"Coca-Cola drinking 'linked to New Zealander's death.'"

Ridiculous headline about a woman who drank 10 liters of Coke every day:

The mother of eight... had developed an addiction to Coca-Cola and would get withdrawal symptoms, including "the shakes", if she went without her favourite drink.

She drank Coke throughout her waking hours and her teeth had been removed because of decay.

The fact that one or more of her children were born without enamel on their teeth should have been treated by her, and by her family, as a warning.”

This has nothing to do with Coke as a product. We're talking about someone who consumed 2.2 pounds of sugar and 970 mg of caffeine every day. And the equivalent of 35 8-oz. glasses of liquid. (I'm saying "equivalent" because I don't picture her pouring the stuff into a glass.) This is not the kind of problem that can be solved with tort suits and warning labels.

But Coke is defending itself against this bad publicity. Have you seen this ad?



I love the extremely tactful voiceover which — la la la la — goes on and on and on just to say one very obvious thing to the almost-too-stupid-to-live crowd: It's not just calories that you eat that will make you fat if you don't burn them off — calories that you drink are real too.

"And the Xhosa for 'tort' is ulwaphulomthetho (oo lwa poo loom twe to)."

Questions, asked at Althouse, get answers.

"Animal activists have been attacking our family, our company, and our employees for decades because they oppose animals in circuses."

"These defendants attempted to destroy our family-owned business with a hired plaintiff who made statements that the court did not believe.... This settlement is a vindication not just for the company but also for the dedicated men and women who spend their lives working and caring for all the animals with Ringling Bros. in the face of such targeted, malicious rhetoric."

The ASPCA pays $9.3 million to get out of this case, which continues against the other defendants, the Humane Society of the United States, the Fund for Animals, Animal Welfare Institute, Animal Protection Institute United with Born Free USA, various lawyers, and a former Ringling employee named Tom Rider.

"When a prosecutor loses a criminal case in America, there are no remedies."

"It's gone. It's dead as a doornail. If they try the case badly and they lose, it's double jeopardy — you heard of it? So there are no post-trial motions, it's gone. Why? Because we had a rookie prosecutor, and if he had done a better job... Too bad, it's gone. Can you then go ahead and sue the DA and say, 'Boy you should have put your ace prosecutor on there'?"

"We certainly haven’t forgotten about Mr. Sandusky’s victims."

Of course, you haven't. Whether you care or not — and past behavior suggests you do not — they all represent lawsuits.

"We want to make sure that we do the right thing in terms of providing a just outcome for them." Aren't you wonderful?! I'm assuming "just" is code for not ruinously destructive to the ongoing enterprise that is Penn State.

$14.5 million settlement to a brain-damaged boy struck by a baseball hit by a metal bat.

The legal theory was that the metal bat was unsafe because it propelled the ball faster than the old wooden bats.

The ball hit the boy in the chest "at the precise millisecond between heartbeats, sending him into cardiac arrest," and oxygen to the brain was lost for 15 to 20 minutes.

(The linked article isn't completely clear about the different kinds of metal bats. It seems that Little League has been involved in getting metal bats designed to limit their performance to that of wooden bats, so don't assume that this huge settlement means the end of metal bats.)

Thaddeus McCotter — after "nightmarish month and a half" — resigns from Congress.

He says:

The recent event’s totality of calumnies, indignities and deceits have weighed most heavily upon my family. Thus, acutely aware one cannot rebuild their hearth of home amongst the ruins of their U.S. House office, for the sake of my loved ones I must ‘strike another match, go start anew’ by embracing the promotion back from public servant to sovereign citizen.”

The quote about the match is from Bob Dylan.

And what will he do now? He says he faces "diminishing prospects" and is "both unwilling and ill-suited to lobby," but I think it's pretty obvious he's got a cool personal style and a way with words. And he's made a TV pilot:

"Bumper Sticker: Made On Motown" starred McCotter hosting a crude variety show cast with characters bearing the nicknames of his congressional staffers, his brother and a drunk, perverted "Black Santa." They take pot shots about McCotter's ill-fated bid for the White House while spewing banter about drinking, sex, race, flatulence, puking and women's anatomy....



