Calling all BP lawsuits: Judge Lynn Hughes

As some judges in New Orleans disqualify themselves from handling lawsuits over the Deepwater Horizon rig deaths and oil spill, a Houston judge Friday made it clear he's willing and able.

U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, whom BP lawyers requested by name to oversee pre-trial matters in all the federal lawsuits, met with lawyers on the first case filed in Houston federal court and talked about joining it with other lawsuits.

Hughes told the lawyers that he's handled complex matters before and that he has no conflict like the handful of judges in New Orleans and elsewhere who've recused themselves because of financial holdings or family ties to employees of the defendant companies or lawyers for those companies.

Hughes said he's posted his public financial disclosure on his own court website. Hughes owns some mineral rights and oil company stock but has no interest in the companies involved in the blowout and explosion that killed 11 and is wreaking economic and environmental havoc in the Gulf.

Do NOT miss the reader comments there. More on Hughes, first from the 1992 Houston Press' "Best of" reader poll/publication recommendations:

Republican Lynn Hughes hardly blinked when he advanced from his state district court (a civil one, no less) to the federal bench some 12 years ago. That characteristic aplomb has yet to be erased by some of the most demanding cases at the federal courthouse. He's coupled a healthy disdain for the traditional veil of legalese with a quiet but firm demeanor that has established him as one of the most independent jurists anywhere. Hughes demanded answers in a shady immunity deal for the notorious Graham brothers. And he didn't shy away from forcing the government to admit to submitting a false affidavit against an ex-CIA agent and lying to a grand jury in a bank fraud case. By now, his straightforward search for the truth is legendary among lawyers.

And Tom Kirkendall, from 2006:

First, he hammered the FDIC with a record sanctions award in the long-running case against Maxxam chairman Charles Hurwitz.

Then, he challenged the Enron Task Force's bludgeoning of a plea bargain from a mid-level former Enron executive.

Now, U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes accused federal prosecutors of "reckless and conscious indifference" for bringing a fraud charge against Oklahoma lawyer John Claro and said he would award attorney's fees to Claro under the Hyde Act that provides sanctions for bad-faith prosecutions.

Lastly, Judgepedia. Scroll to the bottom and click on "The Robing Room" for some entertaining comments from those who've tried cases before Judge Hughes.

My personal opinion is that BP plaintiffs could do a lot worse than Hughes, whose no-bullshit reputation likely translates into rejecting a lot of claims he deems 'frivolous' associated with litigation requesting being 'made whole'.  Which is probably why BP likes him so much.

SCOTX issues emergency stay in bloggers' anonymity suit

On June 4, 2010, the Texas Supreme Court issued a highly unusual emergency stay in a case in which Beaumont trial judge Donald Floyd had ordered internet search giant Google to reveal the identities of two anonymous bloggers whose websites criticize notorious east Texas public figure Philip R. Klein. The high court’s order trumps the April 29, 2010, ruling by Beaumont’s Ninth Court of Appeals and prevents Judge Floyd’s order from being enforced.

“We are pleased that the Supreme Court recognizes the important First Amendment right to criticize public figures anonymously,” said Houston constitutional attorney Jeffrey L. Dorrell, who represents the bloggers. Klein argued that websites operationkleinwatch.com and samtheeagle.com content were “pure defamation” and not entitled to constitutional protection.

“Satirical parody is sometimes harsh, but if Jay Leno or David Letterman were sued every time they cracked a joke about Barack Obama or Paris Hilton, television would be a pretty barren source of amusement,” said Dorrell. Today’s ruling was the latest in a lawsuit in which Klein alleges that he has been defamed for, among other things, a parody of Dog Fancy magazine in which he was depicted under the caption, “Fat Men Who Love Their Dogs Too Much.”

The backstory ...

A political blogger in Southeast Texas has alleged that two other local bloggers have defamed and harassed him through their Web sites.

Philip R. Klein writes the Southeast Texas Political Review, a site that includes news and commentary about area elected officials and community leaders. "The story behind the story in East Texas politics," reads a banner describing the Web site on its home page.

As PRK Enterprises and Klein Investments, Klein sued the Operation Kleinwatch and Sam the Eagle blogs, as well as Google and its subsidiary blogger.com on Aug. 26 in Jefferson County District Court.

In the suit, PRK and Klein Investments are asking Google and blogger.com to identify all people responsible for running www.operationkleinwatch.blogspot.com and www.samtheeagleusa.blogspot.com.

They are also asking for the identities of all people who provided money or literary substance to the Web sites, who posted comments on the Web sites and those who are in any way affiliated with the Web sites.

[...]

The Web address www.samtheeagleusa.blogspot.com, first leads to a page containing a beach scene, soothing music and the words "Welcome to Sam the Eagle Center for peaceful meditation." To access the actual site, a user must click on "learn more about meditation" or instead go directly to http://www.notthisonetoojacques.blogspot.com/.

Then a home page pops up that appears similar to the Southeast Texas Political Review's home page, but with various satiric remarks scattered throughout.

At the moment it's not a beach scene but a picture of puppies, and you have to click on the link that isn't for puppies. Nor kitties.

