B.A.C.A.L.A.

Tip of the Iceberg: Re: The Exact Science of Junk Science: Brown Bags, Asbestos, Silicosis

2011-12-22T20:48:00.000-08:00

Tip of the Iceberg: Re: The Exact Science of Junk Science: Brown Bags, Asbestos, Silicosis

VA Benefits FAQs
1) What are the Eligibility Criteria for Veterans to Receive Benefits from the VA?

Eligibility for most VA benefits is based on discharge from active military service under other-than-dishonorable conditions. Active service means full-time service (and not active duty for training) as a member of the Marine Corps, Army, Navy, Air Force or Coast Guard or as a commissioned officer of the Public Health Service, Environmental Science Services Administration or National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or its predecessor, the Coast and Geodetic Survey.

2) What kind of compensation are Veterans entitled to if they have a disability caused by Military Service?

When veterans are diagnosed with a disability that is "service-connected", the primary VA benefit they are entitled to is Disability Compensation. To apply for Disability Compensation, veterans must fill out a VA 21-526 form (Application for Disability Compensation and/or Pension) and file it with the Regional VA Office in their state. The "Regional Office" is a branch of the Federal Department of Veterans Affairs, not the State's Department of Veterans Affairs.

**Note: For veterans filing for an asbestos illness, there are some additional steps you need to take to justify your claim. You should use Part XIII – Remarks Section to detail your exposures to asbestos while on active duty. You should be specific and give examples of times you were exposed. Also include information about what you did before and after your military service. You will need to convince the VA that more than half of your lifetime exposure to asbestos occurred on active duty. If the remarks section is too small to provide all the detail you feel is necessary to explain your exposure, you can write it on a separate sheet of paper, and attach it to the 526 and simply refer to the attachment in the Remarks section of the application. (Example: For a continuation of Part XIII, write "Continuation of Part XIII" at the top of the page, and then include your name VA claim number. If this is your first claim, you will not have a VA claim number. Write your Social Security number instead.)

3) Are there benefits for Veterans based on income?

Although most benefits (such as disability compensation) are based on whether a veteran has a service-connected disability, it is possible to receive benefits (such as VA pension) and qualify for VA health services even if you do not have a service-connected disability. To qualify, you must show that your income and personal assets prevent you from enjoying a minimum quality of life or affording your own health care insurance. Veterans can only receive VA disability compensation or pension, but not both. If a veteran qualifies for both, he will be awarded the higher-paying monthly benefit (which is typically disability compensation). If a veteran qualifies for VA health services solely based on income, they are usually required to make co-pays for VA prescriptions and health-care services.

4) What information or evidence must I show to substantiate my Disability Claim?

To substantiate a claim for service connection, the evidence must show three things:

You have an injury or disease that began or was made worse during military service, or there was an event during service that caused injury or disease. In the case of asbestos illnesses, the event is the exposure to asbestos while on active duty. The VA will look at pre- and post-service asbestos exposure. To demonstrate the illness is "service-connected," the veteran must make that case that the active duty exposure was more likely than not, the cause of the disease.
You now have a physical or mental disability, as backed by medical records.
Your current disability is related to the injury, disease, or event in military service. Again, medical evidence may be needed. This means you must have medical evidence to demonstrate that you have an accepted "asbestos" disease.
5) What diseases are recognized by VA as being caused by asbestos?

The VA acknowledges that inhalation of asbestos fibers can produce:

fibrosis, the most commonly occurring of which is interstitial asbestos pulmonary fibrosis
asbestosis
tumors
pleural effusions and fibrosis
pleural plaques
mesothelioma of pleura and peritoneum
cancers of the
lung
bronchus
gastrointestinal tract
larynx
pharynx, and
urogenital system, except the prostate.
The biological actions of the various fibers differ in some respects, in that:

chrysotile products

have their initial effects on the small airways of the lung
cause asbestosis more slowly, and
result in lung cancer more often, and
crocidolite and amosite

have more initial effects on the small blood vessels of the lung, alveolar walls, and pleura, and result more often in mesothelioma.
Note: Generally speaking, a doctor must state in writing that an illness has been caused by asbestos. Exceptions are asbestosis and mesothelioma, which are accepted by the VA as ONLY caused by asbestos exposure.

6) What factors will the VA consider when deciding on my asbestos claim?

When deciding a claim for service connection for a disability related to exposure to asbestos, the VA will:

determine if service records demonstrate the veteran was exposed to asbestos during service
ensure that development is accomplished to determine if the veteran was exposed to asbestos either before or after service, and
determine if a relationship exists between exposure to asbestos and the claimed disease.
7) What is a Veterans Service Officer (VSO) and what does a VSO do?

VSO's are paid by either a state's Department of Veterans Affairs or by one of the many Veterans Service Organizations to act as a direct representative of the veteran when dealing with the VA. But VSOs do NOT work for the VA. VSO also assist veterans in filling out paperwork, ensuring it is complete and correct before filing, and will track the claim progress. We instruct veterans not to deal directly with the VA but to work through a VSO, who are experts in the process and can act as guides through a complicated process.

8) What does the VSO need to file my disability claim with the VA?

To apply for Disability Compensation, veterans need to provide their VSO the following items:

A completed VA 21-526.
A copy of their DD 214 (discharge paperwork). If this paperwork has disappeared, a copy can be in obtained from the National Personnel Records Center. A VSO can assist in this.
Copies of pertinent medical records (or a signed medical release allowing the VA to request those records).*
If the veteran is married, a copy of the marriage certificate (this proves he/she has a dependant which provides for greater disability compensation).
*This document is a VA-21-4142 and is included at the end of the VA 21-526 form.

9) How do I find a VSO?

If you have been diagnosed with an asbestos disease and need assistance in finding a nearby Veteran Service Officer, the easiest way is to contact our veterans department. A veteran counselor can assist you in locating a VSO. If you live in a rural area, a good option is asking your state or county about VSOs that work for them. VSOs that work for one of the Veteran Service Organizations – such as AMVETS or Disabled American Veterans – are typically located in large metropolitan areas.

10) What does the VA do after it receives my claim?

After the VA receives an Application for Disability Compensation, it sends a confirmation letter to the veteran outlining what was received. It will also schedule a medical appointment at the nearest VA Medical Facility so the veteran can be evaluated. During the exam, the veteran will be asked about asbestos exposure while on active duty and after active duty. For asbestos cancers, a medical exam is typically not required: Medical records diagnosing that cancer are often sufficient.

11) How much will I receive if I am approved for VA Disability Compensation?

Payments by the VA for a "service connected" disability are based on a rating given by the VA, expressed in 10% increments. Exact disability payments vary. They depend on:

the disability rating.
the number of dependents.
and other factors, such as whether the veteran is house-bound or in need of regular aid and attendance.
The basic payment varies between $123 a month for a veteran with a 10% disability rating to $2,673 a month for a 100% disability rating. Mesothelioma and Lung Cancers caused by asbestos are rated at 100%. Non-cancerous asbestos illnesses are rated anywhere from 0% to 100% (primarily based on the results of a Pulmonary Function Test).

12) How long will it take for the VA to make a decision on my claim?

It's different in every state.

The amount of time it takes to adjudicate a Disability Compensation claim varies depending on State.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has one or more VA Regional Offices in each state, and backlogs vary by state. Generally speaking, it takes about 6-8 months to get a decision. However, the VA's "Fully Developed Claim" (FDC) program now allows veterans or a counselor to gather necessary paperwork to help the VA's rating representative make a decision on a claim. The program has helped expedite claims through the VA's vast system, typically resulting in decisions in only a few months. If you have been diagnosed with an asbestos disease and would like more information about how to file using the FDC program, contact our veterans department and one of our veterans counselors will provide you with the information and assistance necessary to file a FDC.

13) What is Dependency and Indemnity Compensation (DIC) and who is eligible for it?

DIC is a benefit paid to a surviving spouse and/or dependent children of a veteran who died from a service-connected disability. For a survivor to be eligible for DIC, the veteran's death must have stemmed from one of the following:

A disease or injury incurred or aggravated in the line of duty while on active duty or active duty for training.
An injury incurred or aggravated in the line of duty while on inactive duty training.
A service-connected disability or a condition directly related to a service-connected disability.
Spouses receive a basic monthly payment, plus an additional payment for dependent children if they require aid and assistance, or if they are house-bound. For more information, contact your local VSO.

14) Will a lawsuit against an asbestos company affect my VA disability benefits?

No. The VA is not concerned about any money you may be awarded from a lawsuit or from an asbestos company's bankruptcy trust fund when applying for VA Disability Compensation. The VA's primary financial concern is that you do not "double-dip" on a benefit – that any disability payments you receive aren't also coming from the military for the same disability. You cannot receive money from the government twice for the same illness. The VA also will consider your financial situation when the benefit for which you are applying is based on your income level, such as a VA Pension.

Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse of Central Texas for Smith's "zero tolerance approach to what he considers abusive lawsuits designed to harass, not ri

2009-08-10T23:38:00.000-07:00

How Pray Tell Does This "know" how Abusive lawsuits are "designed"?

The Disengagement of the Average citizen in the formulation of public policy?

Out of the Mouth......... the truth speaks:

*

* Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too Bad!
By Mimi Swartz

Texas Monthly

In its November 2005 issue, Texas Monthly magazine published an article on so-called "tort reform" in Texas. The article, titled Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too Bad!, is the best example we have seen of how Texas families have been affected by new laws like HB 4.

We have obtained the rights to provide a link to the article at TTLA. If you link through our website, you will not have to register with Texas Monthly or pay for the article. We hope you will read the article and encourage you to invite your family, friends and colleagues to visit TTLA and access the link. It will be active until February 2006 (possibly longer), and you need not be a TTLA member to use the link.

**Please note: This article is copyrighted by Texas Monthly and cannot be reproduced or distributed without express permission from Texas Monthly. For more information, contact Texas Monthly at (512) 320-6900. As always, please contact TTLA at (512) 476-3852 if you have questions or need assistance.

Banking on the "disengagement of the average citizen in the formulation of public policy...........

2008-05-09T10:04:00.000-07:00

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Texans for Lawsuit Reform: How the Texas Tort Tycoons Spent Millions in the 2000 Elections
III. Who Financed TLR's PAC?
PACs2000

In the 2000 election cycle, the TLR PAC spent $1.4 million, up from the $1.2 million that it spent in the 1998 cycle. This spending makes it Texas' fifth most powerful PAC.9

The latest PAC data reveal that TLR is increasing its dependence on a small pool of wealthy tycoons who have a keen interest in weaker tort laws. TLR's top five donor families (see table) accounted for almost half ($691,000) of the $1.5 million that TLR raised in the 2000 cycle. Moreover, the top 24 donors contributed almost $1.2 million, or 80 percent of TLR's take.

Top TLR Donors in the 2000 Election Cycle
Big TLR Donor Donor's Tort Interest City Money To
TLR in 2000 Total TX 2000
Contributions*
Gordon Cain Sterling Group (chemicals) Houston
$200,000

$335,500
Harlan Crow Trammell Crow (real estate) Dallas
$150,000

$253,826
Dick Weekley Weekley Homes/Properties Houston
$126,000

$208,925
Robert C. McNair Cogen Tech. (electric utilities) Houston
$125,000

$354,825
Bob J. Perry Perry Homes Houston
$90,000

$912,500
James R. Leininger Kinetic Concepts (hospital beds) San Antonio
$75,000

$655,212
William A. McMinn Sterling Group (chemicals) Houston
$75,000

$459,000
Michael S. Stevens M. Stevens Interests (apartments) Houston
$50,000

$139,175
James A. Elkins, Jr. First City Bancorp Houston
$30,000

$129,250
Dan L. Duncan Enterprise Products (oil/gas) Houston
$25,000

$74,500
Ken L. Lay Enron (gas) Houston
$25,000

$247,000
Walter Negley WWN Corp (fastener testing lab) Houston
$25,000

$102,450
Robert B. Rowling TRT Holdings (oil/gas/hotels) Dallas
$25,000

$66,000
Harold Simmons Valhi/Contran (corporate raids) Dallas
$25,000

$126,000
David M. Underwood Everen Securities Houston
$25,000

$70,852
Ernst & Young (accounting) Houston
$17,097

$17,097
Price Waterhouse (accounting) Houston
$16,666

$26,666
James R. Lightner Electrospace Systems (defense) Dallas
$11,000

$93,500
Dennis R. Berman Denitech (copier leasing) Irving
$10,000

$45,500
Joseph Jan Collmer Collmer Semiconductor Dallas
$10,000

$65,850
William R. Cooper Paragon Group (apartments) Dallas
$10,000

$10,000
Ray L. Hunt Hunt Oil/Woodbine Development Dallas
$10,000

$82,000
Jeff Davis Sandefer Sandefer Capital Partners Austin
$10,000

$35,500
Texas Industries (cement/toxic incineration) Dallas
$10,000

$26,750
TOTAL:
$1,175,763

$4,537,878
*Includes contributions by named individuals and their immediate family members. Statewide totals include contributions to all Texas statewide and legislative races, as well as to other Texas candidates and PACs that filed electronic disclosure reports (including TLR).

The people who provided most of TLR's PAC money made fortunes in industries with heavy legal liabilities. As shown in the accompanying table, these industries include: the chemical and energy industries (toxic pollution, accidents); builders (injured workers and lemon homes); property managers (premises liability); accounting and investment firms (securities lawsuits) and medical manufacturers (patient injuries).

In Texas-where there are no limits on most political contributions-the influence of the TLR tycoons extends far beyond their tort money. TLR's top 24 donors spent a total of at least $4.5 million to influence Texas politics in the 2000 election cycle. Houston homebuilder Bob Perry spent an astounding $912,500 in the 2000 cycle. In fact, all but three of TLR's top 15 donors gave more than $100,000 apiece to Texas PACs and candidates. Such donors go beyond mere political influence: they are king makers whose personal checks can determine who wins or loses a competitive race.