Asked who would find the humor in the script funny, McCotter said... the show was "deliberately designed to be a train wreck" to further assault the dignity of the central character — McCotter the host, who is already humiliated from the presidential run....

S.E. Cupp appears in the pilot episode:

McCotter tries to ask serious questions of the columnist, while his sidekicks chime in by asking how she "keeps that great stripper bod?" and whether "D-Cupp" is dating anyone. In the script, Cupp is disgusted by the "train wreck" of the show.

It's unclear whether Cupp knew of her role in the pilot. Reached by e-mail, she didn't want to talk about McCotter.

McCotter also casts Stephen K. Bannon, the conservative filmmaker, as the reluctant producer of "Bumper Sticker." In the show, Bannon is not amused McCotter doesn't have a second guest lined up and McCotter has to interview Bannon instead.

Reached by phone, Bannon, who now runs Breitbart's media enterprise, said he didn't realize McCotter cast him in the script. He recalls McCotter emailing him an earlier version, but he chalked it up to "musings" McCotter would send periodically to Breitbart and himself after his presidential run failed.

This sounds like a fact pattern for a law school exam. Spot the legal issues.

... Bannon said he didn't take McCotter's scripts seriously, but rather as cathartic musings to burn off the anger and hurt from his book and presidential campaign flopping.

I hope McCotter is artistic and not crazy. If he's both, I hope he manages to channel the crazy into the art in a way that works somehow. I really liked him back when he was running for president (but failing to get enough of a percentage in the polls to qualify for the debates). The fake-talk-show format for a comedy series has been done many times, and it can be an easy way to crank out material. It's actively wrong to trick people into appearing in the show, especially when using your status as a member of Congress to lure journalists into sitting down for what they think is an interview. Sacha Baron Cohen tricks people into his comic sketches, but he gets them to sign a release before he uses them, and he doesn't use an actual real-life position of power as the leverage.

***

Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue

"Why are people giving money to bullied bus monitor?"

Asks Paul Farhi about "this week's viral video sensation," Karen Klein, whose ordeal has inspired people to hand over what has now totaled up to over $250,00.

Perhaps the Internet, and a few political fundraising cycles, have taught Americans to transform sympathy, support and revulsion into transferable dollars. George Zimmerman certainly found that out when his defense fund began brimming over with contributions.

Money is an amazing substance! It's very easy to give, and it's so highly appreciated. What's the problem?

Assuming there is a problem, one might say it's that the money people feel moved to give isn't evenly distributed in proportion to how well deserved it is. The apportionment is too emotional, too dependent on the vagaries of video and viral pathways.

Or one could say that the money does nothing to fix the problem that is represented by the one instance that got our attention. Now that Klein is a very lucky victim, her tormenters are off the hook. We can laugh. They unwittingly benefited her! They don't have to cough up the $250,000 that we might imagine she could win in damages in a tort case. They made her a star and her fans got a little psychic thrill out of paying the damages. We're all square now. Everybody's a winner.

ADDED: The young man who started the fundraising effort for Klein is now the beneficiary of a fundraising effort on his behalf, launched by somebody else, who thinks he deserves compensation.

Business clichés.

89 of them.

ADDED: #53 might strike lawyers as misguided:

It’s not actionable enough/what’s the deliverable? = You guys do the work on refining the idea. I’m too tired.

Years ago I worked at a market research firm that had a video ad that it used to show prospective clients. It went on and on, but the repeated tag line was: Above all, it's actionable!

I thought it was embarrassing and all the actionable business was funny, but I had never seen the word and simply assumed it had the intended meaning — that the firm was good at springing into action and getting things done.

When I got to law school and saw the meaning the word has in tort law, I experienced a strange mixture of pity and mirth.

Looking at the OED today, I see the tort law meaning — "Giving cause for legal action" — goes back to 1601:

1601   W. Lambard Archion (1635) 102   Baited, & bitten with libells & slanders that be not actionable.

The other meaning — "Able to be acted upon or put into practice; useful, practical" — goes back only to 1913:

1913   C. Frederick New Housek. xii. 192   Refuse to let the mind wallow and dawdle around a problem without arriving at definite, actionable conclusions.

