In a nutshell, Travelers insured Johns-Mannsville from 1947 to 1976. In 1986, the company declared bankruptcy under the weight of asbestos-related lawsuits. As part of the bankruptcy agreement, Travelers agreed to put $80 million into a larger trust fund from which current and future victims would be paid. These trusts are common in bankruptcy proceedings where there is a large pool of potential victims who could bring suit against the company. They ensure that there is money set aside to pay future victims who come forward, usually without having to bring a suit. In return for that, the company gets a court order granting them immunity from future lawsuits.

In this case, however, the lawsuits didn't stop. Instead, lawyers for victims found loopholes in the agreement to sue Travelers directly for conspiring to hide the dangers of asbestos. (For the record, it's very likely that they did exactly that. It's also nearly indisputable that the original agreement woefully underfunded the trust. Also for the record, Elizabeth Warren had nothing to do with the original settlement.)

In 2004, Travelers entered into another agreement with the asbestos victims, this one brokered by Mario Cuomo. It called for Travelers to set aside $500 million in a trust for asbestos victims, and it granted the company immunity from future lawsuits.

It's important to understand that the immunity does not mean that the company doesn't pay future victims. What it actually means is that future victims do not have to fight the insurance company in court. It means that future victims aren't shit out of luck because the company has gone bankrupt and has no money left to pay them. The structure of the trust generally sets out exactly what a victim has to do to prove their injuries, and in many cases, it will ONLY pay out to actual victims.

And therein lies part of the problem. Most asbestos victims groups were content with the settlement and the size of the trust. A smaller group of victims challenged it because of the immunity clause. The victims were not the only ones challenging it, though. Another insurance company which was being sued along with Travelers and dozens of others, wanted the settlement scuttled so that Travelers would be included in future lawsuits, thereby reducing its own financial liability in the unlikely event a conspiracy lawsuit was successful.

Are you still with me? This all came to pass before Elizabeth Warren came into the picture. Cuomo brokered a deal that most of the victims' attorneys liked. It guaranteed payments to those who were injured by asbestos, including those who had not yet developed or been diagnosed with asbestos-related illnesses. Other insurance companies objected, because with Travelers out of the picture, they would have to pay a larger portion of any judgments against them.

And this is where Elizabeth Warren comes in. Although most of the country had never heard of her, she was well known in financial law circles. She had presented a number of friend of the court briefs on behalf of injured victims in bankruptcy cases, including one that established the right of individuals filing for bankruptcy to protect their IRAs, and another that fought to allow judges to reduce credit card interest rates in personal bankruptcies.

Based on her reputation as an advocate for consumer rights and as an expert in bankruptcy law, Travelers brought her in to help preserve the agreement and the $500 million settlement trust. She helped craft an argument on the constitutionality of immunity based on the legality of the original 1986 agreement.

The Supreme Court agreed and upheld the settlement, including the $500 million trust and the immunity, but did not rule on whether the other insurance company retained the right to sue. That was the end of Warren's involvement. She did not foresee what happened next — and it could be argued that perhaps she should have.

The lower court ruled that Chubb, the other insurance company, retained the right to sue Travelers in the future. Another judge ruled that based on that ruling, Travelers did not have to pay out the $500 million, since it was premised on immunity from all asbestos-related lawsuits. In fact, the second judge used the Supreme Court's ruling to state that Travelers had never needed the second settlement, since the 1986 one protected it from most lawsuits already.

Thus, the argument Warren made to preserve the right of asbestos victims to be compensated was turned around to give Travelers immunity without requiring them to pay anything into the victim compensation fund.

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And there’s some truth.

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Essentially, when Romney admits that of course, businesses benefit from public investment in roads, infrastructure, the Internet, research and all the rest — but insists that they should have more tax breaks and lower taxes, he is advocating that business should be allowed to use our publicly funded services and infrastructure for free — or at least, at a huge discount, and that individuals should shoulder the lion’s share of funding the essential services their businesses use and profit from.

