Beware of paralegals

Lawyers always have had a reputation, mostly undeserved, for being con artists. But it appears from this list of the year's best scams and cons from Insurance Bureau of Canada that paralegals are the people to watch now:

1) A Halifax man made 11 claims in which he pretended to be struck by cars backing out of parking lots.
2) A man exported his new vehicle to Europe and claimed it was stolen three months later.
3) A Toronto-area man who took his car to a body shop for repair of a minor scrape was surprised to see the enormous bill and list of unnecessary parts - including a front grille and cooling system - the shop sent to his insurance company.
4) A Quebec man earned the title Chop Shop King for running two bustling garages where police found 40 stolen vehicles being carved up for parts. The king was jailed six years and ordered to pay a $774,000 fine.
5) An Alberta man reported his high-end pickup truck stolen, collecting $68,000 from his insurer. Months later, investigators learned he had stripped the vehicle and sold the parts. He was charged with public mischief and fraud.
6) A Toronto-area paralegal recruited people to file more than $200,000 in claims for phantom injuries from supposed car crashes. The scheme was supported by a clinic that claimed to have assessed and treated the injuries.
7) Salespeople at a few Toronto-area car dealerships charged $500 to arrange insurance with a broker they said would save car owners lots of money on premiums. The scammers put bogus information on the applications so that customers would be put into a cheaper rate group, but that made the policies invalid.
8) A woman in the Toronto area persuaded friends and family to join her in staging car accidents and filing false claims. One annoyed neighbour was pestered once too often and secretly recorded her pitch.
9) The owner of a company that had several workers filing injury claims denied knowing any of them. It turned out that a paralegal had forged employment forms to boost the compensation claims of staged "victims."
10) A car crash victim seeking cheap legal advice from a paralegal was duped into signing a pile of legal forms that had the paralegal negotiate on the man's behalf with the insurance company. The paralegal then forged the man's signature on the resulting cheque and cashed it.

Getting worse

The thing about the Bush administration is this: its ALWAYS worse than it first appears.
With Clinton, it often turned out that nothing had happened -- the first news stories about all his scandals started out pretty awful, but then it just dribbled away and turned to dust as it gradually came out that nothing much had actually happened -- like Whitewater and Travelgate and impeachment for a blowjob.
But with Bush, its the other way around -- the first news stories start out pretty awful, and then it just keeps on getting worse and worse -- the Office of Special Plans, stovepiping, Abu Ghraib, rendition, CIA prisons, Fallujah, Guantanamo, torture, sabatoging the UN, firing civil servants, pouring government money into Christian Right organizations, Halliburton, losing billions in Iraq, politicizing scientific and technical policies, and now Big Brother-gate.
And then it also turns out that it isn't just accidental or coincidental or bad apples or someone misinterpreting the orders -- nope, it always turns out to be the newest US policy, ordered right from "the top" -- Rumsfeld, Cheney or Bush, happily implementing the Imperial Presidency as fast as they can.
When you think of all this stuff together, it seems pretty clear to me that there is a rough beast being born here. In this post on My Left Wing called :: Slouching Toward Kristallnacht Maryscott O'Connor quotes from Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933 - 1945. It is a chilling description of a civilized society sliding toward fascism, and its attributes are more familiar in America today than anyone could have believed just five years ago:

". . . one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble." Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none . . . in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, "It's not so bad" or "You're seeing things" or "You're an alarmist."
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in "43" had come immediately after the "German Firm" stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in "33". But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying "Jew swine," collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in, your nation, your people is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing) . . . You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or "adjust" your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."
I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say . . . "Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was "defeatism." You assumed that there were lists of those who would be "dealt with" later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a "victory orgy" to "take care of" those who thought that their "treasonable attitude" had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.
"Once the war began, the government could do anything "necessary" to win it; so it was with the "final solution" of the Jewish problem, which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its "necessities" gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."

In America, the targets are liberals (anyone who disagrees with the Bush administration) and Muslims (who want to establish the caliphate, didn't you know?)

"It's a cookbook!"