Here's a recent one:

2004   Jrnl. Amer. Med. Assoc. 14 Jan. 184/2   The availability of advanced technology has changed the nature, scope, and potential of drug utilization programs to provide valuable, actionable, patient-specific information to prescribers.

You'd think the AMA folk would be more sensitive about tort law.

What happens if you're out on a cruise ship, and someone accuses you of rape?

You might spend the cruise in the brig:

The men, both Orthodox Jews from Israel,... say that after climbing into their beds the first night, they were awakened at 5 a.m. by crew members who made them get dressed “in prison garments issued by Royal Caribbean.”

Without explanation, the staffers paraded [Eviator] Mor and [David] Amsalem “through public areas of the ship to a lock-up facility,” court papers state.

Several hours later, they were told they had been accused of raping an “unidentified woman” who later recanted her allegation and who was examined by a doctor who determined she hadn’t been sexually assaulted.

“Notwithstanding the woman’s recantation and the doctor’s conclusion . . . Royal Caribbean’s arresting agents refused to release plaintiffs or to modify the conditions of their imprisonment,” according to the lawsuit.

Yes, it's a lawsuit. They're only asking for $100 million.

This is one reason I would avoid cruise ships. It's a little city out there. What is the government in that little city? You take it for granted, but you know there will be crime. Rape and accusations of rape must happen all the time. The cruise ship company obviously has its lawyers and its policies and must want to handle these things well enough that news like this never comes out, but obviously, there will be some screwups. I assume Royal Caribbean offered these men a generous settlement, but they want more. The publicity is awful. And yet, people will still pay money to ride those floating cities.

Travolta "has been through this so many times before ... he's been photographed kissing other men..."

"... and for some reason, people just don't care."

Why did Rick Santorum deliver a yank-your-arm-out-of-its-shoulder-socket handshake to Ron Paul?

At the end of the debate on Wednesday. Video at the link, where the headline reads "Ron Paul Fans Outraged At Hearty Post-Debate Handshake." I watched the video, and you don't have to be a Ron Paul fan to be outraged. I had to wonder about Santorum's sanity. That wasn't just a hearty handshake. That was... evil. There is evil in the world. Could it be... Satan?

Hey, Rick. Take a lesson from a master:



IN THE COMMENTS: Chip Ahoy said:

Ron Paul was ready for Santorum at the fifty-seventh debate and wore a prop rubber arm. At the end of the debate when Santorum vigorously shook Ron Paul's prop arm it warbled and stretched right out of the jacket sleeve. Ron Paul yelled "Ow! WTF, you freak?!" The rubber arm snapped back and 2% of Santorum's vote flowed over to Ron Paul in repulsion to the aggression but in a twist 1% of Ron Paul's votes and 3% of Gingrich's votes, and 2% of Romney's votes flowed to Santorum because those voters thought the sight of pulling out Ron Paul's arm was awesome.

By the time the fifty-eighth debate rolled around Ron Paul's supporters had fashioned an electrified arm to use on Santorum at the end of the debate but that was detected at the debate entrance and viewers were denied the chance of seeing Santorum electrified by his own aggressive handshake.

And perhaps for the 59th debate, the prop arm might pull out altogether, creating an image something like the animation Chip made for us yesterday, when we were trying to understand not Satan, but Mammon (one of the 7 princes of Hell), and a painting by Evelyn De Morgan called "The Worship of Mammon" had a strangely meaningful extended arm. The illuminating animation:



And the lesson we learn, at long last? The man who gives an extremely vigorous, super-macho handshake — what is it, really, that he is afraid of?

"Hey, I heard that there was a Supweem Court Justice on 'Sesame Street.'"

"There is, Baby Bear. There is."/"Hi, Baby Bear. I am Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, but you can call me 'Justice."



"Wow! Impwessive!"