Dick Weekley Leo Linbeck, Jr. Richard Trabulsi, Jr.
The family of strip mall developer and TLR President Richard Weekley owes much of its fortune to homebuilding. With 2000 revenues of $711 million, Forbes ranked David Weekley Homes as the nation's 384th largest privately held company.

The Weekleys have been parties to plenty of lawsuits. In 1995, 11 Spring, Texas homeowners filed suit, alleging that their new Weekley homes cracked up because they were built on bad foundations. Plaintiff Carlos Murillo complained that the builder refused to finish his house until he put up a yard sign that said, "Come Talk To Me Before You Buy a David Weekley Home." The owner of a home security business, Murillo figured out that the security system that he installed on his new home kept going off because its motion sensors picked up on his crackling foundation long before he did. He and neighboring plaintiffs sought damages under Texas' Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a consumer-protection law that TLR got lawmakers to gut the year that Murillo sued Weekley Homes.10

After Murillo's neighborhood cracked up, the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission (TNRCC) began uncovering Weekley Homes construction waste in fly-by-night illegal dumps outside San Antonio and The Woodlands. A 1996 TNRCC warning letter reminded Weekley Homes that waste generators are legally responsible for the "transportation, processing, storage and disposal of their wastes, even when these activities are performed by another party."

Weekley Homes barred Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspectors from a Colorado construction site for two years-until a federal judge ordered the company to grant access to inspectors. In 1996, OSHA levied the largest worker safety fine in Colorado history on Weekley Homes for six "willful" violations of safety laws. The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission threw out these fines in 2000, ruling that OSHA failed to prove that Weekley Homes was aware of the violations, which involved contract workers.11

Given this history, it is not surprising that Dick Weekley's TLR has lobbied Texas legislators to slash the liability that businesses face for subcontract workers and for incidents in which they are only partly responsible for harming customers, workers or communities.12
TLR Chair Leo Linbeck, Jr., heads a construction firm that had 2000 revenues of $239 million. He also co-founded Americans for Fair Taxation, which seeks to replace federal income taxes with a national sales tax that would shift more of the tax burden from the rich to the poor.

Linbeck is best known for heading Texas A&M's probe into the 1999 bonfire tragedy that killed 12 people. Stacked with three TLR PAC contributors, Linbeck's five-member panel never pursued a basic question. Namely, Did Texas' $500,000 cap on the liability of state entities encourage A&M to ignore the foreseeable risks of letting thousands of poorly supervised students work around the clock stacking telephone-pole-sized logs on top of one another?

Certainly Linbeck knows the liabilities posed by dangerous work sites. Linbeck Construction was a party to more than 125 Houston lawsuits between 1978 and 1995.13 Some of these lawsuits reflect the fact that construction is Texas' deadliest industry, accounting for 6 percent of the state's workforce and 26 percent of its on-the-job fatalities.14 A 43-year-old employee, Jerry Jordan, was electrocuted to death at a Linbeck Construction site in Beaumont in 1985, for example, when the crane he was operating hit a dangling power line carrying 7,600 volts. A crane collapsed at a Linbeck site in Dallas two years later, killing three contract workers and hospitalizing a Linbeck worker.

Government inspectors have recommended a paltry $12,565 in fines against Linbeck Construction for 31 "serious" health and safety violations since 1985. The company so far has negotiated these fines down to just $8,790.

Juries often are tougher than regulators. Working for $7 an hour for a Linbeck Construction subcontractor in 1995, Mexican national Rodrigo Martinez was paralyzed after falling into an open basement. In a resulting lawsuit, the trial judge instructed the jury that Linbeck Construction "failed to comply with their duty to preserve evidence." Finding that the company acted with malice, a jury ordered Linbeck Construction to pay Martinez $6 million in actual damages and $1 million in the punitive damages that juries use to punish particularly irresponsible behavior. The parties confidentially settled before the judge entered a final judgment in the case.16 In another case, contract worker Edilberto Martinez sued Linbeck Construction for rollover injuries that he sustained after being ordered to drive a truck up a steep dirt embankment in 1994. The parties settled that suit for $100,000 in 1996.16

TLR has pushed bills to further diminish construction firms' responsibility for contract workers who get injured on their work sites. Defending such legislation in 1997, Linbeck said that workers turn their injuries into "a lottery ticket" by collecting workers compensation insurance and then collecting damages all over again from contractors.17 In fact, state workers compensation laws only compensate workers for a fraction of their true injury costs.
TLR co-founder Richard Trabulsi, Jr. owns Richard's Liquors and Fine Wines, a Houston liquor store chain founded by his father. Alcohol-related diseases and accidents are the nation's third leading cause of preventable deaths.18 In recent years, families that have been devastated by alcohol-related accidents have demanded greater accountability from venders for the foreseeable consequences of selling alcohol to drunks or to kids. Trabulsi, who owned a liquor store facing Lamar High School, fought a 1996 Houston City Council proposal to establish "alcohol-free zones" around schools.19

The booze industry's biggest TLR coup came with the 1995 enactment of severe limits on so-called joint and several liability laws. Under the revised law, individuals who knowingly sell alcohol to someone who is visibly drunk cannot be held responsible for the resulting damages unless a jury finds that they were at least 51 percent responsible. According to the Texas chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, this virtually eliminated the alcohol industry's liability for drunk drivers, since drivers almost always will be found to be more than 50 percent responsible for their destructive behavior. State bills backed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving to increase this industry's liability for selling alcohol to people who are visibly intoxicated never made it out of committee in 1997 and 1999. Trabulsi contributes money to the political action committee of the Texas Package Stores Association, an industry group that opposed one of these bills in 1997.20

Richard's Liquors also faces generic premises liabilities that require retailers to provide a safe environment for their employees and customers. Trabulsi himself led TLR's doomed 1997 push to radically rollback Texas' premises liability laws. Lawmakers balked when they learned that TLR's broad bill would protect everyone from slum lords who fail to invest in the security of their tenants to negligent nursing-home owners. "Don't let our lousy draftsmanship wreck the public policy interest here," Trabulsi begged fed-up members of the House Civil Practices Committee.21

Despite TLR's purported aversion to lawsuits, Richard's Liquors sued Walgreens in 1986 to enforce residency requirements that prevented that discount store from competing with Texas-based liquor stores-like the ones that Trabulsi owns.

9 The only larger PACs in 2000 were the state�s two major parties, the trial lawyers� Texas 2000 PAC and the Texas Association of Realtors.
10 �Slab O� Trouble,� Houston Press, June 27, 1996.
11 �David Weekley Homes to Contest $221,500 Fine,� Denver Post, June 13, 1996; OSHRC decision, Docket No. 96-0898, September 28, 2000.
12 For example, SB28 enacted in 1995 and the failed 1997 bills SB429 and HB1020.
13 �They Know Whereof They Speak,� Houston Post, April 12, 1995.
14 �Fatal Occupational Injuries in Texas, 1999,� Texas Workers� Compensation Commission, January 2000; �Texas Construction Workers Dying in Record Numbers,� Dallas Morning News, September 9, 2001.
15 �Punitive Damages Awarded in Construction,� Fort Worth Star-Telegram,� August 8, 2000; Tarrant County District Court 141, Case 141-170634-97.
16 State District Court 113, Case 9447831.
17 �Lawsuit Abuse Now Built Into System,� Balous Miller and Leo Linbeck, Jr., San Antonio Express-News, February 6, 1997. The bills, which failed, were SB 429 and HB 1020.
18 Alcohol comes after tobacco and cardio-vascular diseases linked to poor diet and exercise habits. See �Substance Abuse and Mental Health Statistics Source Book 1998,� U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
19 �Liquor Stores Charge Zones Unfair,� Houston Chronicle, April 17, 1996.
20 The Package Stores Association opposed H.B. 2679 in 1997. See also a similar 1999 bill: H.B. 1095.
21 �Slipping & Falling; Tort Reform Stumbling in 75th Session,� Texas Lawyer, April 14, 1997.
Copyright © 2001 Texans for Public Justice

Nueces Democrats: Hegemony: Power, Culture & Ideology: Lencho Rendon: The Pimping Out Of The President & Hillary

2008-03-03T10:35:00.000-08:00

Nueces Democrats: Hegemony: Power, Culture & Ideology: Lencho Rendon: The Pimping Out Of The President & Hillary:

"It is a simple choice, vote for Joe or vote for the Solomonista."

Just think how Obama would act if entrusted such Executive Power

2008-01-30T15:19:00.000-08:00

Barack ~ Just think how Obama would act if entrusted such Executive Power """"""

There is an element within the Republican Party that refuses to tolerate South Texan Culture

2008-01-30T04:31:00.000-08:00

TLR

DINO

Loophole

There is an element within the Republican Party that refuses to tolerate South Texan Culture
Posted on January 30, 2008 at 07:17:47 AM by Joey Martinez

There is an element within the Republican Party that refuses to tolerate anything dealing with Texan culture. Martinez explained: "I was asked one day to help decorate some of the rooms while we were waiting for elections returns – the campaign workers of Jim Kaelin and a few others were present. We had a cowboy room and so forth. So I decided to decorate a Tejano Culture room. Was asked by prominent organizers of these campaigns to take everything down in that many (Anglos) who would be attending would be alienated and upset. I tried to explain that we as Hispanics are also sensitive and deserved a room to feel comfortable, to make many feel at ease. Soon after, the requests became demands... " Thus one story of many embittered Hispanic Republicans who are made to feel belittled or that their beliefs are not part of the redneck Republican image that politicians like Kaelin do not want to lose as a base. Martinez, who plays the accordion and is a Tejano music fan, concluded: "How can this element within the Republican Party expect to win elections if they are out to change us to see the world only through their eyes and not to see it through ours. They (and I am not saying everyone) don't accept our way of life and culture."

TLR/BACALA- A Clique Within The Republican Party, Using Mauricio Celis' Case To Influence Election

EL Defenzor.net: First and Foremost Homero Villarreal is My Friend.

2008-01-17T02:11:00.000-08:00

Like Big John Mc Carthy says, "Let's Get It On"

If one disputes any claim by all means welcome to the show and put it (your dispute or objection) in writing. We run from nobody.

"Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends
We're so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside
There behind a glass stands a real blade of grass
Be careful as you pass,.move along, move along

Come inside, the show's about to start
Guaranteed to blow your head apart
Rest assured you'll get your money's worth
The greatest show in Heaven, Hell or Earth
You've got to see the show, it's a dynamo
You've got to see the show, it's rock and roll, oh

South Texas Chisme: Nueces County Sheriff proves he is a Republican

2008-01-13T23:20:00.000-08:00

South Texas Chisme: Nueces County Sheriff proves he is a Republican

"People have a perception of who you are based on how you look," Kaelin said. "It is time to let the public know that there has been a change."

We at Los Kenedenos have received information (unconfirmed) that one of the new patrol vehicles has been totaled.

Why didnt anyone let the public know that one of these brand new cruisers has already been totaled.

If this is true (and it is believed to be true), why has the Good Sheriff not let us know of the bad news.

We need to hear the bad news immediately.

It's Too Late To Apologize. Unlike yous guys, We Dont Work for the President

2008-01-13T09:51:00.001-08:00

KENEDENO & ASSOCIATES

We at Kenedeno & Associates apologize if this Documentary Dossier' offends. We certainly encourage anyone who disputes or challenges anything written in this Article to rebut / respond. The Links contain more in depth information. To find the specific reference click the link and use the edit find tool entering the phrase or word you wish to find. Also a simple Google search of any of the referred to entities will support the position this publication maintains.

The best way we can kick this thing off is with some hard hitting on the one's not used to getting hit. Lencho Rendon is the whipping boy he is the first one who gets hit.

If they can prosecute a little person for $45 then surely they can look into the allegations with the bridge to nowhere and the brown bag back porch window treatments and all that double standard.

Asian Human Trafficking or an Asian Employment Service? It all depends on who it is, how much lettuce they have, and who they got dirt on.

Why do we hand Lencho Rendon San Patricio Shores along our port and why does the Brownsville Navigation District do the same? And Solomon Grande, why do we keep on pulling the lever? And Solly Junior why give him another chance? He dont keep his promises.

The Nueces County Jail / Federal Prisoner Removal was a Political Smear and a total Sham directed at Larry Olivarez and Mikal Watts at the expense of Nueces County

It is this Publication's objective to prove the above statement.

All submissions are posted regardless of position or standing.

Now, to the heart of the matter; the "Shamsie Tick" FKA the "Shamsie Clique" Network of Avarice and Fiscal Loophole Specialties.

Dear Mr. Shamsie,

It is ironic how you entered the Body of Christ via Robstown. You pinched and cut, denied and fired, released and demoted your supporters their families and the community they inspired to elect you. A bang up JOB you performed with fiscal expediency and without one drop of loyalty (except in the end to your cronies).

Mr. Boss of Bosses, Jefe de Jefes, or fiscal deconstructionists (creative accountant); history has proved you a frugal man however one must question the oddball choices of highballin contractors (DOS Logistics & Omega Contracting) without a bid process. It turns out they are your cronies and you knew your days were numbered. Who are they one might ask? They are: Rene Rodriguez, George Finley (CC Distributors), Jaime Capelo, Terry Shamsie, Mack Rodriguez (Rainbow Building), Oscar Ortiz, Mike Rendon, Lencho Rendon and others to be defined. This faction of Politicos, presently are working within the Solomon Machine while biding their time. In the past, this faction has attempted to undermine and overthrow Congressman Ortiz. Randy Delay works under the Blessing of Solomon Grande.