In other words, this isn’t an argument about whether or not businesses need and profit from government investment. It’s an argument about whether or not they should pay a fair price for using the fruits of those investments.

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Do you think the Obama campaign is drawing inspiration for their “where are the tax returns?” push from the birth certificate debacle? It’s been interesting watching and listening to this developing over the weekend. I’m hearing questions and comments about Mitt Romney’s tax returns that sound a whole lot familiar to anyone who followed the birth certificate mocktroversy over the past several years. Questions like:

Where are the tax returns, Mitt Romney? What are you hiding in them? What don’t you want the American people to know?

Comments like:

Mitt Romney must be hiding something in those tax returns. There’s something on them he doesn’t want us to know.

Even other Republicans are jumping on the “Show us the tax returns, Mitt” bandwagon. Haley Barbour, not very well known for his liberal leanings, when asked by Wolf Blitzer if Mitt Romney should release his tax returns, responded, “I would,” adding that he didn’t think it should be a campaign issue. Of course, this invites the rejoinder that the Mitt Romney tax returns wouldn’t be a campaign issue if he’d just release them.

Now, mind you, I do understand the difference between the Obama birth certificate and the Romney tax returns. For one thing, no other presidential candidate in history felt the need to show his birth certificate publicly because the public had never demanded to see a candidate’s birth certificate before. Where tax returns are concerned, on the other hand, every modern presidential candidate HAS released his tax returns for multiple years, not just a single year, as Mitt Romney did.

And the tax return issue also plays into a few other themes that the birth certificate story rang; to wit:

- He’s not like the rest of us (the rich are different than you and me, after all)

- He’s unAmerican (Swiss bank accounts, offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands)

- He’s hiding something!

Other things play into the whole “he’s not like us” narrative, too, notably Romney’s awkwardness relating to everyday constituents and his remarkable comfort with his monetary peers. Reports from those who know him well suggest that he’s at ease, open and approachable among his fellow 1%ers — it’s just around us peons that he gets tongue-tied and finds himself saying odd things like “cheesy grits for breakfast” and “the trees are just the right height.” It certainly seems as if Mitt Romney doesn’t know how to relate to the “common people” — likely because HE thinks that the rich are different. They have different concerns. They have different lives. They have different aims. They believe that the world should be arranged for their convenience and policies should be designed to best benefit their portfolios because, in their experience, it always has.

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Instead Davis delivered a proposal based on tying the president to Jeremiah Wright, among other things. According to Baker, Ending Spending received the ad proposal on Tuesday and immediately knew it was not what they wanted. When he was contacted by the New York Times on Wednesday, he claims, he tried to make it clear that they “were not going ahead” on the proposal which was not what they’d asked for at all. He said that there had been no approval, no preliminary approval and certainly no money changing hands for the now-infamous ad proposal.

So he was kinda gobsmacked when he read the New York Times article about the Jeremiah Wright campaign ads that the super PAC headed by Joe Ricketts was apparently this close to commissioning.

In Brian Baker’s version of events,  Ending Spending approached Fred Davis, best known for viral, controversial campaign ads, and told him they liked his work. They asked him to come up with an ad campaign targerting Obama’s spending and instead got this horrible ad proposal that was all about attacking the president’s character and hanging his association with Jeremiah Wright around his neck. And then, horror of horrors, even after he “made it clear” to the New York Times that Ending Spending and Joe Ricketts wanted nothing to do with the proposed campaign (not, apparently, out of outrage but because they wanted to focus on spending not the president’s character flaws), the Times went ahead and published this story that implied that they had ASKED for ad ideas about Jeremiah Wright — on the front page!

The real story, apparently, is that the New York Times sensationalized a “nothing to see here” story – so like the liberal mainstream media, right? – and dared to suggest that the super PAC was considering the ad proposal from a guy that’s notorious for ads that are so outrageous they go viral within minutes. I mean, who would have thought that Fred Davis, who had submitted a similar proposal to the McCain campaign in 2008, would have come up with an ad featuring Jeremiah Wright?