ADDED: Let's talk about the particular legal problem the "Sesame Street" folks used to teach kids law. Baby Bear has a complaint against Goldilocks, who entered his house and sat in his chair, breaking it. Justice Sotomayor, after listening to Goldilocks, notes that Goldilocks didn't intentionally break the chair, and the dispute is resolved by having Goldilocks help Baby Bear glue the chair back together. "And the 2 of you can live happily ever after." Baby Bear says "I can live with that," so we could view Sotomayor as proposing a settlement — Baby Bear agrees to it — rather than issuing a legal decision.

Notice the emphasis on conflict resolution and building community. Fine. But I'm not satisfied with the observation that Goldilocks didn't intentionally break the chair. Goldilocks intentionally broke into a private home. Why is there no attention to that? If somebody broke into my house when I was away, I would be outraged, even if nothing were broken. I would also not accept a glued-together chair as an adequate replacement for an unbroken chair.

So "Sesame Street," in classic left-wing fashion, pays no attention to property rights. Also, consider the gender dimension of this problem. If a male had intruded into the home of a female, I don't think "Sesame Street" would focus on how nice it would be if the 2 could now become friends.

Pepsi say Mountain Dew would turn a mouse into a "jelly-like substance."

Oh, the things you have to say in order to win a lawsuit!

Ronald Ball of Wisconsin claimed that he purchased a can of the bright green, supercaffeinated citrus-flavored soda only to discover mid-sip that there was a dead rodent inside....

NY police union threatens to bring civil lawsuits against the protesters who assault police officers.

The NY Daily News reports:

[T]he president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association warned demonstrators that he will pursue civil suits against anyone who assaults any union member.

"New York's police officers are working around the clock as the already overburdened economy in New York is being drained by 'occupiers' who intentionally and maliciously instigate needless and violent confrontations with the police," SBA President Ed Mullins said in a statement....

Seventeen demonstrators were arrested and six officers were assaulted during a chaotic march to Union Square on Wednesday night, police said.

A protester responds:

"We have been brutalized and mass-arrested by the NYPD. They can threaten us all they want - we've got lawyers, too."

That's the classic informed citizen's response: You sue me, and I'll sue you.

Margie Phelps encounters the police... and Meade.

Another video by Meade — edited by me — showing today's protest by the Westboro Baptist Church folk. Watch for Phelps to tell Meade to "get up out of my grille." And wait for the fellow protester who attempts to lighten things up with a suggestion of song. Interestingly, it's the same song we've heard a hundred times from the anti-Scott Walker protesters downtown. The lyrics are differently tweaked.

If the phrase "up out of my grille" sounds out of place but also oddly familiar, perhaps you remember the oral argument in the Supreme Court case involving the Westboro folks:

At page 40 [of the transcript], Margie Phelps, arguing in favor of the right to express outrageous opinions in the vicinity of a funeral, is quoted as saying:

I think approaching an individual up close and in their grille to berate them gets you out of the zone of protection, and we would never do that.

(Boldface added.) Then, at pages 47-48, she's quoted saying:

Your body of law about captive audience... where they, by the way, specifically said at footnote this isn't about content. You've got to be up -- again, I will uses [sic] the colloquial term -- up in your grill. The term I think the Court used was confrontational.

And page 49:

I do think that you could have a public event where there was not an element of vulnerability in the people going in. You might even let them up in their grill.

(At the linked post, I discuss the spelling issue: Is it "grille" or "grill"? It's grille.)

"Things that I never imagined people would care about are now being plastered all over blog sites..."

"... including pictures of me from when I was 17 and tweets that have been taken completely out of context. I tweeted once (it was reported that I said it twice) that 'I wonder what my boyfriend @RepWeiner is up to.'"

ADDED: Imagine if Anthony Weiner were a Republican. (I know, it's such a hackneyed visualization, but it's important here.) The liberal/lefty blogs would be shredding him mercilessly. I'm not saying Weiner's not getting his hair mussed. But if he were a Republican, the feeding frenzy would be of a different magnitude entirely.

IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt writes:

So the media is just accepting this absurd assertion that all his accounts were hacked? They were all hacked for the purpose of sending a boner photo to some woman in Seattle? And he hasn't bothered to contact law enforcement?

