bear to take it from him.”

I listened, not sure where she was going with this.

“And he was recently diagnosed with diabetes, and he’s now convinced he has bad luck, and finding the camera was good luck, and so we can’t tell him that he has to give it up. Also we had to spend a lot of money to get a charger and a memory card.”

It started to dawn on me that she had no intention of returning the camera.

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