So anyway, if any my fellow bloghermanos are ever in need of a lawyer, I can recommend one. And if you think I'm a nasty bastard ...

The minority of the opulent will always protect itself against the majority

Bush confesses to torture

Same as with Rove -- and Cheney and John Yoo and the rest of these criminals: can we arrest and prosecute him now?

"Yeah, we water-boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," Bush said of the terrorist who master-minded the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. He said that event shaped his presidency and convinced him the nation was in a war against terror.

"I'd do it again to save lives."

George W. Bush is nothing but a chickenshit silver-spoon sociopath, of course, but it's the current administration that has chosen to make itself complicit in the war crimes -- by not stopping the same "enhanced interrogation techniques" and refusing to prosecute the previous administration's thugs -- that is now the inconvenient truth.

How long before the free market plugs the Gulf oil gusher?

Bob Cesca -- author of One Nation Under Fear -- with the coffin nails and the hammer.

As I watch these robots slice the riser from the blowout preventer and read the news about lakes of oil moving towards the coasts of Florida, I'm wondering who to blame for this. The list is long, but, in part, I blame anyone who bought into the lines: "government is the problem" and "the era of big government is over." It's been systematic deregulation and the elevation of free market libertarian laissez-faire capitalism that have wrought this damage and allowed potentially destructive corporations to write their own rules and do as they please.

Like Bob, I'm not against capitalism. I AM against unbridled, greedy, shameless corporate executives who whine about wanting their lives back as thousands of lives along the Gulf coast are destroyed financially (not to mention the thousands of aquatic lives actually lost, drowned in goo).

After all, the nature of any corporation is to mitigate losses and increase revenues. Keep the shareholders as happy as possible, spend the least amount of money necessary, hire the best lawyers to avoid paying punitive fines and get back to drilling and selling oil for profit. This is what corporations do.

So it comes as no surprise that the only achievements since the rig explosion have involved releasing a syllabus of weasely remarks designed to ameliorate any damage to the BP brand, and literally harvesting oil from the riser.

At the peak of the riser insertion tube's efficacy, BP was successfully harvesting around 200,000 gallons of oil per day with a total capacity to process around 15,000 barrels per day. That's a lot of milkshake drinking in the middle of an unprecedented oil spill. And so BP will probably do what they always do. Refine and sell those barrels for a profit. And once the relief wells are completed, they'll do the same.

Mitigate. Ameliorate. Mediate. And then back to business.

Regardless of Justice Department investigations or lawsuits or cleanup costs, BP will emerge from this disaster and continue to profit from the drilling and selling of petroleum, including the oil from Macondo prospect.

Exxon, as precedent, is now Exxon-Mobil and is doing just fine. It endlessly appealed the fines imposed as the result of Valdez oil spill and whittled the down the cost of the disaster to corporate pocket change, and whatever money they paid out was covered by insurance policies.

Read that again. Exxon almost entirely escaped financial damages from the Valdez. In fact, it spent most of the last 21 years appealing its financial liability related to the Prince William Sound disaster. Why? Mitigating losses, and increasing revenues. There's no reason or evidence to believe that BP will be any different, lest anyone think they're in this to take full responsibility and do whatever it takes to repair the Gulf waters and its coastline.

Don't forget to lie your ass off while you're doing all that mitigating, either.

Before a drop of oil was spilled, they deliberately refused to invest in crucial failsafe mechanisms to prevent this sort of tragedy in the first place.

Following the rig explosion, they detained workers who witnessed the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

They attempted to distribute ridiculously small settlement offers.

They consistently low-balled the estimated volume of oil leaking from the riser and blowout preventer, arguably to avoid harsher liability.

They brazenly refused to stop using Corexit despite evidence that it was more toxic than other chemical dispersants.

BP's CEO, Tony Hayward, tried to tell us that the environmental damage will be "very, very modest."
 
They ordered federal Coast Guard officers to shoo the press away from tar-balled beaches.

They're preventing other reporters from photographing dead animals.

This week, they not only denied the existence of massive underwater plumes of dispersed oil, but, on top of it all, they've hired Dick Cheney's former press secretary to run their PR efforts. Any minute now, I'm half expecting to hear that the oil spill is in its "last throes."

Yet what you will read today, especially in the newspaper of record in the nation's oil capital from the Chronically conservative commenters is how horrible that socialist Obama is for halting offshore drilling, how terrible this news is for jobs in the Southeast Texas oilpatch, and yaddayaddayadda.

Forty years of corporate deregulation by conservative Republican Ayn Rand fetishists (and their Democratic enablers) have successfully poisoned the Gulf of Mexico. Ironically, the most liberal pro-regulation president in this same span of time -- the president who has announced on several occasions a significant break from Reagan's "government is the problem" mantra -- appears to be the only politician being blamed for this so far. One of many reasons why I fear it'll be another 40 years before we roll back this free market monster.

And, as I watch this video, the solution occurs to me: they should just plug the oil leak with every single existing copy of Atlas Shrugged.

Nationalize BP's American operations -- in the form of Robert Reich's suggestion regarding temporary receivership, arrest and charge Tony Hayward, and send a little message to all the other petroleum corporate thugs that "bidness as use-you-all" is. over.