As IF Times

Source: Jury selection begins in Erin Andrews $75 million lawsuit against Marriott | syracuse.com

Although stupid lawsuits are as common as insults during a Trump family dinner, when it’s worth 75 million dollars and involves an attractive female ‘personality’ it’s still news. The defendants in this peeping Tom case are not only the perp, but also the Marriott hotel chain which supposedly aided and abetted the creep in allowing him to film Erin in the expected privacy of her room.

You won’t find anyone taking the side of the creep who should get whatever punishment he deserves based on existing laws.  Without the benefit of a procedural legal system, the best solution would be for Erin’s brothers or friends to take this guy out in the back alley and sh0w him some manners.  No lawyers, no judges and possibly no repeat crime.

But the Marriot company is also drawn into this as a co-defendant and likely the only party that will have to pony up $75 million in the case of a court loss.  This is preposterous. It creates a wildly asymmetric cost/benefit profile for the hotel.  Imagine that for the price of a 200 or 300 or even a 500 dollar room, the hotel is expected to provide complete and absolute security for the entire duration of the customer’s stay.  It implies that the customer can never be harmed by virtue  of putting down a few hundred bucks per night.  If that were the case, the FBI witness protection program may as well contract out to hotels.

If in fact there is the expectation that absolute privacy and safety must be ensured by the hotel, a few hundred bucks per night isn’t going to pay the cost of such security.  They may have to reassess their business model and add a few digits to all room rates in order to prepare for the lawsuit contingency. You may need mortgage brokers in the lobbies of these places. Only in the west and the U.S. in particular,  are people so delusional that they think their ‘hurts’ have a legal price tag attached to them.  Every visit to a business including hotels,  grocery stores, yoga studio, movie theaters or fast food outlets which  results in real or imagined harm would have the potential to be  lotto ticket winners.

In Erin Andrew’s case, we wonder how they arrived at the $75 million dollar damages number.  If the point was to teach Marriot a lesson, why not claim $200 million and really teach them a lesson?  I suspect that the hotel can argue that sexism is at play here, because if it were Terry Bradshaw being the victim, he’d be lucky to be offered a room upgrade on his next visit.

Source: Eugene Robinson: Trump dispels GOP fantasy – San Jose Mercury News

It’s all fun until someone loses an eye is the old saying.  For the past 6 months or so, The Donald has been celebrated as, well, the celebrity candidate for the GOP.  Riding on a wave of populism and anger of unforeseen breadth, he has consistently appeared at the top of the candidates scrum vying for the nomination.  He’s kind of like the eccentric, brash relative who comes to visit and is a barrel of laughs…until he starts walking around in his underwear, drinks milk directly from the carton, inappropriately fondles the dog and calls your sister mean names.

Oddly his behavior hasn’t noticeably dented his support among his hard core fans; if anything, the support base becomes larger if you believe the polls.  He’s very popular, just ask him. The mainstream media have come to label his rhetoric as right wing and nationalistic but this is mostly inaccurate.  All candidates, left and right have nationalistic views.  His ‘right wing’ views just happen to cater to an audience that have long been marginalized by seven years or more of suppression in favor of left wing views.  Despite Trump’s vague policy details, adolescent tantrums and often contradictory and inflammatory rhetoric, his base still thinks he’s the best man to represent them.  He’s like Kanye West for white people.

This feels eerily familiar to the circumstances that brought the last President to office who likewise was ushered in by the support of a constituency that overlooked obvious shortcomings and bought into his rhetoric.  In effect, this is the pendulum swinging the other way.  Trump’s entire message is simply, “It’ll be better when I’m in charge”.  In fact, we found a website that has his fingerprints all over it, huhcorp. Those that think Trump’s coronation will be a balm to what ails them might want to take a closer  look at what he stands for, though that may be difficult given his admitted ‘evolution’ on many issues.  A pertinent quote from George Orwell’s classic Animal farm:

“No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

As the aphorism goes, be careful what you wish for.