There is a Twilight Zone episode called "To Serve Man" based on a science fiction short story by, I think, Larry Niven. It was one of those stories with a twist ending. The aliens arrive on Earth and they're all very nice and friendly and they invite everyone to visit their planet. Well, our hero is suspicious, but the aliens win him over. Then his girlfriend finds an alien book titled "To Serve Man" and sets to work translating it. At the end of the episode, just as the hero is getting onto the spaceship to travel to the alien planet, the girl comes running into the spaceport and screams up at him "It's a cookbook!"
This is what I am starting to feel like with this NSA story -- that its not a question anymore about which individual people are being targetted and whose enemies they are. Rather, the question is whether there is anyone, anywhere, whose phone calls and email are NOT under surveillance?
Kevin Drum and Josh Marshall have assembled indications that NSA is spider-botting whole groups of people at once. Marshall says

. . . Perhaps they're doing searches for certain patterns of words or numbers, perhaps something as simple as a phone number. But unlike 'traditional' wiretapping, in which you're catching the conversations of a relatively small and defined group of people, this may involve listening in on a big slice of the email or phone communications in the country looking for a particular phone number or code or perhaps a reference to a particular name . . . you can see how this would just be a non-starter for getting a warrant. It is the definition of a fishing expedition.

And its also more than a little reminiscent of the "Big Brother is Watching", where everyone is guilty until proven innocent.
And suddenly we are back at the Supreme Court nominations, too. Everyone thought the questions about how Roberts and Alito would rule on Right to Privacy issues were related to birth control and abortion rights -- but that's pretty small potatoes, really, compared to the question of whether people all over the world have a right NOT to have their communications monitored without cause or warrant.

O.J. Two

Call it O.J. Simpson Two: G.W. Bush wants everyone to focus on the REAL criminal, that person who leaked the story to the New York Times!
Well, Bush and Gonzales and Rice and Rumsfeld and Cheney and the right wing bloggers can spin all they want, but the public knows what the real crime is.
In Bush's Snoopgate, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter writes:

. . . on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story . . . The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security . . . Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story . . . because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker.

They just can't explain why they didn't apply for warrants. There is no explanation, except for the obvious one that the people they felt to be such a threat to security were political targets like journalists and Democrats, and they knew no judge would ever give them a warrant to eavesdrop on these people.

Christmas skirmishes

Non-Sequitur

Harper - Canada's Dubya

Watch out for this guy Stephen Harper. He wants it his way, ALL his way. And that's all there is to it. The Imperial Prime Minister has spoken.
Just like Dubya, if Harper wants reality to twist in his direction, well, then...it will. HE doesn't have to work with actuall reality. Oh, no. If he wants a different reality, a Harper reality, why then -- magically -- that's the way it will BE!
It is a profound belief in creationism, to think that he can personally create a universe which is more to his liking. Its just the way your average four-year-old thinks.
Harper continues to insist that if he passes a law against same-sex marriage then it just won't be overturned by the Supreme Court.
Even though lower courts have ALREADY declared laws against gay marriage unconstitutional.
Even though the only way the Charter allows overriding of constitutional rights is use of the notwithstanding clause.
Nope. That's not the way Harper wants it to be. So that's not the way it will be. So he's going to deny reality, forcing everyone to go through years and years of expense and trouble and legal cases and court challenges, just to end up exactly where we are now, with same-sex marriage legal unless the notwithstanding clause is used.

"Harper appears to be living in a kind of legal Disneyland, as if you can wave a magic wand and thereby override" the Constitution, the courts and an act of Parliament, said Justice Minister Irwin Cotler. "The only way that Harper could possibly override all that is to use the notwithstanding clause and to suggest otherwise is either to be ignorant of the law or to be dissembling." He said lower-court decisions on the issue are constitutionally binding and the Supreme Court itself said the right to same-sex marriage "flows from" the Charter.

Remind you of someone? That guy down south, maybe? The one who keeps talking about how well things are going in Iraq, and how US authorities don't torture anyone, and how the economy is great and there is no such thing as climate change and Delay is innocent and . . .