DOS Logistics & Omega Contracting Inc.-

Yet, the county is paying three times the customary rate for engineering and inspection services, according to engineers in government and private practice.Instead of assigning the county's staff engineer to handle the project, Nueces County Judge Terry Shamsie negotiated $7.6 million for engineering with Omega Contracting Inc. and $7.95 million for inspection with DOS Logistics, as the county revamps 280 miles of mostly flat, straight, narrow, non-shouldered rural roadway., Source: CCCT,

DOS Logistics' registered agent is Eric Chin and the company is based in Weslaco, according to records from the Texas Secretary of State. Corpus Christi businessman George Finley said he started the company in 1999 to pursue minority contracts and that he no longer owns it. Source: CCCT
DeLay did legal work
Randy DeLay, a Houston lawyer and lobbyist, whose brother is U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, was the company's registered agent when it was incorporated in 1999. Finley said Randy DeLay's only role with DOS Logistics was handling the legal work of incorporating the company for Finley.Last year, Shamsie and County Commissioner Oscar Ortiz unsuccessfully sought to award DeLay a $1.2 million contract to lobby on behalf of local military installations. Source: CCCT

Texas Secretary of State records indicate that Omega Contracting is based in Dallas and belongs to Luis Spinola. Spinola also owns Azteca Enterprises. Both firms are described on their Web site as contractors that seek government contracts set aside for minorities. Source: CCCT

Public Private Strategies-

Randy DeLay, owner of Public Private Strategies Consult, Inc, said he told Nueces County Judge Terry Shamsie and his assistant, Tyner Little, that his firm was withdrawing its proposal to represent the area. Source: CCCT

Last year, Shamsie and County Commissioner Oscar Ortiz unsuccessfully sought to award DeLay a $1.2 million contract to lobby on behalf of local military installations. Source: CCCT

Regional Transportation Authority Board Chairman Miguel Rendon (Lencho Rendon's Brother) said politics may be the undercurrent motivating two city councilmen who were critical this week of plans to put a rail trolley in downtown Corpus Christi.
Source: CCCT
Rendon said he suspects City Councilmen Rex Kinnison and Brent Chesney voiced opposition to the trolley because the City Council secretly did not want the RTA to renew a $120,000 contract in January with lobbyist Randy DeLay's company, Private Public Strategy Consulting. DeLay is the brother of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Republican from Sugar Land. Source: CCCT

The Correction Corporations of America (CCA)-

Private Prison-Industrial complex such as the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the GEO Group (formerly known as Wackenhut), Correctional Services Corporation (CSC) and Correctional Medical Services.,

The Federal Prison Lobby Bureau of Prisons-
Randy DeLay, the brother of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), lobbied the Bureau of Prisons to send its prisoners to RCDC [Reeves County Detention Facility], at the behest of county officials. Randy DeLay isn't the only member of his family with an interest in corrections. In December, Rep. DeLay accepted a $100,000 check from the CCA for the DeLay Foundation for Kids.,

Does anybody remember the April Primary and the Robstown Private Prison Contractor (LCS) Leverage of Public Opinion that affected the election?

Political ad could alter deal
Nonetheless, the company's owners fired off statements Tuesday and Wednesday through lawyer Tonya Webber questioning why they were being pulled into the political fray and refusing to comment to "rumors or allegations that the negative campaign" had jeopardized the company's plans for the facility.
"LCS Company officials will not respond to questions regarding whether the company will change its plans to build a corrections facility in Nueces County," Webber said. "They will not make that decision until after next Tuesday's election."
Commissioner Betty Jean Longoria said it would be unfortunate if the political ad kills the project. Source: CCCT

SHOW MORE
CAMPAIGN MUD BEING SLUNG HARD Company officials refused to comment on whether the ad has now jeopardized the plans to build the corrections facility, saying it might unfairly impact the election.
Source: CCCT
Lencho Rendon was Pete Alvarez's Political Consultant.
Source: Brownsville Herald

Lencho is allied in business with Randy Delay.

Why would the Louisiana Contractor (Robstown Federal Prison Project) side against a candidate of Lencho Rendon?

Was Lencho squeezed?

WATT were Lencho's intentions regarding Pete Alvarez?

Who wanted to eliminate Alvarez for a candidate they could or thought they could control?

Is that candidate Jimmy Rodriguez or Jim Kaelin?

Is there any truth that Kaelin is being courted (or has received campaign donations) from WATT Democrat?

WATT could Shamsie and Delay (with his Federal Lobby influence) do to affect the Federal Prisoner Removal?

DeLay's company is paid to conduct federal lobbying

Caller-Times reporter Brad Olson wrote that Randy DeLay, through his Washington connections, would have pressed for the appointment of a BRAC commissioner who would be favorably disposed to South Texas bases. Source: CCCT

RTA chairman Mike Rendon and board members Roland Barrera and Joe Benavides said they are pleased with DeLay's lobbying progress. Source: CCCT"I think his strong point is that he knows the members on the Senate and the House," Rendon said. "If you hired me as a lobbyist, I don't have the contacts that he has in the upper echelon of committee members. That is where the influence comes." Source: CCCT

WATT initiated the scrutiny was the abuse of a Political Familia from Robstown. In the past, the Nueces County Jail Conditions have never been an issue. The Jail became an issue only after the scheme to railroad $1.2 million to lobbyist Randy Delay's company Private Public Strategy Consulting was derailed.

Last year, Shamsie and County Commissioner Oscar Ortiz unsuccessfully sought to award DeLay a $1.2 million contract to lobby on behalf of local military installations.

"County Commissioner Betty Jean Longoria said Shamsie was "the driving force" behind the two contracts (DOS Logistics & Omega Contracting Inc). Shamsie recommended the two firms to the commissioners, she said.She said she was anxious to get the project moving because a majority of the roads in need of work are in her precinct and at the time she did not notice that she was never shown any qualifications for either firm, she said."
Source: CCCT

BRACC, BREAK or BROKE while sacrificing our "money maker" (the Nueces County Jail) was no longer a dilemma for a Lame Duck Nueces County Constitutional Judge (Terry already knew he wasn't coming back) to invoke the Federal Marshal's into his vendetta with Mikal Watts and Larry Olivarez. One phone call to Randy and the Bureau of Prisons went to work.

Was / is Randy Delay with the support of Solomon Grande our Nueces County insider connection to the Federal Prison Lobby?

The RCDC is a private-public partnership in more ways than one. Randy DeLay, the brother of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R–Tex.), lobbied the Bureau of Prisons to send its prisoners to RCDC, at the behest of county officials.Randy DeLay isn’t the only member of his family with an interest in corrections. In December, Rep. DeLay accepted a $100,000 check from the CCA for the DeLay Foundation for Kids.

The Awards (evidenced by Larry Olivarez) and the Federal Prisoner occupancy dividend was never a problem until after the $1.2 Million to DELAY was denied.

For a fellow who conducts his business out of the glare of publicity, Randy DeLay has a way of popping up in headlines - and generating controversies - in these parts.
Source: CCCTLast May, DeLay, the lobbyist (and brother of U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay), came into the spotlight when Nueces County Judge Terry Shamsie tried (but failed) to convince his colleagues on the Commissioners Court support retaining his lobbying services. Source: CCCT

WHO wanted the Nueces County Jail to be a problem right in the middle of the County Leadership Races?

Randy DeLay was hired to help Reeves County lobby to get more federal inmates from the federal Bureau of Prisons & Reinstate employees JOBS Source: CCCT

Who crashed in during the Primary from Louisiana with concerns about the building of a Private Prison?

“I remember Lencho telling me that his ideal dream team (to help BND) would be (lobbyist) Randy DeLay, (Monterrey consult-ant) Esther Rodriguez and ‘Madam Ping,’” Lasseigne said.

A Dream Team of Randy Delay Lobbying in Washington, Solomon Sr. nicely positioned on the House Arms Services Committee and his influential "friends" such as Congressman Ike Skelton, the distract and the DELAY side JOB Lobby at the Federal Bureau of Prisons / CCA / Private Prison Profiteering CON. The Daytime JOB is the Defense Contractor Ocean Shipholdings

Total Defense Contracts, 1998-2003: $1,094,875,569

Ocean Shipholdings Inc. builds, repairs and operates ocean-going marine vessels. Over the past six years, the company ranked as the Pentagon's second-largest provider of marine transportation of equipment.

Many contract dollars are classified as going to a small business or small disadvantaged business (minority-owed, etc.). Set-aside contracts are reserved for small businesses; large companies cannot compete for them.
According to records from the Texas Secretary of State. Corpus Christi businessman George Finley said he started DOS Logistics in 1999 to pursue minority contracts

Influence

Campaign Contributions

Top Recipients
Democratic Party Committees
$61,000
Rep Solomon P Ortiz (D-TX)
$9,750
Rep Gene Green (D-TX)
$9,500
President George W Bush (R)
$8,250
Rep Ike Skelton (D-MO)
$7,500
Rep Richard A Gephardt (D-MO)
$6,000
Republican Party Committees
$5,750
Sen Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX)
$5,000
Rep Ken Bentsen (D-TX)
$5,000
Rep Chris Bell (D-TX)
$4,500
Rep Tom DeLay (R-TX)
$3,000
Rep John Culberson (R-TX)
$3,000
Sen John Cornyn (R-TX)
$3,000
Sen Ted Stevens (R-AK)
$2,500
Rep Don Young (R-AK)
$2,000
Rep Henry Bonilla (R-TX)
$2,000
Rep Jerry Lewis (R-CA)
$1,000
Rep Norman D Dicks (D-WA)
$1,000
Rep Martin Frost (D-TX) $1,000

Rep Helen Delich Bentley (R-MD) $1,000 The Center for Public Integrity has instituted an improved methodology to compute lobbying figures in order to produce the most accurate possible totals. For up-to-date lobbying information calculated with the revised methodology please see the Center's LobbyWatch site.

With the Shamsie Dream Team, the Nueces County housing Federal Prisoners was never an issue, not even when the Mold Contamination was an issue were Federal Marshalls involved. Evidently, the Mold remains even though the Commissioners Court and Shamsie never addressed it (or did they ignore it?).

"These are not Democrat issues. These are not Republican issues." These are Nueces County issues

The Caller Times and mainly Jaime Powell has informed us all along of the elements referred to in this work product. We at Kenedeno & Associates attempt to compile, organize and put in plain words a meaningful testimony.

7 Comments:

Jaime Kenedeño said...: “MIDDLE MAN” WHO FORWARDED BRIBE PAYMENTS TO WILLACY COUNTY COMMISSIONERS SENTENCED

BROWNSVILLE, Texas – The man who arranged the delivery of bribe payments to two Willacy County commissioners in exchange for contract advantages in the construction of the Willacy County Adult Correctional Center (Center) in Raymondville, Texas, was sentenced today, U.S. Attorney Don DeGabrielle announced.

David Cortez, 72, of Laredo, Texas, will be serving a three-month term of imprisonment at a facility to be designated by the U.S. Bureau of Bureau of Prisons to be followed by a two-year term of supervised release during which Cortez will be confined to his home for six months. U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen imposed the sentence this morning and further ordered Cortez to pay a $25,000 fine.

Two Willacy County commissioners -- Jose Jimenez, of Sebastian, Texas, and Commissioner Israel Tamez, 60, of Raymondville, Texas, were convicted in January 2005 for accepting bribe payments in exchange for contract advantages in the construction of the Center, which houses federal inmates. On March 24, 2005, former Webb County Commissioner David Cortez, who arranged the delivery of the bribe payments to these men, admitted to forwarding a series of payments totaling approximately $39,000 from a corporation involved in soliciting a consulting contract regarding the Center in Willacy County. The payments were in exchange for providing the particular corporation with advantages not available to others interested in, and competing for the consulting contract concerning the Center.

Former Willacy County Commission Israel Tamez was sentenced to six months in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release and fined $25,000.

The charges against former Willacy County Commissioner Jose Jimenez were dismissed following his death earlier this year.

Cortez, who had been serving as a county commission for Webb County at the time of his conviction, resigned following the entry of his guilty plea in March 2005.

The charges filed against David Cortez and the two commissioners were the result of an investigation conducted by special agents of the FBI, the Texas Rangers, and the Willacy County Sheriff’s Department.

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/txs/releases/November2006/061121-Cortez.htm; 12:01 AM
Jaime Kenedeño said...: WOMAN CONVICTED OF BRIBERY TO SERVE PRISON TERM

McALLEN, Texas – Paulita Nilo, 24, of Mercedes, Texas, was sentenced to prison for bribery of a public official, U.S. Attorney Don DeGabrielle announced today.

Judge Ricardo H. Hinojosa sentenced Nilo on Thursday, Nov. 16, 2006, to a year and a day in federal prison, without parole. Nilo was ordered to surrender to the U.S. Marshals on Dec. 29, 2006. The prison term will be followed by a two-year term of supervised release.

Nilo pleaded guilty in July, admitting that in May 2006, she approached a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer while he was off-duty and offered him an unspecified amount of money to facilitate the smuggling of an undocumented alien through the Progreso, Texas Port of Entry. The CBP officer reported the incident to his superiors. During the subsequent investigation, Nilo exchanged numerous telephone calls with the CBP officer concerning arrangements for the passage of an undocumented alien into the United States. Ultimately, Nilo paid the officer $300, and on that same day was immediately arrested after driving a vehicle through the Progreso, Texas Port of Entry, accompanied by an undocumented alien.

The charge against Nilo is the result of an investigation conducted by the Department of Homeland Security - Office of Inspector General and Customs and Border Protection. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Linda Requenez Rossborough.; 12:03 AM
Jaime Kenedeño said...: November 9, 2006

FORMER COUNTY COMMISSIONER SENTENCED IN BRIBERY CASE

BROWNSVILLE, Texas – A former commissioner of Willacy County was sentenced to prison for accepting bribe payments related to contracts for the Willacy County Adult Correction Center in Raymondville, Texas, U.S. Attorney Don DeGabrielle announced today.

Israel Tamez, 60, of Raymondville, was sentenced to serve six months in federal prison and fined $25,000 at a hearing held this morning before U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen. Tamez has been permitted to remain free on bond pending an order from the court directing him to surrender himself to a prison facility to be designated by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Following his release from prison, the court has ordered Tamez to serve a three year term of supervised release.

