Day: August 11, 2008

Rigsby's new counsel sings Aretha's song in Response filed today

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Read Heidelberg’s respectful Response to State Farm as he makes it easy to find out what it means to me – hopefully, State Farm will give him, the Rigsby sisters, and our overwhelmed courts just a little bit from now on.

State Farm’s proposed restrictions for the Relators and their counsel in connection with contacting former counsel are based on the inaccurate assertion that the Relators can never access the False Claims Documents. However, because the Relators and their counsel should be able to obtain the False Claims Documents, the basis for State Farm’s entire argument vanishes.

The quote above is from the conclusion but it nicely summarizes the Response and accurately reflects these points.

Without providing a basis for its argument, State Farm asserts that this Court’s order in McIntosh v. State Farm Fire & Casualty Co…and Judge Acker’s order in E.A. Renfroe & Company, Inc., v. Cori Rigsby Moran…compel this result. Continue reading “Rigsby's new counsel sings Aretha's song in Response filed today”

Forensics reaches settlement with McIntosh – Motion to dimiss filed

My computer locked right after I pulled up the docket and saw McIntosh attorney Tina Nicholson had entered a Motion to Dismiss with Prejudice – and all those hours I was waiting for it to get over its spell and cough up the document, I wondered dismissed what.

Now, I know: McIntosh finalized settlement with Forensic Engineering:

Plaintiffs have reached an amicable resolution to their dispute in accordance with the Notice of Settlement filed on November 9, 2007 [Doc. 797]. WHEREFORE, PREMISES CONSIDERED, Plaintiffs respectfully request that the Court enter an Order dismissing this cause and all its claims against Defendant, Forensic Analysis & Engineering Corp., with prejudice.

The November 9, 2007 Notice of Pending Settlement provides more background: Continue reading “Forensics reaches settlement with McIntosh – Motion to dimiss filed”

Breaking – Moultrie Pleads Guilty to Illegal Gratituity to Musgrove (Updated)

H/T to Yallpolitiics. Here is the plea and here are the facts. Alan Lange is 100% right, Musgrove is in the crosshairs. Check this out excerpt from the factual basis:

Between May and July, 2003, Robert Moultrie, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Facility Group, began planning a fund raiser for the public official, then Mississippi Governor Ronnie Musgrove, at his residence in Atlanta, Georgia, in order to obtain his good will. Moultrie and Nick Cawood, President and Chief Operating Officer of The Facility Group, invited several FCMI employees to attend the fund raiser and donate $1,000 each. Cawood told the employees that they would be reimbursed for these contributions through bonuses to their salaries. The fund raiser was held on July 23, 2003 and raised approximately $50,000 for Musgrove’s campaign. Subsequently, the company reimbursed their employees. Continue reading “Breaking – Moultrie Pleads Guilty to Illegal Gratituity to Musgrove (Updated)”

Pot boiling over in beef plant case, AJC finally finds the "recipe"

We should have some happy Georgia readers today – all those who have been complaining about the lack of Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s little mention of USA v Moultrie. h/t Y’all for the link to First, pre-heat oven to 425 degrees: A recipe for ‘cooking the books’

That federal trial of a politically connected Smyrna company and its three executives continues to churn out preliminary documents that reveal bits and pieces of the prosecution’s case.

And the company’s fine sense of mathematics.

The AJC story is a blog post by the Political Insider who appears to actually have a fine sense of mathematics himself. Continue reading “Pot boiling over in beef plant case, AJC finally finds the "recipe"”

Can a signed MDI Mediation Agreement prevent a policyholder from later filing under RICO?

Where did I get such a question? Well, after I read Sop’s recent post with a reference to the Order and Opinion in Boyd v State Farm et al issued last week by Judge Senter, the question came to mind. Ordinarily, reading the Opinion would – and should – have answered my question.

However, Judge Senter’s Opinion does not address the Statue of Limitations governing RICO and the Katrina RICO case was filed on June 20,2007 – the same day the Boyd complaint and approximately 200 nearly identical complaints were filed. However, the date on the Mediation Agreement signed by Boyd was July 19, 2006, almost a year earlier.

Judge Senter’s Opinion also does not address the potential confusion possible when the Q&A that MDI issued with the announcement of the Katrina Mediation Program failed to mention the finality of the Agreement.

Mediation is a non-adversarial, non-binding, alternative dispute resolution procedure designed to facilitate the resolution of claims as fairly and quickly as possible. During the mediation Continue reading “Can a signed MDI Mediation Agreement prevent a policyholder from later filing under RICO?”

Not what you see but what you don't…the post-Katrina coast

For someone who can be a real “chatty Cathy,” I sat quietly with my camera in my lap as Sop drove me down Beach Boulevard – the first time I’ve done that on the post-Katrina coast and the road still isn’t completely open, it’s just no longer blocked.

Gulf side of Beach Boulevard August 2008
Gulf side of Beach Boulevard August 2008

Before the storm, there wasn’t a prettier stretch of highway in America. I’m convinced of that. With the Gulf on one side and one beautiful home after another on the other, it was a sight to behold.

The Gulf side is as beautiful as ever; but, not so the other where all that remains of many of those beautiful homes is a drive way and an otherwise vacant, weed-filled lot.

By the time we headed into the Bay-Waveland area, I’d seen more slabs that I could count and was feeling like an empty lot myself, the experience was so draining.

Lot on Beach Boulevard 3 years after Katrina
Lot on Beach Boulevard 3 years after Katrina

What made it so draining and me so sad was how much those vacant lots looked like those I saw right after the storm almost three years ago.

If this slab was the place I once called home, I can only imagine that I would have been overwhelmingly sad; leading me to believe that the empty lots on the Coast leave others empty and sad – depression is the clinical term.

According to cognitive-behavioral psychologists, depression in humans may be similar to learned helplessness in other animals, who remain in unpleasant situations over which they’d initially had no control.

Once we began to eat, meet, and greet, it wasn’t possible to be sad; and I bounced back and took these pictures the next day. However, others on the Coast are having more than the just a brief depressing experience like my encounter with the empty lots. WLOX, Biloxi television, ran a related story the day before I arrived. Continue reading “Not what you see but what you don't…the post-Katrina coast”