Chatter

Anyone who gives this two seconds thought knows that the National Security Agency hasn't spent the last four years monitoring the phone calls and email of homesick Arab students.
This is a White House where every single thing is political, where the election of a Democrat was seen as a threat to national security. So they have, of course, been spying on all of those 10,000 people on the White House enemies list, plus Democrats and peace activitists and protestors and columnists and journalists and embassies and investment bankers and bank presidents and industrialists and Colin Powell and the State Department and, well, who knows . . . just about anyone or everyone. Remember those stories about John Bolton's abuse of NSA intercepts, when the White House refused to tell the Senate whose phone calls had been recorded, just accidently-like of course? Tip of the iceberg.
How many phone conversations have Bush's opponents or potential opponents had in the last four years with their mistresses or their lawyers or their bookies or their AA sponsors? Just about everybody has something they don't want to see spread all over the local newspaper.
And are we wondering which 'sensitive' security operations would have been endangered if this operation had been revealed a year ago? Likely the ones targetting the Democratic National Committee and the Kerry campaign.
People are wondering why the New York Times held this story for a year before publishing. Two reasons, I think. If the New York Times had published this before the election, it simply would not have been believed -- does anyone remember that a month before the election, when the New York Times revealed that Iraqi arms depots had been stripped of their weapons and the whole thing was brushed aside as partisan politics? And then after the election, the Bush administration had the media bamboozled that everybody just loved them, so again, the Times would have backed off the story again thinking that no one would believe it.
But now that the Bush administration is down, well, the media can finally kick them. The National Security Agency secret spying story has hit with even more impact than the secret prisons story.
Steve Gilliard writes:

Bush's war on terror has been a failure on most levels.
But why break the law?
Because Bush and Cheney think that there would be the magic bullet, that they could torture or violate their way to Osama, and didn't want the law in the way. And enablers like John Yoo were all too eager to help to subvert the law, human decency and common sense.
The short term solution was what Bush wanted. The whole idea behind Gitmo was to round up the truly dangerous, then the secret prisons, then holding Padilla. All short cuts to Osama, they thought. But it wasn't.
The short term solution war on terror will lead to the long term legal fights by its innocent victims.
Now, we're pushing into genuine impeachment territory. NO presidential finding can break the law. Bush seems to think the Constitution is an a la carte menu, when it isn't.

Emphasis mine.
Bush's Divine Right of Kings doctrine is finally turning around and biting him in the ass. I just hope it isn't too late.

Have you heard the good news?

The freeway blogger has a list of the good news from Iraq these days. Here's some of the best:

Vast majority of Iraqi population still alive. Many unwounded, untortured . . . Scrap metal business literally booming. Lots of extra car parts . . . Many U.S. Soldiers not killed at all . . . Lots of surgical training opportunities . . . World opinion of United States gradually changing from hatred and fear to laughter and pity.

If there is one thing which the American electorate will be unable to forgive, it will be Bush making the US look ridiculous around the world. Even after Vietnam, the world saw the US as mistaken, but not silly or misguided.
But here is Canada -- little ole Canada, with the world reputation as everybody's dweeb cousin -- dressing down the American delegation at last week's climate conference and telling the American ambassador to STFU. And meanwhile John Bolton continues to open his mouth just to change feet at the UN. And Rice tours Europe pleading with them to stop their CIA investigations. And Bush has to hold a press conference today with John McCain to announce an "agreement" on the torture amendment -- the agreement being Bush's total capitulation to what McCain wanted.

Stunning

Americans are pissed! Rasmussen reports that "Thirty-two percent (32%) of Americans believe that President George W. Bush should be impeached and removed from office."
This is a stunning figure -- so one third of the electorate thinks Bush should be impeached? Even during the height, or depth, of the Lewinsky scandal, only about a third of Americans thought Clinton should be impeached -- and this was after YEARS of the Mighty Wurlitzer right wing scream machine trashing Bill and Hillary Clinton every day and every night. Even during the worst of Iran-contra, I don't think a third of Americans would have thought Reagan should be removed from office.
Maybe the Freeway Blogger is having more effect than even he realized:

Hang together or hang separately

I don't speak French so I didn't watch tonight's debate, but this story doesn't surprise me at all:

It would be a stretch even to describe Thursday night's French-language televised election debate in Vancouver as an exchange of ideas. A new debate format, agreed upon by all four major federal parties, stripped the event of any spontaneity and reduced it to two hours of prime-time party platitudes . . . For all the leaders, the evening was about preaching to the converted, avoiding mistakes and sticking to the script. Harper acknowledged as much, in a roundabout way, after it was over. "I knew the format would be a bit dry," he told reporters. "But on the other hand I think it was much more informative for those who did watch it . . . . I'm not sure watching four leaders yelling at each other at the same time - while entertaining - really tells people very much." In the end, the first debate was less about mental agility than the perfection of cadence, pacing and language that comes from working with a good speechwriter. It may have made their handlers happy - and earned a bonus or a pink slip for whoever told Martin to gesture with his hands so much, depending on your point of view - but as a test of leadership in the crucible it did little to illuminate the candidates for Canadian voters.

So when it comes to the debates I guess we have a choice -- either the party leaders scream at each other, or they drone on and on with their individual spin points. Harper is right when he says that screaming at each other is more entertaining, though its a shame if voters chose the government of Canada based on which leader talks the loudest.

More jokes

Well, my favorite cartoon source has changed how it displays its cartoons so that they can't be downloaded anymore to websites, but here just for fun are a few recent talk-show jokes:

"While speaking in North Carolina this week, President Bush said, the economy is strong, and the best is yet to come. Adding: Also, the war's going great, we don't torture people, I'm 11 feet tall, and if you don't believe me, you can ask my unicorn." --Tina Fey
"It's predicted that USC running back Reggie Bush will be the overwhelming vote-getter for the Heisman Trophy award. That's tomorrow, isn't it? It's also the first time the words 'Bush' and 'overwhelming vote-getter' appeared in the same sentence." --Jay Leno
"A rumor is circulating that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will retire next year. Today, Rumsfeld denied it, saying if you've seen my work in Iraq, you know I don't plan that far ahead." --Conan O'Brien
"For those of you who aren't Jewish, Hannukah is the celebration of when a tiny amount of oil lasted for eight days. Boy, sound's like a Republican's worst nightmare, doesn't it? A fuel-efficient device that doesn't use a lot of oil?" --Jay Leno
"President Bush lit the candles on the White House menorah. There was an awkward moment when Bush saw the menorah and said 'Cool, a flaming rake.'" --Conan O'Brien
"First Lady Laura Bush read 'The Grinch Who Stole Christmas' to a group of children. Unfortunately, the first lady was interrupted when Dick Cheney yelled 'Go Grinch.'" --Conan O'Brien
"There was so much snow in Washington, D.C. that Dick Cheney had to take the chains off a detainee and put them on his car." --Jay Leno
[On anti-torture legislation negotiations]: "It works like any negotiation. ... Both sides go in overreaching with their best-case scenario going forward, knowing they're probably not going to get exactly what they want. McCain has opened with no torture, any time, any place. The administration has countered with, we want to do whatever we want, whenever we want, to whomever we want, and we don't want anybody knowing about it. So they're not really that far apart. There's some wiggle room there. And if you know anything about torture, you do not want to spend any time in the wiggle room." --"Daily Show" Senior Human Rights Correspondent Jason Jones
"President Bush is being criticized by Christian groups because his holiday cards don't have the word 'Christmas' in them. In response, President Bush said, 'You try spelling it.'" --Conan O'Brien
"According to CNN, Donald Rumsfeld said the war in Iraq did not go according to plan. And President Bush said, 'What? We had a plan?'" --Jay Leno
"In a speech yesterday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld criticized the media for casting the war in Iraq in a negative light. Yeah, he said they should focus on the light-hearted and fun aspects of the war." --Conan O'Brien
"Howard Dean said that we can't win in Iraq. And if anybody knows about not winning. it's the Democrats." --Jay Leno
"A lot of Bush supporters are very upset about the TV show the 'West Wing.' They say there are too many Democrats on the 'West Wing.' That'll even out when 'Prison Break' comes back, there'll be a lot more Republicans then." --Jay Leno

Great line of the day

Huffington Post blogger Marty Kaplan writes about the Washington Post's "its the truth that's liberal, not the columnist" controversy inJournalism's Slo-Mo Suicide:

. . . We have reached the point where instead of assessing the objectivity and accuracy of statements in public discourse, we are told by journalistic traffic cops to treat them merely as theological observations that flow from one's political religion. It's a symptom of the same disease that already causes spineless editors to force apparently defenseless reporters to pair every truthful "he said" in an article with a bogus "she said" in service of some nihilistic postmodern notion of balance . . . Froomkin’s boss’s idea – add a conservative blogger to the mix – is the journalistic equivalent of tattooing “Just Shoot Me” on his forehead. The “intelligent design” guerrillas want to subvert the credibility of evolution by forcing science classes to “teach the controversy” – that is, to put science and theology on morally equivalent footing. Instead of inviting readers to take seriously the troubling information that Froomkin assembles from some of the nation’s most highly-credentialed journalists, Brady wants to turn Froomkin’s content into infotainment: Dancing Bear Left, to be enjoyed alongside some Dancing Bear Right.

Emphasis mine. I have read a lot about the sticky, gooey details of this controversy here and there -- its always lots of fun to follow all the ins and outs of office politics combined with White House politics, especially the towering snits of White House reporters when someone else covers their beat better then they do. But I did think this Kaplan column summed up the most important issues of the story as far as newspaper readers are concerned.

Yawn!

Well, its Decision 2006 and Canadians are on the edge of their seats, eagerly awaiting the first of the big debates . . . well, at least I guess we'll be watching. . . well, some of it ... or at least a little ....snarrrrrfffff.
Oops. Oh, sorry, drifted off for a minute there. Where was I? And in today's election news, everyone is still piling onto Scott Reid for his popcorn and beer remark. . . first interesting thing anyone has said yet so we have to make the most of it . . . then again, its really not THAT interesting . . . just a slip of the tongue really and . . . .snnooooorrrr.
Sorry, sorry. Did it again. Just can't seem to keep my eyes open. And now Harper wrote a letter to the Washington Times to say he really wasn't such a big fan of Bush's - or, actually, he didn't exactly say that, just that he was disappointed that Saddam didn't have any deadly weapons - what? He's "disappointed"? Like, does he mean that he WANTED Saddam to have horrible weapons? . . . Oh, well, I'm sure that wasn't really what he meant, just a slip of the tongue really. . . zzzzznnoooosssss!
Damnit, did it again. . . and now the NDP have a daycare policy too. Just. Can't. Keep. My. Eyes. Open . . . snnnnaaaarrrfffffttttt....
(with apologies to Paul Wells, who wrote an hysterically funny blog post on Inkless Wells last spring about falling asleep while covering Canadian politics.)

Health Care Hold 'Em!

Tories announce cancer plan
Well, I'll see your cancer plan, and raise you a diabetes strategy on the flop!
Take THAT for your diabetes strategy! We've got a public clinics initiative.
Fie on your public clinic initiative! I've got a Wait Times Action Plan and you'll see it as soon as the river card gets turned.
So looks like its pocket jokers now against a full house...

Who's sorry now?

So the American perception at the beginning of the week was that Condoleezza Rice was going to Europe to kick ass and take names -- as of Tuesday, "US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was set to tell Washington's allies to fall into line as she began a four-nation tour . . . "
But by Friday, it was clear that it was Rice who was being kicked around. A State department spokesperson re-defined 'success' for the trip by saying "at least we stopped the cycle of self-referenced speculation" -- wow, what an achievement, guys! -- and Rice had been forced to announce a new US "torture" policy which "explicitly banned its interrogators around the world from 'cruel, inhumane or degrading' treatment of detainees" to try to get the Europeans to stop their investigations.
It didn't work.
AP reports today that "More than a half-dozen investigations are under way into whether European countries may have hosted secret U.S.-run prisons in which al-Qaida suspects were allegedly tortured, and whether European airports and airspace were used for alleged CIA flights transporting prisoners to countries where torture is practiced." And today an AP analysis noted that "Condoleezza Rice is now the public face of the Bush administration's promise to play by the world's rules when it comes to fighting terrorism. So if they're broken, her credibility abroad, and perhaps at home, could be at stake."
The world doesn't believe anything the US says anymore.