The bribery charge filed against Tamez was the result of an ongoing investigation conducted by special agents of the FBI, the Texas Rangers, and the Willacy County Sheriff’s Department.

Tamez and former Willacy County Commissioner Jose Jimenez of Sebastian, Texas, were originally charged with conspiracy to commit bribery in a one-count information. Both men pleaded guilty to the charge in January 2005 when they admitted to agreeing to accept cash in exchange for voting to select particular corporate representatives and their companies in competition for the design, construction, financing, maintenance and management of the Correction Center. Tamez admitted receiving a series of cash payment totaling $10,000 or more from the corporate representatives selected to receive the contracts.

The charges against former Commissioner Jose Jimenez were dismissed earlier this year due to his death.

# # #

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/txs/releases/November2006/061109-Tamez.htm; 12:04 AM
Jaime Kenedeño said...: Nueces County
Infrastructure Rehabilitation Project
Promoting Growth and Opportunity

A NUECES COUNTY
CAPITAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECT
Public Involvement
Maximizing Community Awareness
Public Events Calendar

Press Releases

Publications

Contact Info

Photo Gallery

Message from Judge Terry Shamsie…

"In order to meet the demands of increased traffic and population, Nueces County has made road and bridge improvement projects a top priority. Investing in our county's infrastructure will create a solid foundation for new jobs, increase revenue for local government services and schools, and lighten the long-term tax burden on our residents. With a focus on traffic and safety improvements today, we increase our potential for economic, agricultural, and commercial growth tomorrow. Nueces County is committed to developing and improving roads and bridges that will better serve our communities."
What is the Nueces County Infrastructure Rehabilitation Program?

The Nueces County Infrastructure Rehabilitation Project is an endeavor to address the critical infrastructure needs of Nueces County. As the county expands its services to meet the growing transportation needs of its citizens, the county has made road and bridge improvement projects a top priority.

The project is an 18-month, 58 million dollar Capital Improvement Project adopted by the Nueces County Commissioners Court and funded by Series 2004 Certificates of Obligation. The project will address the rehabilitation of 280 miles of county roadways and the replacement of 39 bridges.
How does the project benefit Nueces County?

Building new roads and upgrading existing streets help reduce traffic congestion, decrease accidents and improve safety. Furthermore, good roads and bridges are essential to the economy and livability in Nueces County and help increase response time for law enforcement and emergency medical personnel.

Efficient roads and bridges will also promote agricultural productivity and transport of goods to the ports for the Nueces County farming and refinery industries - which makes up a significant segment of the local economy.

By adopting a Capital Improvement Program, Nueces County now has a valuable management tool for citizens, developers, businesses and planning committees who are interested in the development of all Nueces County communities. The Nueces County CIP reflects its community's assets, needs and goals and also provides guidelines for the potential for future growth and development of Nueces County.
What is the county doing to promote public involvement and community awareness about this project?

In order to enhance public involvement, Nueces County has hired Dos Logistics to coordinate all aspects of public relations as it pertains to the project. Together with Nueces County, Dos Logistics has developed a Public Involvement Strategic Plan that addresses community awareness implementation procedures, an 18-month timeline of events and strategic planning measures to maximize pubic participation and awareness.

The Nueces County Commissioners Court believes it is critical that information is disseminated to the public in a timely and efficient manner to ensure local leaders and citizens remain well informed about the progress of the project and how it directly affects their communities.

The project team has already initiated the public involvement process - targeting public and private media, citizen groups, City Councils and School Boards and community based programs, to disseminate information, acquire feedback and communicate reports on project status. From an official Press Conference & Tour to kick-off the commencement of the project to Community Meetings and presentations to local City Councils, Nueces County is committed to engaging the public in the information process throughout the entire course of the 18-month project. Click here for more information on Public Events.
How Can the Public Voice Support, Opposition or Concerns about a Road or Bridge Improvement Project?

For projects initiated through the CIP process, the county will hold quarterly public meetings with residents to discuss a particular road and bridge improvement project. Letters will be sent to property owners in the affected area inviting them to attend the public meeting(s) with county officials and others involved in the project. Nueces County will also issue news releases to the media and place legal advertisements in the newspaper to notify residents about a public meeting.

The purpose of the meeting is to provide an overview of the project, answer citizens' questions and gather comments from community members about the design of the project. In addition to the public meeting(s), residents can voice their concerns or questions at the Nueces County Commissioners Court Meeting during Public Comments. Project Team members also attend each meeting to provide a project update to the Commissioners Court and to answer any questions that may arise.

http://www.doslogistics.com/nuecescounty/index.shtml; 3:04 AM
Anonymous said...: Re(1): In Defense of Solomon Ortiz Jr.
Posted on December 25, 2006 at 04:38:09 PM by Roddzilla

What's the big deal? MacCarthyism in El Defenzor? This is outright ridiculous. FDR had socialist tendencies, was he labeled? Communism in concept sound like a great idea. Human nature screws it up. Give this young man a chance and cut the labels.... Ricardo - It was great meeting you the other evening, I hope I didn't bore you with my rhetoric!

FACTITIOUS

Re(2): In Defense of Solomon Ortiz Jr.
Posted on December 26, 2006 at 02:17:50 AM by dannoynted1

you probably did!

Re(3): In Defense of Solomon Ortiz Jr.
Posted on December 26, 2006 at 03:41:53 AM by Roddzilla

Maybe I shoulda quoted some song lyrics?!? That always seems to work for you.....

Re(4): In Defense of Solomon Ortiz Jr.
Posted on December 26, 2006 at 05:26:50 AM by dannoynted1

well if the shoe fits.....; 1:37 AM
Anonymous said...: http://b4.boards2go.com/boards/board.cgi?action=read&id=1167082689&user=defensornews; 1:38 AM
Jaime Kenedeño said...: BND, Dannenbaum reach settlement

BY EMMA PEREZ-TREVIÑO
The Brownsville Herald

February 15, 2007 — The Brownsville Navigation District board on Wednesday approved a settlement proposal with Dannenbaum Engineering Corp. of Houston, regarding a failed bridge project.

The district spent more than $20 million for a new international bridge that was never built. An internal BND investigation later revealed that most of the money paid to Dannenbaum was not justified.

Just how much of the $21.4 million spent on the nonexistent bridge will be recouped is unknown.

The terms of the settlement are being kept confidential until both parties sign the proposal. It will come back to the board for final action on Feb. 21.

Chairman Martin Arambula, vice chairman Luigi Cristiano and fellow commissioners Roy de los Santos and Carlos Masso voted for the settlement with Dannenbaum, the project engineers and managers.

Commissioner Peter Zavaletta voted against the move, saying, “I think it’s a bad agreement.”

The board majority immediately rejected a proposal from Zavaletta that the board should contact the Cameron County District Attorney, the Texas Rangers, the FBI, and U.S. Attorney’s Office, urging criminal investigations into the project to continue and reaffirming its full cooperation.

Zavaletta also proposed that interim administrator Donna Eymard and commissioners tell the law enforcement agencies that they would willingly serve as complainants in the event criminal charges are brought.

He said he feared that law enforcement agencies would think that BND was satisfied with all aspects of the project in reaching a settlement.

“This is too important to taxpayers,” Zavaletta said.

Fellow commissioners, however, indicated that Zavaletta’s proposal took them by surprise and said that Zavaletta should have brought this up in executive session before springing it on the board in public.

“In theory, it’s a great idea,” Cristiano told Zavaletta. Cristiano then admonished him, asking, “What message are you sending by blindsiding us?”

Commissioners agreed to discuss Zavaletta’s proposal at BND’s upcoming meeting Feb. 21.

The settlement brings an end to nearly two years of litigation.

BND paid Dannenbaum $15.4 million from 1997 to 2004.

Following an investigation by The Brownsville Herald, a spending study by BND special counsel showed that of the monies paid to the firm, $9.2 million were not justified, $1.7 million in possible “success” fees were in question, and the firm might have done about $4.5 million in engineering work.

In the midst of mediation efforts, Dannenbaum sued BND in the spring of 2005, claiming the district owed it $822,365.

BND countersued to recoup the millions paid to the firm, claiming breach of contract, self-dealing and fraud.

eperez-trevino@brownsvilleherald.com

Posted on Feb 15, 07 | 12:09 am

Printer Friendly Version | Email Article
COMMENTS

I completely agree with Peter Zavaletta. This is in light of the fact that the terms to this agreement are not available. WHY???? The money paid came from taxpayers so I think we should at least know what these terms are going to be before these other commissioners make a big decision like this. I want to congratulate Mr. Zavaletta for being a good commissioner and looking for our best interest.

Posted by: Miguel on Feb 15, 07 | 5:58 am

What are the Commissioners hiding? Who are they trying to get off? Are they trying to sweep this under the rug by reaching a 'settlement' then keep it secret? There'll be hell to pay if they try. Peter - go get 'em.

Posted by: RUNNER on Feb 15,

Offices Up For Election In 2008

2008-01-03T00:40:00.000-08:00

Offices Up For Election In 2008

President		4 yr. term

U. S. Senator		6 yr. term
	John Cornyn

All 32 United States Representatives		2 yr. term

Railroad Commissioner		6 yr. term
	Michael Williams

Chief Justice, Supreme Court		6 yr. term
	Wallace Jefferson

2 members of the Supreme Court		6 yr. term
	J. Dale Wainwright, Place 7
	Phil Johnson, Place 8

3 members of the Court of Criminal Appeals		6 yr. term
	Thomas Price, Place 3
	Paul Womack, Place 4
	Cathy Cochran, Place 9

15 State Senators		4 yr. term
	Districts 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 16, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31

All 150 State Representatives		2 yr. term

7 Members, State Board of Education		4 yr. term
	Districts 2, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14

Chief Justice of Courts of Appeals		6 yr. term
	W. Kenneth Law, 3rd Court of Appeals
	Alma L. López, 4th Court of Appeals
	Brian Quinn, 7th Court of Appeals
	Richard Barajas, 8th Court of Appeals
	Steve McKeithen, 9th Court of Appeals
	James T. (Jim) Worthen, 11th Court of Appeals
	Adele Hedges, 14th Court of Appeals

Various Court of Appeals Justices		6 yr. term

Various District Judges, Criminal District Judges		4 yr. term
	Family District Judges

District Attorneys		4 yr. term

Sheriff		4 yr. term

County Court at Law		4 yr. term

County Attorneys		4 yr. term

Tax Assessor-Collector		4 yr. term

County Commissioners, Precincts 1 & 3		4 yr. term

Justices of the Peace		4 yr. term

Constable		4 yr. term

Is there any documentation on any occasion where Jim Kaelin was MOCKING AFRICAN AMERICANS AND was CALLED ON IT BY THE DPS?

2008-01-02T23:34:00.000-08:00

[texaswallstreetjournal] Insurance / Healthcare Industry Vs Trial Lawyers

We at Los Kenedenos concur (although not in totality) with the Author's take on this issue (El Defenzor Newspaper Hardcopy Commentario)

We do however, express our disappointment in Sheriff Kaelin's partisan political positioning. In hindsight we look back to the previous administration and many an issue we may question, but we do not recall any investigations (while ongoing) conducted in such boisterous fashion. In the same, we do not believe there are any grounds of civil rights violations due to race or ethnicity. It is evident false statements were made in an attempt to spin public opinion and we do find this to be obtuse to the due process afforded to all Americans.

We ask Mr Kaelin to remember the faithless party abandonment of his party who now uses him (and his popularity) to launch political strikes. Mr Kaelin needs to realize these shoes he stands in uncomfortably. Everybody is watching, so just be yourself and quit appeasing to Political Powerbase who did not back you up and will run the first time you are in trouble.

Respectfully,

Anton Haley

Texa$ Wall $treet Journal: Will your loved one become an unknown or unborn heir to the HELLHOLE of a Death Trap Another Dares to Call Frivolous or Fra

2007-12-26T04:33:00.000-08:00

Texa$ Wall $treet Journal: Will your loved one become an unknown or unborn heir to the HELLHOLE of a Death Trap Another Dares to Call Frivolous or Fraudulent?

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Will your loved one become an unknown or unborn heir to the HELLHOLE of a Death Trap Another Dares to Call Frivolous or Fraudulent?

The first responder opens with a gush of emotional well unthought acrimony.

"What a crock! "The citizens of the Valley and Gulf Coast have been victimized by poor decisions in corporate boardrooms, favoring greed over safety. Citizens serving on juries in Rio Grande Valley and Texas Gulf Coast have done their constitutional duty, and in doing this most honorable service, have protected their fellow citizens from the unkind actions of others, and have made our country a safer place."

"Greed over safety"? Pot calling kettle black comes to mind, sheesh!

Leave it to a Corpus attorney of such questionable character to blame the corporations for the greedy nature of local attorneys and the populace. Everyone in this community is trying to hit the lotto, witness the thousands of fraudalent claims as such broken foundations and mold, and no, I am not a member of any organization, just not easily taken by a bunch of lies."

In concurrence with the first responder; it is agreed, the claim is a bit embellishing and heroically ebullient nevertheless Mr Watts opening averment, ("The citizens of the Valley and Gulf Coast have been victimized by poor decisions in corporate boardrooms, favoring greed over safety) cogently defines an element that bullies the average citizenry. An Actuary is a person whose work is to calculate statistically risks, premiums, life expectancies, etc. for the insurance industry and the emerging "bean-counting" approach to risk management in the Corporate Scheme. This "bean-counting" rings clear and is exemplified in the movie "A Class Action" . The central premise of the film is roughly analogous to the controversy surrounding the Ford Pinto and Mustang II.