Right.

Must be nice to be a Democratic politician.

Nevadabob writes:

1) Weiner hasn't reported the alleged hack to the FBI.

2) Facebook hasn't announced any investigation of Mr. Wiener's allegedly hacked account.

3) Twitter (the company) knows the IP address of the computer that really sent the tweet. However, Twitter hasn't announced any investigation. They also haven't released the IP address of the person who actually sent the tweet so we can see if that IP address belongs to the Democrat Rep. Wiener

yfrog knows the IP address of the person that actually uploaded the obscene photograph Mr. Wiener's yfrog account. Thusfar, yfrog has not released that IP address so that we can track down the nefarious hacker who did that. Also, Mr. Wiener could request that they release that IP address to the public so we could help him track down the hacker. But he hasn't.

Mr. Wiener so far refuses to tell us what his own IP address is. And, he is refusing to answer detailed questions that would allow us to determine if the IP address which sent the tweet is at his home in New York.

It's trivially easy to determine if his accounts have REALLY been hacked. Is the FBI investigating? He is, after all, a sitting member of Congress and it is a felony to impersonate a member of Congress. It's also a felony to hack people's Facebook and Twitter accounts.

I'm left to wonder why hasn't Mr. Wiener reported this breach of Homeland Security to the proper authorities? Is it because falsely reporting this would itself be a felony?

ADDED: Is it news if a politician is unfaithful to his wife? It's not important (unless there's some big hypocrisy involved, as there is with politicians who have made their careers spouting "family values"). But I think it is news when a politician mishandles his internet communications. Minor news, but worth noting.

And it's really news — serious news — if either: 1. the internet accounts of a politician have been hacked in an effort to destroy the man, or 2. the politician makes the false statement that he has been victimized by a crime. One or the other has occurred in this case (unless I'm failing to see some other option).

Should we all be closing our Twitter accounts lest some devious prankster destroy our reputation? Or has Weiner —  for his own purposes — maligned Twitter's business and undermined the Twitter-user's sense of security? I want to know!

AND: If Weiner is lying about his accounts getting hacked, he could be sued by Twitter (and the other companies) for defamation.

ALSO: NBC News reports "Lewd Photo Sent Over Rep. Weiner's Hacked Twitter Account... his Twitter account was hacked." Not that Weiner makes that claim, but an outright assertion that his account was hacked. Twitter is getting slimed here. Does it deserve it?

"The family of an 11-year-old boy killed by a bear in Utah in 2007 was awarded nearly $2 million in damages...."

"Judge Dale Kimball... ruled that the federal government was 65 percent responsible for Samuel's death, the state government 25 percent responsible, and the boy's family 10 percent responsible."

The iPhone app that lets you find open parking spaces in a city that has embedded sensors at 1,000s of spaces.

What a great fact pattern for a torts exam!

“It could be really distracting,” said Daniel Simons, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, where he studies the science of attention. And, he said, it could also be dangerous: “Most people are looking for parking spaces in places that have a lot of traffic and a lot of pedestrians.”

City officials acknowledge the potential problem. They are urging drivers to pull over before they pull up the city’s iPhone app, or to do so before they leave home. 

Before they leave home! But the sensor sends out its signal seconds after the space opens up in an area where drivers are circling looking for spots to pounce on before the next car snags it. That's why installing the sensors seemed to make sense in the first place.

Nathaniel Ford, executive director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said safety could actually improve if drivers quickly found a spot instead of circling and getting frustrated. “I get you off the streets as quickly as possible,” he said.

San Francisco spent $20 million on this system, not counting the money they will spend on struck-pedestrian law suits. One way to get a person "off the streets as quickly as possible" is to... ugh! Sorry to go morbid on you. Technology is cool. San Francisco is cutting edge... cutting down traffic... and hopefully not pedestrians.

"If I had known there was a reporter stuffed in the closet, I would have been compelled to stand up and demand answers."

"I would also like to know if this is actually legal to treat people like caged animals. I’m disgusted by these actions."

(The reporter agreed to the accommodations, didn't he?)