Nobullthinker

He would definitely be in my top 10.

Great point about beep-bonics being the language of the Left. It is a language designed to express emotion - not thought.

"First kill all the lawyers." Don't recall who said it but he sure knew what he was talking about. All these disgusting law suits ever accomplish is the enrichment of suck-ass lawyers. If we could get rid of them we'd defang fools like the gorons.

I apologize if I came on too strong. But the tone of your post was one of having sided with the Shanks. You did not say which way you would have ruled had you been judging this case and I may have drawn a faulty conclusion. There are many judges these days who would happily have found cause to rule against the clear terms of the insurance agreement.

Curious - do you happen to know if the same lawyer collected on both suits - Shanks v Trucker and Walmart v Shanks?

If there was one thing I could get you to understand it would be that any tax on business is going to be paid by the people. It is merely a slight of hand trick used by pols to raise YOUR taxes. Businesses do not pay taxes - they collect taxes from their customers. If you could make the intellectual connection that government is turning your anger away from themselves by making corporations the object of your blind fury many things would become clear to you about the economy.
Allowing emotion to overrule reason is a serious problem on the Left. You almost never see the the kind of behavior or language used by your heroine Randi Rhodes (or whichever Air America hostess it is) being used on the Right. But on the Left there is a never ending parade of outraged and outrageous people obsessed by emotional reaction rather than well considered thought. I mention this because I really hope you will give careful consideration to my opening paragraph in this reply.

Your honor, I'm stunned that you might consider your moral opinion as a higher authority than the law itself. We all weep for the tragedies suffered by the Shanks' but for you to use the authority of the court to demand that an innocent third party (Walmart) toss away a half million dollars of their money to alleviate that suffering is unconstitutional to say the least.
I'm no lawyer but I know enough to know that the failure in this case is the Shanks' attorney. He was obliged to know that Walmart was entitled to recover its insurance costs against any award won by the Shanks. And knowing that the trucker had limited liability the attorney ought to have known that the Shanks could not come out financially ahead in the lawsuit. Only one person had anything to gain by bringing this suit - the attorney himself.

Wow! Everyone on the list is against Walmart on this one. It's really quite frightening to see such a complete lack of reason on the part of so many. What happened to the Shanks is horrible, no doubt. But is any of it Walmart's fault? Even Mr Shanks is rational enough to admit that it's not.
Walmart fulfilled its insurance obligations when Mrs Shanks was most in need. When the Shanks collected a second time in the law suit Walmart was entitled to have its money returned to them. If there was a failing in this cluster f... it was in the fact that the Shanks' attorney did not inform them that Wal-mart had first claim to any money recovered in the law suit. Had he done that the family might have dropped the suit and the lawyer would have missed a really nice payday. He was the only one that gained anything in this whole painful debacle.
In case you don't understand what I'm saying let me put it a little differently. Once Walmart paid the Shanks' medical expenses they had the right to sue the trucker for those costs. Had they done that they would have gotten their money back, the Shanks would have had their medical bills paid per the insurance agreement and the outcome would have been exactly the same as if Wal-mart had ended up winning their fight with the Shanks. Viola - the Shanks would have been paid once by Walmart and Walmart would have recovered its costs from the trucker.
Now the Shanks should turn around and sue their lawyer(s).

Nixon was a sap. I think he believed that the fact that he'd won the Presidency was proof that he was no fool. But he was a fool. Having achieved the highest office he let his guard down - he had nothing left to prove to his political rivals and made the mistake of turning his back on them; et tu Brutus?

We can never know the real Clinton death toll but it's hard deny that Clinton lied and rivals died.

I think that Clinton's plan to institute communism here was simply to put inexperienced, incompetent,extraordinarily naive Utopians in vital positions and just stand back and watch everything collapse. It didn't happen because nothing about this government is truly vital except our military (which he tried to destroy but only succeeded in decimating. Essentially Bill was a hopelessly lazy and uncommitted communist. It is the energy and will of his vicious wife that worries much more now.

Good work. I'd like to see more of it.

Quite a mixed bag. I won't miss some of them and look at the notion of replacing them as an opportunity to do better.

How come with all those farm subsidies growers can't hire Americans instead of illegal aliens?

Answer (Part 1) - Americans can sit home and collect government checks for doing nothing that add up to more cash than the poor migrant worker makes busting his hump.
Answer (Part 2) - The government is utterly irresponsible about the way it throws our money around. If they'd balance their giveaways according to man power intensity in various agricultural ventures perhaps growers who needed to could afford to hire actual Americans.
Answer (Part 3) - Greed. I love what our farmers do for us but when the government flashes free money in people's faces even the most honest among us will give in to the temptation to take a handout.

I was hoping you'd approve.

You may have hit on something here. Maybe we don't have to kill the radicals. Maybe all we have to do is wipe out their goat herds. If we can convert them to eating ham - problem solved.

You're failing to grasp that the economy is circular. Industry creates jobs and wealth - government taxes industry so that it can throw money around to bums, support its own greed and solidify its electorate - in order to pay its taxes industry is forced to raise prices and lay off employees - as a result more "poor people" are created for the government to support. There are only four steps in this mad circle but something tells me you won't be able to grasp the concept anyway. Not because you lack the smarts but because you are completely invested in your narrow point of view.
Poor people need to bear their share of responsibility in this downward spiral, so do people who push for socialism as you do. But rationally speaking the main cause of our present social decline is government's incompetence and thievery.

You say absolutely nothing about what causes these statistics. All you've got is your insanely myopic focus on Bush as the cause of all things evil.
Government give-aways and our progress toward socialism are what make it acceptable for everyone who's willing to stoop to beg and lie to get on the dole. I forgot the exact percentage but some 35% of Michiganders are now on Medic-aid.
Welcome to soviet USA. You're getting what you wanted.

Throw the bums out!? That's the real American dream.

I don't agree that this uproar is politic/media motivated. The mainstream media is actually avoiding ithe story like it's poison. Your own impression comes from listening to "off Broadway" media.

The story should be front page news in all outlets as it would be if it was discovered that McCain had attended Nazi rallies for the last 20 years!