And Baker was so indignant about the whole thing that he almost had me convinced. Then Dan Senor, who was sitting at the table with Mika, Joe and the gang, was asked what he’d thought when he first saw the story. His issue with it? Front page, above the fold — really? He was kinda sorta stunned that the New York Times was treating this like a you know, news story.

So, I guess the storyline is that the big, bad liberal media misrepresented something that was not news at all. And then, Mark Halperin — who started the segment by saying he didn’t think the Times should have run the story — asked Baker about a follow-up story in the Times that laid out the ticktock of the original story — yes, meta story story. The Times said they’d specifically asked if the ad proposal was dead or still under consideration. Halperin gave Baker a chance to reiterate that the Times knew, when they published the story, that it had already been rejected. Baker’s response?

Well, apparently Joe Ricketts had not yet seen the ad proposal and “no final decision has been made”. They were still considering it, in other words. So the New York Times was completely wrong in reporting that the report was still under consideration. Mean old New York Times reporting the news in a way the subject of the story doesn’t like again.

Mitt Romney, in repudiating the so-called Rickerts Plan to Stop Barack Hussein Obama Spending Once and For All, popped out a couple of totally AWESOME quotes that tell you all you really need to know. First:

“There’s a fiction that you can get rich by stripping a company of its assets and pocketing the profits…Now some people may know how to do that, but I don’t know how you do that.”

But even better, this was Mitt Romney’s response when he was asked about a statement he made on a radio program a few months ago:

“I don’t remember exactly what I said, but whatever I said, I stand by it.”

I guess that’s the best you can expect from the man who also said, “I don’t recall the incident, but if I offended anyone, obviously, I would be sorry.”

Source: Freebase

Mitt Romney may have said a bit more about his beliefs about religion than he did about treason when he made this statement in response to the infamous treason remarks at his campaign event yesterday.

“I happen to believe that the Constitution was not just brilliant, but probably inspired, and so was the Declaration of Independence.”

By now, you’ve probably heard that Mitt Romney failed to address statements about Obama being tried for treason at a campaign event yesterday. In freaking out about Romney’s failure to address the treason remark, the media missed something in what the former governor actually did say. What exactly did Mitt Romney mean when he said that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were “not just brilliant, but probably inspired“?

Sounds pretty innoccuous, right? For those in the evangelical community or those who have some background in theology, though, those bolded words mean much more than a simple statement of admiration for the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. “Inspired” is a word that’s reserved for religious writing that comes from God. That’s right — Mitt Romney essentially telegraphed that he believes the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were inspired by God — that He may not have given them the words directly, but His hand guided theirs to ensure that the writing reveals His own message. That’s a pretty bold statement in a country where there’s a major controversy about the separation of religion and government and the role of religion in government.

Was the Constitution “Inspired by God”?

Inspired is a word that’s usually reserved for writings that form the basis of a religion, not the founding documents of a government, and most especially not a government that holds as one of its major founding principles that it would have no established religion and that there should be no religious test for attaining offices of power in said government. In applying that word to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, Romney is implicitly stating that he believes this country and its policies were inspired by God in the same way that many people believe a religion is inspired by God.

This is something we’ve seen more and more over the past several elections — candidates who state either implicitly or tacitly that the United States was somehow established by Christians for Christians and guided by Christian principles. Yesterday, Mitt Romney took that rhetoric a step further in his response to the treason remark when he used the word “inspired”  to describe the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. If the founding documents of the United States were inspired by God, then we must be a Christian country with a Divine Provenance and a divine mission — that Shining City on the Hill to be emulated by the rest of the world. It also gives the US an implicit right to impose its will on other countries unilaterally.