Durrill v. Ford Motor Company

A rear end collision fire case in which a 1974 Ford Mustang II vehicle exploded into flames. The two occupants of the vehicle, Devary Durrill and Bonnie Watkins, died of burns. The accident happened in Corpus Christi Texas and was tried by Perry & Haas. Watts worked at the Corpus Christi plaintiffs’ firm Perry & Haas, where he trained in vehicle litigation and was involved in numerous suits against Ford.

In the movie "A Class Action" the auto manufacturer utilizes a "bean-counting" approach to risk management, whereby the projections of actuaries for probable deaths and injured car-owners is weighed against the cost of re-tooling and re-manufacturing the car without the defect (exploding gas tanks) with the resulting decision to keep the car as-is to positively benefit short term profitability.

WATT if it was your daughter, wife, son or another whom you hold dear in your heart; WATT amount is worth the life of a human being?

Basically the actuary crunches the numbers and calculates a probability. How many people will die and how many will be injured (if the defect is not corrected) The number of dead and injured are translated into a dollar amount which is weighed against the cost of re-tooling and re-manufacturing the car without the defect. The decision is made and carried out knowing that their product will kill people. They know their decision will take the life of an X number of unknown and unborn heirs to the HELLHOLE of a death trap to be sold as the dealerships assure the consumer that the product is safe.

The Ford Pinto, one of the best-selling cars of the 1970s, had a defective gas tank with an unfortunate tendency to burst into flames in rear-end collisions. Instead of fixing the Pinto, Ford lobbied against federal regulation affecting fuel tank safety. As part of the lobbying effort, the company prepared a cost-benefit analysis. According to Ford's engineers, it would cost $11* per car, or $137 million per year for the industry as a whole, to meet the rollover standard, while avoiding an estimated 180 deaths per year, along with an equal number of serious burn injuries and a few thousand wrecked cars.

Ford's cost-benefit analysis valued those lives at a mere $200,000 apiece. That number was calculated by the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration at the request of the auto industry, mainly on the basis of lost wages, plus medical and legal costs and a small amount for pain and suffering. At $200,000 per head, 180 deaths are "worth" $36 million, not nearly enough to "justify" a $137 million expenditure. As Ford saw it, spending an extra $11 per car to fix the gas tank just wasn't worth it.
Despite Ford's lobbying, the gas-tank safety regulation was adopted. Ford responded by immediately, and inexpensively, making the 1977 Pinto safer. But the damage to the company's image had been done. The public realized that Ford had knowingly produced a dangerous car, leading to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of preventable deaths. Ford finally discontinued the model in 1980. --adapted from Priceless

WATT recourse do we have?

WATT will force manufacturers to decide in favor of preserving the life of a human being?

The only way to convince a Corporate Giant is for the cost analysis to favor correcting the defect and the only way to do this is for the cost of a wrongful death to exceed the cost of re-tooling and re-manufacturing the car without the defect.

Yes, in the eyes of those who have not experienced the ordeal of losing a loved one from a defective products such as Ford Pintos exploding upon impact, Firestone tires falling apart in the Texas heat, Chrysler minivans ejecting belted children due to poor door latches, or due to gross neglect by corporate chieftans, countless bad drugs pulled from the market because of no effective regulatory controls at the FDA and pharmaceutical companies decisions to place profits over patient's lives (Rezulin, Baycol, Fen-Phen, Vioxx), old ladies subjected to unnecessary second surgeries to replace tainted hip implants, 40% is a hefty amount to share with a lawyer. On the other hand WATT choice will stop the recurrence of such preventable accidents? No amount of money can ever compensate for the loss of a loved one or for permanent injury?

Is it worth it for someone to pay you 60% of $500 million so they will hold accountable the ones responsible for deciding to burn your daughter alive?

Ask Dusty Durrill, maybe you will see things differently?

Corpus Christi Watchdog Authority: [texaswallstreetjournal] Insurance / Healthcare Industry Vs Trial Lawyers

2007-12-21T01:18:00.001-08:00

Texas Wall Street Journal Insurance / Healthcare Industry Vs Trial Lawyers. We do however, express our disappointment in Sheriff Kaelin's partisan political positioning

We at Los Kenedenos concur (although not in totality) with the Author's take on the linked issue.

We do however, express our disappointment in Sheriff Kaelin's partisan political positioning. In hindsight we look back to the previous administration and many an issue we may question, but we do not recall any investigations (while ongoing) conducted in such boisterous fashion. In the same, we do not believe there are any grounds of civil rights violations due to race or ethnicity. It is evident false statements were made in an attempt to spin public opinion and we do find this to be obtuse to the due process afforded to all Americans. We ask Mr Kaelin to remember the faithless party abandonment of his party who now uses him (and his popularity) to launch political strikes. Mr Kaelin needs to realize these shoes he stands in uncomfortably. Everybody is watching, so just be yourself and quit appeasing to Political Powerbase who did not back you up and will run the first time you are in trouble.

Respectfully,

Anton Haley

Solomon P. Ortiz: Rove Expedience & A Simple Activation Mechanism: A bloated bafoon in a suit who treated his wealth as carefully as the Beverly Hill

2007-12-21T01:18:00.000-08:00

Solomon P. Ortiz: Rove Expedience & A Simple Activation Mechanism: A bloated bafoon in a suit who treated his wealth as carefully as the Beverly Hill Billies

Ad Valorem Tax: For each of you guys a Merry Merry Christmas

2007-12-21T00:45:00.000-08:00

Fil Junior only seeks a Federal Bench for Rose

Texas Monthly Web Press: Fil & Junior John ( the Two Juniors) dont give a hoot about a VA Hospital or Children’s Healthcare, they dont care about S TX

2007-12-16T22:50:00.000-08:00

Texas Monthly Web Press: Fil & Junior John ( the Two Juniors) dont give a hoot about a VA Hospital or Children’s Healthcare

Fil Junior only seeks a Federal Bench for Rose

South Texas Chisme: Could it be true, Is Fil Vela involved with Connie Scott?

Treasurer?

TLR hates South Texas, does that include Connie and her Hubby?

WATTS his name? Mike Scott?

The Two Juniors represent not a mainstream Texas but they represent the Transplanted Texans (like Bush) and the Elite Texans (like K.C.Rove).

Junior John will say WATT ever it takes to get re elected.

>Why hasn't anyone gone after Filemon personally as a way to derail Rose?
>If you go to www.fec.gov and follow the instructions on finding out who
>gave to whom, how much, and when, then load up Filemon Vela as an
>Individual Search you'll see he's made significant contributions to two
>notorious politicians. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) and Senator Robert
>Menendez (D-NJ). Hunter is an undicted coconspirator in the very same mess
>that sent ex-rep "Duke" Cunningham's ass to prison recently, and Menendez
>is currently under federal investigation for shady real estate dealings by
>renting a building he owns to a non-profit and pocketing $300, 000.00 in
>taxpayer subsidies.

Junior John is working with Fil Vela Jr. & Federal Prosecutors (in the Valley, CC, SA & Houston) to Manufacture White Collar Crime and use it as a Political Strongarm when the Political Strongarm should be accomplishments and the actual construction of a VA Hospital in the Valley.

Junior John has got to figure in this mix and Fil is the inroads (for Cornyn) into South Texas. We need to put a Big Stop Sign up in Robstown and inform them about Connie Scott as I understand Fil Vela is her campaign manager or treasurer and Mike Scott is a TLR guy with a title

We dont need to speculate or debate how Junior John will vote

, who he will benefit and who he represents. No if ands or buts about it Junior John’s Record is who he is, how he votes, who he represents and it is not the average Texan

Abel Hererro has proven himself and his record is there for all to see; he is a fine representative

2007-12-09T02:30:00.000-08:00

Abel Hererro has proven himself and his record is there for all to see. I am proud of Abel, he is a fine representative.

There is a natural law I always like to follow, "If it isnt broke , then it don't need fixin".

On the other hand,

Velacrat is making friends with the Federal Entrapment gang and sycophants up to the ones he believes will elevate his Rose to a Federal Judicial Bench.

Is Fil Vela going into the fraud abuse prosecution racket & the manufacturing of fraud abuse prosecutions?

Inroads (for GOP) into South Texas?

Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too Bad!

TLR?? ..................................three little bitty letters;

nah, I wouldnt worry bout em.

Will Kay Bailey co-opt Hillary,

2007-11-30T00:48:00.000-08:00

Machine Politics surely a strange animal indeed. Looks like Hillary will posture with the facade of red and blue or will it create a shade purple.

Will Kay Bailey co-opt Hillary, (neutralize or win over through assimilation into an established group or culture (KC Rove's Machine) into the GOP so as to recieve the blessing of Armstrong OSS underground power government?

And then we have the special political manipulation appointments of Mr Rick James (Perry).

It will be interesting to watch the Machine Work but I think in the end Hillary will be a rotten choice for the Democratic Party. The Problem is I dont see any one better winning the primary in the Republican Party. The best candidates are eliminated for not being a politician.

Politics are the biggest con of all. Maybe, there are a few good men and women in the bunch but the rest of them are dishonest con men. Ask Kenneth and Ping Lee Cohen.

But TLR has a Enron CEO Ken Lay, an early TLR member, warned the newly elected governor in a let......

2007-11-11T01:55:00.000-08:00

Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too Bad!

Two years ago, rich and powerful Texans said lawsuits were ruining the state’s economy and needed to be fairer. Today, thanks to tort reform, they are fairer -- for business. Ordinary people are out of luck.

by Mimi Swartz

LIKE A LOT OF OLD-FASHIONED TEXANS, Alvin Berry is the kind of man who bears the pain and indignities of life with good grace. At 73, Alvin has never been a rich man, but in his youth he managed to maneuver himself from the rolling plains of Central Texas to the industrialized eastern corner of the state, where he worked his way up to maintenance superintendent at a chemical plant in Texas City. After he retired, he moved to a small ranch near Izoro, in Lampasas County, on property inherited by his wife of almost fifty years, Carla Jean. Despite the twinkle in his eyes and his love of a good story, Alvin is not a frivolous man: He wears his snowy-white hair parted in the middle and brushed back, Depression-era-style, is an elder of his church, votes Republican, and, for most of his life, never dreamed of involving himself in something as crazy as a lawsuit.

But Alvin also has, in common with many Texans, a keenly developed sense of fairness, and something happened two years ago that struck him as just plain wrong. He had endured several surgeries: a hip replacement in 1999, which required additional surgery in 2000, and in 2002, a triple bypass, after which he experienced uncontrolled bleeding and heart failure; the doctors had to open him up again right on his hospital bed. Alvin made no complaint; as Carla Jean pointed out, those doctors had saved his life. But then, in 2003, Alvin got some lab tests with disturbing results. He’d been having kidney stones, and now his prostate-specific antigen test showed an elevated score. He didn’t like that; the nurse at the chemical plant had been a stickler for this test, so he knew that a high score could indicate cancer. His family doctor was worried enough to send him to a urologist, and that is when the trouble started. Don’t worry, Alvin recalls the doctor telling him. Kidney stones can elevate your PSA. Go home. Relax.

But five months later, in September, Alvin still had stones, and when he took Carla Jean in for her physical, he asked a nurse to check his PSA. It was up again, to 86 from 12.6. He called his urologist, who, a little more brusquely, told him not to worry. But Alvin couldn’t stop worrying. In November he got it checked again; now his level was 166. “ Then he got all excited,” Alvin says of his doctor, who immediately ordered a biopsy.

The news wasn’t good: Alvin had prostate cancer, and it had already spread to his bones in twenty places. Right away the doctor put him on daily medication and a $4,000 injection three times a year. The money wasn’t a big problem—Alvin had insurance—but he couldn’t help stewing about his predicament. “If he’d caught it earlier, it wouldn’t have been in my bones,” Alvin says. It bothered him too that the doctor hadn’t looked him in the eye when he’d delivered the bad news and that he’d never said he was sorry, even as he gave Alvin, at best, five years to live.

“I’ll tell you what upset me so much,” he says today. “Other than that, I was in pretty good health. We had a ranch out in the country, goats and cattle.” Because Alvin didn’t want his wife to be left alone in the middle of nowhere, they sold the house and part of the ranch and moved into a modest brick home atop a hill in Copperas Cove, outside Killeen. He tried to control his anger, but he felt his final years had been stolen from him: “That doctor thought he was right and the world was wrong. He didn’t give me the opportunity to make the decision of what to do with my life.”

Personally, Alvin had always been against lawsuits. He thought there were too many of them, and he didn’t think people should be able to win multimillion-dollar awards for situations they could have prevented, like the smokers who sued tobacco companies. Alvin had voted for Proposition 12 back in 2003, which amended the Texas constitution to limit noneconomic damages (usually pain and suffering) in medical malpractice cases to $250,000. “I think there are too many frivolous lawsuits,” he says. “But you ought to have the right to sue if you’ve been wronged.”

Alvin sure didn’t think what had happened to him was frivolous, and he didn’t want to give his doctor the chance to be so arrogantly dismissive of anyone else. So on a sunny Saturday in April 2004, he found himself in a Hillsboro coffee shop with a pretty auburn-haired lawyer named Kelly Reddell.

Kelly had good news and bad news. The good news was, in her opinion, that Alvin had definitely been the victim of malpractice. The bad news was that it would probably take up to two years to litigate, and if he won the case, Alvin would take home substantially less than the maximum of $250,000 the state of Texas had decided an injury like his could be worth. “Is this something you are ready to sign on for?” she asked.

Alvin was surprised that someone who seemed as sharp as Kelly could be so misinformed. He had paid attention to the campaign for Proposition 12, and supporters said that damages for the likes of pain and suffering were capped at $750,000, not $250,000. “I voted for it,” he said.

“You voted for it?” Kelly asked, eyeing him levelly.

“Yeah,” Alvin said. He was proud of it. A $750,000 cap struck him as more than fair.

