Day: October 19, 2009

Coalescing Coastal Insurance Consumers: Gene’s Staff Spreading the Good Word

As we catch up with the news I saw this out of Cape Cod last week in the Barnstable Patriot. (H/T Yallpolitics)

They read us down there in the Deep South. And that could maybe save Barnstable property owners a pocket full of money on home insurance. All it might take is a national coastal coalition of fed-up ratepayers.

Unfortunately, coastal homeowners, despite all their griping and little else, aren’t that easy to coalesce.

We got a note from a Mississippi congressman’s office after our business page carried an interview recently on Paula Aschettino’s 6,000-strong, grass roots Citizens’ for Homeowners’ Insurance Reform, which has been jousting with this state and insurers for several years over the roughly 400 percent increase in the Cape’s coastal insurance premiums and/or blatant abandonment by private insurers.

The office of U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi’s 4th District, which was pummeled into crisis by Katrina, wanted us to get them in touch with Mrs. Aschettino. We did. But we also perused the congressman’s Web site containing considerable information about insurers and their propensity to, in the congressman’s terms, “screw” the premium payers.

“People who played by the rules and expected insurance companies to play by the same rules got screwed,” Taylor, a Democrat and ex-Coast Guard search and rescue boat skipper, has said in the wake of Katrina. But more than talk, he has filed a bill, HR-1264, the Multiple Peril Insurance Act of 2009 that, in summary, would allow coastal homeowners for the first time to buy a comprehensive government policy that covers flood and wind damage, which is not now the case. Continue reading “Coalescing Coastal Insurance Consumers: Gene’s Staff Spreading the Good Word”

The Sun Herald Takes Obama’s “Tinkle-Stop Tour” to Task

Do the ladies and gentlemen of the Sun Herald editorial board read Harry Shearer at the Huff Po or have they been climbing Editilla’s Ladder (thanks to citizen-activists like Cresent City Ray)? Whoever turned them on to Shearer’s spot on criticisms of President Obama’s last visit deserves an A+ as Saturday’s Sun Herald contained a spot on editorial that echos much of what has been said on the Ladder, here on Slabbed and many other local cyber venues regarding Obama’s Tinkle-Stop Tour visit to the Big Easy last week:

Brilliant.

During his historic run for the presidency, Barack Obama’s campaign consistently outmaneuvered the opposition, whether fellow Democrats in his party primary or John McCain in the general election.

He was engaged, decisive, and especially in tune with the mood of the electorate and its sense of national priorities.

Time and time again he invoked the image of Republican failure in handling Katrina’s impact on a vast Gulf Coast population.

Fast-forward nine months into his presidency, and President Barack Obama has made his first post-inauguration visit to New Orleans — a visit that seemed to many more like a drive-through or photo op.

Author/actor Harry Shearer, a strong advocate for New Orleans, said, “he could have saved the jet fuel.” Continue reading “The Sun Herald Takes Obama’s “Tinkle-Stop Tour” to Task”