Now, I know that’s a popular view among many on the right, but I see that as a scary position for the president of the United States to hold. This country was conceived of and instituted by men, forward-thinking men who deliberately drew up documents that separated the governing of the country from the influence of religion. They did not believe that “God” had handed them a mission to reform the world. They simply believed that individuals are born with certain innate rights and in this country, the government should support those rights rather than abridge them. It had nothing to do with God and everything to do with the right to choose not only your religion but your livelihood, and to determine your destiny not by your birth but by the choices that you make.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are certainly inspiring — but the only thing the writing was inspired by was the determination of the Founding Fathers to establish a land where every man had a voice and no man would be oppressed by others. In retrospect, they are remarkably progressive documents, though parts of them certainly reflect the prejudices of their time. The truly remarkable thing is that the framers recognized that their writings contained inherent prejudices, and that time would necessitate adjustments and changes to reflect progress and different circumstances. That’s why they included procedures for making those changes and adjustments. That’s something you won’t see in documents that are generally regarded as inspired by God — a tacit admission that there is room for error and a mechanism for correcting errors as they come to light.

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Every once in a while, I click on “news of the wierd” type stories on HuffPo — you know, the kind of thing you usually find as filler in local papers. This morning, I clicked on a story with the headline “Man Alleges He Bought Safe with $26,000 In It on eBay“. I figured it would be a feel-good story about a guy who got lucky. I didn’t expect to click away shaking my head at the rampant stupidity of what appears to be the general population.In a nutshell: a guy who’s been selling stuff on eBay for 15 years sold a locked safe for $129. The buyer received the safe, then posted in the buyer’s feedback that he’d found more than $26,000 inside the safe when he got it opened. The seller, incensed, wrote to the buyer asking for a cut of the find. The seller refused, stating the seller’s own policy, which reads no returns, no exchanges, no money back. At that point, the story went public locally, with the seller calling himself “the stupidest man in the world” and complaining about the moral of the guy who wouldn’t share his good fortune. According to the latest update, the seller now says the buyer was playing a practical joke, and there really was no money in the safe.

But the story is not the story. The story is the comments that follow the story. These seem to fall into several different sentiments, every one of them cringe-worthy. They are:

• What a stupid buyer! He announced the find and now he has to pay taxes on it!

• The story is fake becase:

1. who is stupid enough to sell a safe when they don’t know what’s in it? or
2. who is stupid enough to buy a safe without the combination? or
3. who is stupid enough to announce they found $26,000? or
4. what kind of stupid joke is it to say you found money?

• Why is this news and why are you stupid enough to read it here instead of going to AOL and reading it there?

• Whoever wrote this story is really stupid because it’s poorly written, doesn’t stick to the point or talks about a stupid story

That’s a whole lot of stupid on display there — and every single one of them is reinforced by people saying “Yeah, that’s pretty stupid!”

Not a single one of them — at the time I read it anyway — had a single person responding with surprise, incredulity or even headshaking chagrin of the stupidity of the comment itself. All I can figure is that:

• The maojrity of people think its acceptable and even praiseworthy to evade paying taxes.
• Nobody understands the concept of calculated profit. i.e.: the safe, as is, is unusable and worthless, but it may contain something valuable. If I crack the safe open and there’s nothing in it, I destroy any value it may have. If I sell the safe unopened, I can recover my investment and make a little money.
• Nobody understands the concept of calculated risk or the allure of a mystery. These same people probably think nothing of plunking down $5 on a lottery ticket but somehow can’t see that paying $129 on the chance that there was something in the safe was worth it to this guy.
• People believe that it’s stupid to pay taxes, or put yourself in the position of paying taxes or being asked for loans by friends.
• Quite a few people think they have magical insight into what should be news and where people should be reading it.
• Everyone’s a hater, and a lot of the critics know nothing about what makes an interesting story.

And now, having spent close to an hour noting the stupid on display, I’ve added my own stupidity to the collection, because when you come right down to it, it’s pretty stupid to extrapolate widespread stupidity from a few pages of comments on one HuffPo story.