His soon-to-be attorney gave him a sad, patient smile. That $750,000 cap he’d seen advertised on TV and in the papers, she explained, was available only when there were multiple defendants whom a plaintiff could sue for $250,000 each, such as a doctor and a couple of hospitals. Otherwise, the cap on noneconomic damages for a retired person with no income amounted to only $250,000. (Medical expenses are not subject to the cap.) Like a lot of lawyers in Texas, Kelly had been turning down plenty of once-good cases because the numbers just didn’t add up. She worked on a contingency basis, her fee usually around 40 percent of the award, which would amount to about $100,000. She also fronted all the expenses of the case: up to $5,000 a day for expert witnesses, money for travel, court costs. If this case worked like an average malpractice case, it would cost somewhere around $50,000 to get to trial and another $25,000 for the trial itself. That would leave Alvin about $75,000 after attorneys’ fees and expenses; other clients, with more-complicated cases, had recovered even less. And with the damages capped, there was little to no incentive for insurance companies to settle.

Once upon a time, the purpose of tort law was to make injured people whole. In Texas, victims of medical malpractice or corporate wrongdoing, no matter how poor or powerless, had some redress through the legal system. The Texas constitution plainly states that “all courts shall be open” and that every injured person “shall have remedy by due course of law.” But through the efforts of a small group of wealthy and politically influential businessmen and a legislature slavishly devoted to the organization they founded, Texans for Lawsuit Reform (TLR), those days are gone, and these rights may disappear across the nation as President Bush pushes his campaign against “greedy trial lawyers” and “frivolous lawsuits.”

Here is what can happen to you in Texas today, thanks to tort reformers and the Legislature: If you go to an emergency room with a heart attack and the ER doctor misreads your EKG, you must prove, in order to prevail in a lawsuit, that he was both “wantonly and willfully negligent.” If you took a drug that was later recalled after studies proved it could cause fatal complications, the manufacturer can escape liability for your serious injury or death if the instructions inside the package were approved by the FDA when you took the medicine. If your child is blinded at birth because of medical malpractice, there is a good chance that her only remedy is to receive a few hundred dollars a month for the rest of her life. If a driver hits your old Ford Pinto from behind and burns you beyond recognition, Ford will almost certainly be able to shift the blame from its defective product to the driver of the other car. If you live in an apartment complex that lays off security guards and fails to maintain its locks and you are raped as a result, the apartment owner can still avoid liability. All of the above presumes that you can find a lawyer to take your case; many can no longer afford to do so because tort reform has reduced your odds of winning. And should you by some slim chance win and the defendant appeals, your odds of ultimately prevailing on appeal are 12 percent as of 2004—the paltry rate at which the Texas Supreme Court, which has also been subject to the influence of the tort reformers, has found for the plaintiff in cases involving harm to persons or property, according to Court Watch, an Austin-based public-interests organization.

When Alvin Berry heard this news, he felt utterly betrayed. “I felt the whole thing had been misrepresented,” he says now. “We’d voted on something, and we really didn’t know what the facts were.” Alvin decided to go ahead with the suit. But what he’d really like to do, he says, is change his vote, the one that took away his right to a fair fight in court.

IT MIGHT SURPRISE ALVIN TO LEARN that the people who led the battle to take his rights away are very much like him: hardworking, churchgoing men of a certain age and experience who believe incontrovertibly that their determination to put an end to the spurious lawsuits supposedly clogging our courts is for the good of all. In fact, the words they like to attach to their efforts are terms like “civic virtue,” “level playing field,” and above all, “fairness.” I first met with the founders of TLR early this past summer in Leo Linbeck Jr.’s soaring home on one of the best streets in River Oaks, sitting down with four men who have created, in a little over ten years, not just the most powerful lobbying organization in Texas but also a social revolution in the way we treat our fellow Texans.

Central casting couldn’t have done better. In the sunny, expansive kitchen, which, complete with fireplace, resembled nothing so much as the breakfast room of a small-town country club, here was Linbeck, tall, grandfatherly, and though pale and pained from recent surgery, still chairman, at 73, of the holding company of his eponymous multimillion-dollar construction firm and other enterprises. Whenever he spoke—slowly, in soft, equitable tones—the other men, all middle-aged, listened raptly. Richard Weekley, the chairman of his family development company and vice chairman of Weekley Homes, coiled confidently in a corner, white-haired, tan, and assiduously fit. Richard Trabulsi, dark-eyed, with bountiful salt-and-pepper hair, chose his words with the precision and care befitting the corporate defense attorney he once was at Vinson and Elkins. Finally, there was Hugh Rice Kelly, the retired general counsel of Reliant Energy and the legal strategist and scholar of the group, a man whose stentorian voice, sharp intellect, and dry wit have long made him a respected presence in Houston.

As different in personality as the four men may be, all share two crucial characteristics: They are wealthy, and that wealth has been accumulated in businesses—from construction to alcohol—profoundly threatened by lawsuits. The existence of these lawsuits, in their minds, has less to do with corporate failings than with the greed of lawyers and what Linbeck describes as “the disengagement of the average citizen in the formulation of policy.”

“We all get busy in our lives,” he explained gravely, his long, tapered fingers splayed open in a gesture simultaneously apologetic and understanding. “For most of us, it’s a day-to-day tussle, living paycheck to paycheck, and esoteric issues like joint and several liability don’t really resonate. As a result, we tend not to be engaged. My concern was and is that issues like this need to be engaged by the average person.” Flaws in the civil justice system, he said, have a “perverse” effect on our lives without our even knowing it. People “didn’t understand why their wages were depressed. They didn’t understand why their job opportunities were fewer. They didn’t understand why the economy was not as robust as it would otherwise be. So I viewed this opportunity as one in which my personal bias and interest in civic virtue could be reflected in a tangible way.”

The other men in the kitchen nodded sagely at this cogent analysis, one that explained why the devastation brought about by what TLR likes to call “lawsuit abuse” had been allowed to persist and why Texas law needed to change. But outside this cozy scene, there are those who would strongly disagree. A 1994 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, for example, failed to uncover any decline in the Texas economy that could be attributed to frivolous lawsuits; Texas, in fact, led the nation in the number of new jobs created that year, when TLR was first becoming a force in Texas politics. That same year, Fortune magazine reported that, in the last quarter-century, Texas had enjoyed a 311 percent increase in Fortune 500 companies headquartered here. A national jury verdict survey found that the midpoint verdict for personal-injury cases in Texas was below the national average in every year from 1989 to 1993, including 45 percent below average in the last year of that period. In other words: What litigation crisis?

And why has the campaign against trial lawyers been so successful? Here’s how Republican political consultant Frank Luntz explained it a few years ago: “Unlike most complex issues, the problems in our civil justice system come with a ready-made villain: the lawyer. . . . It’s almost impossible to go too far when it comes to demonizing lawyers.”

Trabulsi put it another way: “A lot of people think we’re not nearly as aggressive as we should be in trying to reform a system that’s out of control.” People who suffer through the emotional and financial drain of lawsuits are very passionate about what they think the solution should be.

Leaning forward intently, he added, “We’re looking for fairness, balance, and restoration of litigation to its appropriate role in society,” he insisted. TLR isn’t trying to make sure the justice system favors defendants, as its critics have claimed. The four founders have all been involved in lawsuits; eliminating access, Trabulsi said, would be “bad public policy, and it would be against anybody’s own self-interest.”

The distant, high-pitched keening you might hear at this point in the story is the sound of some of Texas’s most successful plaintiff’s lawyers gnashing their teeth, rending their garments, and screaming in frustration. Mark Lanier, fresh from his $253.4 million verdict in the Vioxx case, still sees himself as an advocate for the common man, like many personal-injury lawyers. He has this to say about Linbeck and his three cohorts when I interview him later in his paper-strewn office in north Houston. “TLR includes what some might call a bunch of rich snots,” he sneers, the baby face that was so charming and affable during the jury selection phase of the trial contorted now with icy fury. “They’re entrepreneurial everywhere but the legal system. They don’t have a clue what it’s like to be stepped on by a rich snot.”

And there you have it, the two poles of a brutal debate that has been roiling Texas since the late eighties, one that has grown more intense and self-serving with time. “It will be difficult for you to find people in the middle,” TLR’s communications director Ken Hoagland suggested to me, and his was the voice of experience. Even the dean of the University of Texas law school, Bill Powers, declined to comment on the situation on or off the record. In the battle between trial lawyers and tort reformers, each side accuses the other of excessive greed and infinite mendacity; each side is convinced that only its side represents the truth. The middle ground is reserved for the all-too-human collateral damage of a bitter war involving big money and partisan politics, seemingly without end.

SYLVIA ANN FULLER’S LIFE ENDED just when she was finally able to savor it. The 68-year-old Tyler widow worked hard all her life, but the tight curls she wore reflected the unseen constraints on her psyche. She gave herself over to teddy bear and cookbook collections and lavished affection on her dachshund, but her ability to love her three grown children and two grandchildren was often eclipsed by inconsolable depressions. Then, in 2003, Sylvia sought treatment for the first time and, with the help of antidepressants, was reborn. A sunny day in August 2004 was one of the happiest of her life: She was picnicking with her whole family in Tyler State Park, the first time in two years they’d all been together.

But toward the end of the day, Sylvia started feeling ill, and early the next morning she felt bad enough to call her daughter, Karen Hindman, to ask for a ride to a local hospital. She had been vomiting all night and was frightened. Karen jumped in her car and drove the fifty miles from her home in Winnsboro to take her mother to a quiet emergency room that, she assumed, would give her mother the proper treatment.

Through serial workups, including two EKGs to measure her heart function, Sylvia could not stop vomiting, even with the help of medication. The doctor diagnosed food poisoning from the potato salad at the picnic and was not dissuaded when Karen noted that no one else who’d eaten it had fallen ill. He gave Sylvia morphine, to help her rest.

The next thing Karen knew, the nurses were saying her mother could go home. She didn’t see how. Sylvia was barely conscious from the drugs. “We will help you get her into the car,” they told her. “After that, you’re on your own.” Karen was reassured when her mother chatted a little during the ride. At home, she said she’d be fine alone; she just wanted to sleep.

But when Karen got back to her own house and tried to call her mother, there was no answer. After the night passed with no response, she returned to her mother’s house, in Tyler, and found her collapsed on the floor. She had been there for nine hours, too sick to reach the phone. As soon as Karen helped Sylvia up, thick, grainy blood started pouring out of her nose and mouth. Sylvia Fuller died before the paramedics could arrive.

Because there were many things that just didn’t seem right about that visit to the emergency room, Karen and her brother David Fuller began an investigation. They hired a private pathologist to go over their mother’s medical records, which showed that Sylvia’s cardiac enzymes had been irregular (a sign that often necessitates a hospital stay). Two EKGs revealed an irregular heart rate. No one had mentioned either finding to Karen or her mother at the hospital. In written notes, the ER doctor had suggested that the irregular heartbeat was a side effect of digitalis—a drug Sylvia wasn’t taking. Hospital records also stated that Sylvia had walked out of the emergency room on her own, when in fact she had been discharged, heavily medicated, in a wheelchair. Then David discovered that the pathologist who had conducted the autopsy for the hospital had a checkered history; he had left the Harris County medical examiner’s office under a cloud after jeopardizing at least fifteen homicide investigations because he was practicing without a Texas medical license.

Like Alvin Berry, Sylvia Ann Fuller’s children had never sued anyone before. But they also felt that their mother had been robbed of her life and didn’t want what had happened to her to happen to anyone else. “If the emergency room had been very crowded and they had been overwhelmed, I could even forgive them,” David told me. “But she was the only patient in there.” One employee had been watching TV, Karen had told him. So, with his sister, David began looking for a lawyer.

They saw the first one last December. He explained the realities: The facts of the case looked promising, but because their mother was retired, they would have a hard time getting any lawyer to take the case. It was, essentially, the same story Kelly Reddell had told Alvin Berry: Anyone who didn’t work—the elderly, homemakers, or children—was looking at a cap on noneconomic damages of $250,000. Trying such cases was simply not cost-effective for the lawyer or the client. (“It’s an assault on those who are the most vulnerable,” one plaintiff’s attorney told me. “It’s almost legal malpractice to take those cases.”)

David contacted about fifteen lawyers and was turned down by all of them. One letter explained why: “Unfortunately, many of your legal rights have been taken away by state laws proposed and lobbied for by insurance, HMO, and corporate interests,” the lawyer wrote. “You and your family deserve better from the Texas government.” The lawyer suggested that David contact a citizens’ advocacy group and state officials.

So that’s what he did. He described his mother’s experience in a letter to Governor Rick Perry and received a form letter from someone in the constituent services office. It described Texas’s great success in limiting frivolous lawsuits and reducing medical malpractice rates. “Please let us know if we may assist you in the future,” the letter ended.

The letter made him more determined than ever to find a lawyer. So far, he’s had no luck.

“I THINK IT’S IMPORTANT to set the stage for this discussion by talking about what the civil justice system in Texas was like in the eighties and early nineties,” Dick Trabulsi told me earnestly, during our first meeting. The past was a mirror image of today: Trial lawyers, most of whom were Democrats who were generous with their campaign contributions, had lots of loyal friends in key legislative positions, as well as in the governor’s office and throughout the judiciary, from the Texas Supreme Court down to local district courts. They were skilled in the art of “forum shopping”—filing their cases in friendly counties, particularly in South and East Texas—and styled themselves as defenders of the weak while using their money and power to bend the rules in their favor. “Legalized extortion” is the way former lieutenant governor Bill Ratliff—who, as a state senator, wrote most of the 2003 tort reform law—described the situation to me. “If a really mean trial lawyer had a case in the right courtroom, he would break you. Insurance companies would settle anything for higher and higher amounts rather than go to a stacked court.”

Because venue laws were so loose in Texas, a case with only the most tenuous connection to the state (or the county) could still be tried in that locale, regardless of where the alleged wrongdoing had occurred. (In a seminal case, workers at a Costa Rica banana plantation who claimed to have been injured by a pesticide manufactured by Dow Chemical and Shell Oil outside the state sued in Texas, where Shell was headquartered—and won.)

Public attitudes in those days were more sympathetic to consumers and injured people than to corporate defendants. Texas attorneys made hundreds of millions of dollars in cases involving everything from breast implants (in which the science was debatable) and tobacco (in the celebrated case in which five trial lawyers, including courtroom superstar John O’Quinn, received an arbitrated fee, paid by tobacco companies, of $3.3 billion) to asbestos (in which people who were not sick managed to routinely walk away with very tidy payouts of cash from their former employers). The turning point came in 1987, when famed Houston trial lawyer Joe Jamail allowed himself to be filmed by 60 Minutes as he cozied up to Texas Supreme Court justice Oscar Mauzy and bragged about his $25,000 campaign contributions soon after the court had allowed a $10.5 billion verdict Jamail had won for Pennzoil against Texaco to stand. (“Justice for Sale?” the segment was titled.) The New York Times said that the conduct of Texas’s courts was “reminiscent of what passes for justice in small countries run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses.”

Corporate America fought back, decrying a crisis in litigation. Republicans like Vice President Dan Quayle capitalized on the partisan aspects of the issue by attacking the mostly Democratic trial lawyers in speeches as elitists. Advocacy groups sprang up across the nation—the tobacco industry in one year gave $55 million to the American Tort Reform Association—while the conservative Manhattan Institute asserted, loudly but debatably, that abuses of our legal system were costing Americans $300 billion a year.

It was in this atmosphere, in 1993, that Dick Weekley decided he had had enough. As he would later write with Hugh Rice Kelly in TLR’s monograph, “Template for Reform,” “The Trials controlled the Legislature, and Austin mandarins dismissed attempts at meaningful reform as wishful thinking.” Weekley began to convene meetings of Houston businessmen and community leaders to discuss the problem, and the people who kept coming back were Leo Linbeck, Trabulsi, and Kelly. They formed Texans for Lawsuit Reform, styling themselves as outsiders, refusing to “go along to get along.” To defeat “the most powerful special-interest group in the country,” they knew that they had to match their opponents “in focus, funding, and tenacity.”

IT WAS PROBABLY NOT surprising that the Legislature initially viewed them with derision and contempt—“Dick Weekley is gonna feel like he was f—ed by a bull,” one lobbyist vowed—but they were undaunted. TLR’s chief lobbyist, a former Republican legislator from Houston named Mike Toomey, explained to the group that they would never effect change until they could break up the coalition of Democratic state senators who could prevent tort reform legislation from coming to the floor for a vote. So the group set to work, tattling on legislators who paid lip service to tort reform back home but in Austin remained beholden to the trial lawyers. They raised $600,000 for the 1994 elections and spent about $300,000 on three contests in which novice Republicans were trying to unseat veteran Democrats—and won them all. The new senators TLR helped to elect gave Republicans their first majority in the state Senate in more than a century. Suddenly, the trial lawyers weren’t laughing anymore.

There was a new governor too: George W. Bush, who had defeated Ann Richards, in 1994, by sticking to four issues, one of which was tort reform. (By the time he was reelected, in 1998, TLR and similar groups had given more than $4 million to his two campaigns.) Karl Rove told the Washington Post that once Bush took on the trial lawyers, “Business groups flocked to us.” Enron CEO Ken Lay, an early TLR member, warned the newly elected governor in a letter, “Let me finally say that I believe there are few, if any, issues more important to this state than reforming our tort system. It has become the laughing stock of the country and is certainly discouraging companies from moving offices and plants into Texas. Over time it will encourage many of us with large operations in Texas to entertain moving some of these to other states to attempt to reduce our exposure to what has become an extremely capricious legal system.” (Lay did not mention Enron’s long history of pipeline safety violations.) In February Bush responded by declaring tort reform an emergency issue, overriding a rule that prohibited lawmakers from taking up legislation during the first sixty days of a session.

Still, there were enough Democrats in high places that TLR didn’t get everything it wanted. Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, who presided over the Senate, forced TLR and other tort reform groups to sit down with the trial lawyers and negotiate a compromise, which they did, near the end of the 1995 session. Punitive damages were contained; instead of being calculated at four times actual damages, they were reduced to twice that amount, plus an amount equal to noneconomic damages (for pain and suffering), up to $750,000. (“Of course, the punitive damages are not what compensates somebody for their loss,” says Weekley. “It’s just pure money.”) The era of soaking the defendant with the deepest pockets came to an end; in the past, if a jury found that the defendant was more negligent than the plaintiff, that defendant could be held liable for the entire amount of a judgment. After 1995, a defendant was on the hook for only his share of the responsibility, a concept defined by TLR as “proportionate liability.” The effect of this was that if, say, an uninsured driver who rear-ended a poorly designed car was found to be 40 percent responsible for the resulting explosion, then the injured plaintiff would have to “eat” that 40 percent—the Legislature having chosen to protect the negligent automaker instead of the innocent victim. The rules covering where a case could be tried in Texas were tightened substantially; defendants could be sued only where negligence had occurred or where they were based. While plaintiff’s lawyers howled that victims would have a much harder time winning cases, it was hard to argue with reforms that probably corrected some of the worst abuses of the legal system.

Soon after the session, plaintiff’s attorney Mark Lanier found himself at a fund-raising lunch for a religious right organization, seated next to then—agriculture commissioner Rick Perry.

“What’s this next session gonna do to me?” Lanier asked.

“Hey, don’t worry,” Perry told him. “We’ve gone as far as we need to.”

That, of course, did not turn out to be accurate.

JUST BEFORE HE SIGNED the contract for his house, on New Year’s Day 2002, Brian Zaltsberg looked the KB Home salesman in the eye and gave him a stern warning. “Go ahead and lose the commission if there are going to be problems with the house,” he said. “Because your time will be better spent on someone else. If you screw me, I’m gonna come back on ya.”

The salesman for KB, one of the nation’s largest homebuilders, promised that the house would be just fine. So Brian and his fiancée, Stephanie, signed the contract and, thrilled, became first-time homeowners. They were just two young kids—27 and 23 years old, respectively—without much education or money to throw around. Brian, tall, wiry, and favoring gimme caps, was determined to finish college while he earned a living developing Web sites and repairing computers. Porcelain-skinned Stephanie had finished high school and was looking forward to life as a homemaker and a mom. Brian felt they had bought, for their hard-earned $140,000, a piece of the American dream. “Happy people,” Brian said of his envisioned future, when the three of us met at his favorite Mexican restaurant in Fort Worth. “Dream home and all that.” The 1,800-square-foot one-story brick house, in a sun-scorched suburb on the northwest side of the city, was far from lavish, but to the Zaltsbergs, it was paradise. “We were so damn excited,” Stephanie told me.

But the trouble started even before they moved in. Groundbreaking was delayed, and then construction was erratic. Brian would often find the site littered with trash and once pulled containers from fast-food restaurants from the half-finished walls. But those were small problems compared with the one that took place on moving day. The Zaltsbergs stored many of their belongings in the garage while they set up the house, and as night fell, so did a downpour. Brian stepped outside for a smoke and noticed that water was flowing from inside the garage out into the street. He ran inside and saw water cascading down the walls and pooling on the floor, soaking into everything they had stored there. The Zaltsbergs had paid an extra $2,000 for a drywalled garage; now the Sheetrock was damaged and everything within was ruined.

Every day after that seemed to bring new problems: KB repaired the roof flashing where the leak had occurred but refused to replace the Sheetrock; the attic door stuck, and some of the rafters in the attic had split. Brian could pry bricks out of their mortar on exterior walls, and shingles flipped up in the wind. He asked KB to schedule repairs so that workmen wouldn’t interrupt meetings with clients at his home, but they showed up unannounced. Eventually, Brian demanded a meeting with KB. He was stressed to the max; he wanted KB to buy the house back from him. “I don’t want to live there anymore,” he told them. KB refused. Then Brian threatened KB with the only weapon he had: He would exercise his First Amendment rights and put up a Web site he would call kbhomesucks.com. The representative laughed in his face and told him to go ahead.

Why, you may wonder, didn’t Brian sue KB? Because his contract prohibited him from doing so. It required him to seek binding arbitration instead of redress in the civil courts. In fact, only a handful of lawyers in Texas are now representing people who try to sue homebuilders, because the cases are so hard to win and so expensive to try before arbitration panels. “I always thought it was your constitutional right to sue people,” Brian said. “But we couldn’t sue KB.” Like victims of medical malpractice, homeowners have seen their access to the courthouse curtailed.

Had Brian’s confrontation with KB taken place a couple years later, he would have run into another obstacle: During the tort reform frenzy of 2003 that TLR helped stir up, the Legislature, after intense lobbying and millions of dollars in contributions from homebuilder Bob Perry, created the Texas Residential Construction Commission (TRCC). Disgruntled homeowners were not allowed to go directly to court; first, they had to go to the TRCC, an agency heavily influenced by homebuilders, for a determination of whether their case had merit, a finding that would then be admissible in court. (TLR did not endorse or lobby for this bill.)

Brian didn’t want to go to arbitration. He couldn’t afford an attorney. Instead, he decided to make good on his initial threat: In January 2003 he launched kbhomesucks.com. Almost immediately, he was swamped with e-mails from people claiming to have been harmed by the company. They posted their complaints too, and Brian added links for finding help. He appeared in a few local news stories, and pretty soon he was getting between 1,200 and 2,000 hits a day on his Web site. Then one night he checked his e-mail and found one from a lawyer, asking for the person in charge of the site. Attached was a copy of a $20 million lawsuit filed against someone else who had tried to take on KB. “I took that as a threat,” Brian told me. Still, Brian contacted the lawyer and requested a meeting with KB’s director of customer service. Brian had stopped paying on the house by then; KB had agreed to buy it back if he would disable his Web site. For a moment, peace appeared to be at hand. But then Brian asked for $4,000 in moving expenses and for reimbursement of his down payment. KB said it would not exchange any cash with him until the house sold. That was a deal breaker for Brian, so, as he put it, “the deal broke.”

Three months later, Brian started getting anonymous, threatening e-mails, including ones that suggested that his wife was being unfaithful, which added to the stress at home. (Stephanie had a miscarriage that spring.) Eventually, Brian started protesting publicly in front of KB’s Fort Worth offices and was harassed by the police. He had the persistent feeling he was being watched.

Finally, in September 2004, Brian sued KB in state court for harassment. The company countersued in October, hitting him with what many lawyers call a “slap suit,” a lawsuit filed by a big company against a much smaller firm or individual to try to scare the other party off. Among the claims against Brian was an accusation of cyber squatting, for misusing the KB name. Since that time, Brian has found himself in a lawsuit many might call frivolous, especially since it involves a company worth hundreds of millions and an accused party worth very little.

In late August of this year, Brian finally got to arbitration; to KB’s dismay, he was allowed to keep kbhomesucks.com up and running. In a much bigger case settled around the same time, KB Home was fined $2 million by the Federal Trade Commission and, more important, was prohibited from requiring mandatory arbitration in its homeowners’ contracts. The ruling came too late for Brian and Stephanie, who by then had let the bank take their house. “This is hell on earth, that’s what it is,” Stephanie said.

THE YEARS BETWEEN 1995 and 2003 were frustrating for TLR. Many legislators in both parties lacked the stomach for another tort reform battle, feeling they had addressed the issue well enough. But not TLR. Thwarted in Austin, TLR’s leadership turned its attention to judicial races, investing around $1 million to defeat Elizabeth Ray, a Houston district judge, in a 2002 Republican primary runoff election for the Texas Supreme Court. Ray had a reputation for fairness in her courtroom and, like many judges, accepted campaign contributions from lawyers representing plaintiffs as well as from lawyers representing defendants. But in an exceptionally bitter race, TLR tarred her as a sham Republican and a friend of the plaintiff’s lawyers. Its candidate, Dale Wainwright, won. The lesson was that you didn’t cross TLR. (“Support from plaintiff’s lawyers is a campaign issue,” Trabulsi told me solemnly.)

But by 2003, TLR’s years in the wilderness were over. A Republican wave had swept through the state in the 2002 elections, and Republicans commanded substantial majorities in both houses of the Legislature and controlled every statewide elected office, including all seats on the Texas Supreme Court. Once a plaintiff’s paradise, the court in 2002 and 2003 was finding for plaintiffs in only 19 percent of its cases. TLR had friends in high places too, including Governor Perry and his chief of staff, Mike Toomey, a tort reform true believer who had taken a leave from a lucrative lobbying practice that included TLR as a client. At the beginning of the legislative session, there were two tort reform bills, one originated by doctors (and endorsed by TLR) that capped noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases at $250,000 and another containing an assortment of protections for businesses, supported by TLR. In a clever strategic ploy, the House leadership combined the two bills, making it difficult for a lawmaker who supported one but not the other to vote no. Says Democratic state representative Craig Eiland, of Galveston, himself a trial lawyer: “Never have so many who needed so little gained so much.” The governor’s office cleared the way by maneuvering to remove the Texas Medical Association’s head lobbyist, who was deemed to be too friendly with the trial lawyers and had supported Perry’s opponent in the 2002 governor’s race. Once the lobbyist was dispatched, the TMA’s new leadership refused to engage with the trial lawyers at all.

The 1995 tort reforms had been forged during negotiations between lawyers on the two sides, but with Republicans in total control of the legislative process, compromise was a thing of the past. The sponsor of the tort reform bill, state representative Joe Nixon, of Houston, was also the chair of the committee where the bill would get its initial hearing. Nixon curtly informed the TTLA that there was “a new sheriff in town,” and things went downhill from there. “The concern was the train was going so fast no one could stop it,” Mark Lanier told me. When Lanier protested that the trial lawyers were being shut out, he found, coincidentally or not, a private investigator on his tail.

When the bill reached the House floor, hostility between Republicans and Democrats erupted in the first twenty minutes of what turned out to be a two-week marathon. Democrats filed hundreds of amendments to the bill; Republicans interposed parliamentary objections; Democrats protested adverse rulings by Speaker Tom Craddick; and on it went. Republicans voted as a bloc—the occasional stragglers were quickly whipped back into line by Craddick—and so, most of the time, did Democrats. Their pleas for exceptions to the cap fell on deaf ears. What if, for instance, an injury was proved to be intentional to a child or an elderly or disabled person—someone without significant economic damages? The answer was no exceptions; the cap would remain at $250,000. What about nursing home patients who were injured? Nope. What if the doctor was proven to be drunk? Still no. What about allowing the cap to rise with the consumer price index? After all, the $250,000 cap, which was chosen because a similar figure had been adopted in California in 1975, would be worth a little over $750,000 in 2003 dollars. No, no, no. Meanwhile, the TLR principals remained a constant presence in a corner of the House gallery, which inspired a Democratic state rep to christen their spot “The Owners’ Box.” (TLR spokesman Hoagland told me, with barely contained outrage, “My guys were there for civic virtue. We are not divorced from the legislative process.”)

The House passed the bill 99—45. The Dallas Morning News called it “Open Season on Plaintiffs.” It gave judges authority to return cases brought by out-of-state plaintiffs to their home courts; allowed challenges to forum shopping to be appealed at the time of trial, instead of after a lawsuit was over; made plaintiffs (but not defendants) responsible for court costs and attorneys’ fees if they turned down reasonable settlement offers and then lost at trial; and placed a limit on contingency fees, a device that is the only way people of limited means can get to the courthouse. Plaintiff’s lawyers front all expenses and get reimbursed (and paid a fee) only if the client wins. TLR wanted to fix the remaining problems held over from the eighties, but the limit on contingency fees and the medical malpractice cap also had the benefit of constraining the ability of trial lawyers to practice their profession.

The trial lawyers had some hope when then—state senator Ratliff, who was known for his evenhandedness, balked at the House version of the bill and set out to write his own. He nixed the limit on contingency fees and made defendants as well as plaintiffs subject to the penalties for turning down reasonable settlement offers. He also included language that allowed the $250,000 cap to be stretched to $500,000 and even $750,000 in rare situations. But enough of the reforms stayed intact for TLR to champion the bill and the TTLA to regard it as a disaster. Hartley Hampton, a former head of the TTLA, put it this way: “It was the session where the lobbyists basically acted like looters, and they got all of the candy that they were unable to get in an atmosphere of deliberation and negotiation in 1995. It was a piecemeal dismantling and sale of our civil justice system.”

TLR AND ITS TORT REFORM allies had to fight one more battle before the victory was secure. Back in the eighties, the Texas Supreme Court had struck down a 1977 law that capped damages for victims who were injured but did not die from medical negligence as “unreasonable and arbitrary.” They called the law “a speculative experiment to determine whether liability insurance rates will decrease.” But by 2003 that Democratic court, and the Democratic Texas it operated in, was long gone. A constitutional amendment allowing caps—if approved by the voters—would put to rest any doubt over the legality of the new $250,000 cap.

The fight over Proposition 12, as the constitutional amendment was called, presented the people of Texas with a Hobson’s choice: access to medical care versus access to the courts. On one side were doctors, insurance companies, and business interests, who claimed that physicians would leave the profession if malpractice insurance rates were not reduced; on the other were trial lawyers and consumer groups, who said that injured victims would have no recourse if the caps took effect. Each put harrowing statistics and shrewd emotional ploys to work, and each side spread around plenty of money—about $4 million came from the trial lawyers and their allies and $8 million from an agglomeration of pro-amendment groups, including TLR.

The amendment authorized a $250,000 cap on noneconomic damages in malpractice cases “and other actions,” three words that sent opponents of the proposition into a fury because they allowed the Legislature to cap damages not just on malpractice cases but on every personal-injury lawsuit, whether it involved drunk drivers or corporate polluters. Trabulsi suggested that no one in his right mind would take that possibility seriously, but retired U.S. district judge Finis Cowan, who had been a highly regarded defense lawyer at Baker Botts, strongly disagreed in a State Bar of Texas publication on the debate. “Clearly Prop 12 is not a medical malpractice reform,” he wrote, “but an amendment designed by special interests who have reasons for desiring to restrict access to courts and juries.”

Constitutional amendments are usually voted on in early November, but the Legislature moved the election to September to avoid the big turnout on a traditional election day, which probably would have defeated the amendment. As of June, polls showed that 62 percent of Texans favored letting legislators limit lawsuits, with just 28 percent opposed. Twenty years of lawyer bashing had taken its toll. To fight back, the lawyers hired the Dallas-based public relations and political consulting firm of Allyn and Company to run their campaign. The standard-bearer of the fight, however, was former Texas Supreme Court justice Deborah Hankinson, a plucky Republican and a Bush appointee who was willing to expend virtually all her political capital to defeat an amendment she saw as an affront to Texans’ most basic legal rights.

In the past, Hankinson had supported needed tort reform—and continues to do so—and accepted TLR contributions. But this amendment, she said, wasn’t designed to cut off bad—that is, frivolous—lawsuits; it was designed to cut off lawsuits by people with legitimate claims, by restricting access to the courthouse. (Meanwhile, special-interest groups had gained unprecedented control of the Legislature.) “This tort reform went too far,” she told me. “I don’t consider this to be reform. I view this as something that deprives people of their constitutional rights.”

Frantically, Hankinson enlisted a diverse coalition to fight the amendment, including members from the American Association of Retired Persons, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Sierra Club, the Texas Federation of Teachers, and others. One group was missing in action: trial lawyers. “The biggest problem we face as lawyers when we try to get our message across on this issue is that the MESSENGER is KILLING the MESSAGE,” TTLA president John Eddie Williams wrote in a June e-mail to his members. “To make this program work we must vow to not communicate with the public. . . . NO LAWYERS—NO EXCEPTIONS.”

Within weeks, the arguments about court access began to have an effect. July polls showed that the two groups were almost dead even; the same was true in August, as political ads from both sides became more strident and more questionable. Particularly troubling were advertisements in print and on television that put the cap for noneconomic damages at $750,000. On election day, Prop 12 was defeated in every major city in Texas but still won, by a margin of one percent of the vote. The decisive votes came from South Texas and rural areas, where voters feared that lawsuits might leave them without doctors or hospitals. “If we’d had another week, we could have cleaned their clock,” Hankinson told me. Instead, Alvin Berry, Karen Hindman, David Fuller, and thousands like them have found their rights diminished when they needed them most.

ON MY LAST VISIT with TLR, U.S. senator Sam Brownback, of Kansas, was just leaving as I arrived. An old friend of Linbeck’s, he is just the kind of politician TLR likes: Republican, wealthy, with Christian right bona fides, and— in the words of Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter With Kansas? —“a stalwart friend of the CEO class.” When he clapped Trabulsi on the shoulder to thank the group for all its hard work in Kansas, the four men beamed. “They brought back the small-aircraft industry,” Brownback assured me. “It was dead. Dead.”

After he left, I asked the quartet what, exactly, they had done in Kansas.

“Ah, nothing,” one of the members said. “He was speaking generically about tort reform.”

It might seem that after the sweeping 2003 reforms, there is little left for TLR to do. But the bogeyman of excessive litigation is always out there, and TLR is, in fact, laser-focused on the one Texas Supreme Court decision of the past few years that did not go its way. The case involves Ashley Dueñez, who was nine when, in 1997, a drunk driver, Roberto Ruiz, swerved across the centerline on a highway near Port Lavaca, crashed head-on into the Dueñez family car, and left her severely brain damaged, requiring around-the-clock care for the rest of her life. Ashley’s father, Xavier, a corrections officer, also suffered some brain damage and needed plastic surgery.

Ruiz had drunk one and a half cases of beer while chopping wood earlier in the day and then, stumbling and drooling, bought another twelve-pack at a convenience store before getting back into his truck and destroying the lives of the Dueñez family. The defense argued that the clerk who sold the beer was primarily responsible, not the convenience store chain, but last September the Supreme Court upheld a $35 million judgment for the Dueñez family against F.F.P Operating Partners, the owners of the convenience store. The 5—4 decision was based on anti—drunk driving laws passed years before the 1995 change in proportionate liability. (The majority relied on a law that reflected basic common sense: Too often a drunk driver can’t afford to make restitution to his victims; bar and liquor store employees have the opportunity to stop drunks from getting drunker and going on the road by simply refusing to serve them.)

But in April of this year, the court agreed to a rehearing, a highly unusual move, particularly because four of the original justices who had decided the case had left the court and been replaced by judges perceived to be even more defendant-friendly. One possible reason given for the turnaround was the half a dozen friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the motion for rehearing, including one from TLR, stressing the importance of proportionate liability. Justice Priscilla Owen, whom TLR had helped elect, had conceded in her dissent that “a provider of alcohol should be vicariously liable for a patron’s intoxication.” But she went on to say that she did not believe the Legislature meant what it said when it passed a law stating that a provider of alcohol was 100 percent liable for damages caused by an intoxicated patron who had been allowed to buy alcohol when he was clearly already drunk.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which believes that a company that profits from the illegal sale of alcohol should also bear the burden when injuries occur, had supported this law. Owen didn’t see it that way, and neither did TLR, especially Trabulsi, who opened himself to conflict-of-interest criticism as the owner of Richard’s Liquors and Fine Wines. As John Griffin, the attorney for the Dueñez family put it, “They are asking the court to take a Magic Marker and put a big black mark through the Legislature’s description of its own laws.” The assertion that legislators didn’t know what they were saying, he says, was “sophistry.”

There are other areas of the law that TLR would like to see “reformed.” Along with prohibiting contingency fees for lawyers hired by government agencies, TLR wants to restrict who can serve on juries, which, after all, are unpredictable. According to its latest press kit, the group is intent on “upgrading the qualifications required to serve on juries.” Explains Trabulsi: “We want to make sure that someone who is a claimant or defendant is tried in front of a jury of their peers. And we believe sometimes that doesn’t happen. We’re going to take a look at the whole realm of the jury system to try to make sure it operates as efficiently and as constructively and as fair as it possibly can.”

After surveying their handiwork, one can legitimately ask, fair for whom? While TLR and the governor’s office extol the return of insurance companies to the medical malpractice insurance business in Texas and a 6.35 percent drop in malpractice rates (less impressive when you realize that rates for the state’s major insurers went up more than 100 percent between 1999 and 2003), they have surprisingly little else to show for their labors. When I asked TLR for evidence of a tort-reform-fueled business boom, they handed me a five-year-old study.

Several recent studies, on the other hand, make you wonder whether there was ever a litigation crisis at all. Four law professors, including two from the University of Texas, Bernard Black and Charles Silver, found no link between lawsuits and rising insurance premiums. They studied resolved malpractice claims from 1988 to 2002, relying on data from the Texas Department of Insurance. The number of large claims—those with payouts of at least $25,000—had remained basically flat since 1988; jury verdicts in favor of plaintiffs in civil courts had likewise shown no change over the same period. Furthermore, malpractice claims made up less than one percent of total health care expenditures in Texas. In short, nothing changed much in fourteen years except that insurance company profits doubled. And the promised results of tort reform have not occurred: Malpractice insurance reductions have been less than 1.5 percent since 2003, and the hoped-for return of doctors to underserved areas has not taken place. A briefing paper released by the Economic Policy Institute, in Washington, in May 2005 further found no evidence that tort litigation was responsible for causing unemployment, dampening productivity, discouraging research, or driving up liability insurance rates. The institute found, in fact, that the number of lawsuits in the U.S. actually dropped 4 percent in the decade prior to the tort reform year of 2003.

The tort reform movement was born in an era when the pendulum had swung too far in the direction of plaintiffs, and reforms that restored fairness and integrity to the system were justified. But as so often is the case in politics, the wronged side overreached. Now the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction—so far that the Legislature has usurped the lawmaking powers of the courts, and meaningful access to justice has been eliminated for the likes of Alvin Berry, the children of Sylvia Ann Fuller, Brian and Stephanie Zaltsberg, and—if business and the tort reformers have their way—Ashley Dueñez. If lower awards limit the number of cases a good lawyer can afford to take, the remainder of cases will fall to less competent lawyers, who, if they take a case at all, will most likely win much lower settlements for their clients or, more likely, not win at all. When I suggest this to Trabulsi, he insists that attorneys can attend seminars to learn how to get around the caps. “And lose,” Mark Lanier adds.

Maybe that’s the point. With the courts closed and the Legislature supine, the good people of TLR will have remade the world in their image, one in which there is no recourse for wrongdoing, one in which the powerful simply get their way.

Brian Zaltsberg, for one, is going down fighting. As soon as he finishes college, he plans to attend law school.

Lions for Lambs ~ “For most of us, it’s a day-to-day tussle, living paycheck to paycheck, and esoteric issues like joint and several liability .......

2007-11-11T01:41:00.000-08:00

The truth behind your eyes--You know the thing you never see.......

2007-11-11T01:36:00.000-08:00

Won't Back Down lyrics

YEAH!!! [x2]

I know what darkness means
(and the void you learned from me)
The isolation steams
(So I think it wants to bleed)
The echoes in my brain
(All the things you said to me)
You took my everything
Now I'm coming for you!

[Chorus:]
I won't back down
I will not bow
I've come to bring you hell
I can’t forget
Things you did
I've come to bring you hell

The shadows that you see
(In the places that you sleep)
Are memories of me
(Better pray your soul to keep)
The truth behind your eyes
(You know the thing you never see)
Your darkest little lies
I'm coming for you!

[Chorus]

All the scars that never heal
All the wounds that will not seal
I will not forget the day
These memories never fall

[Chorus]

I've come to bring you hell
(I've come to bring you hell) [x4]