BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

by Mary Williams Walsh For the first couple of days after his flight ditched into the Hudson River, Paul Jorgenson was just glad to be alive. But then he started to need his laptop, his wallet, his car keys -- all the essentials he had stowed under his seat and left behind in the sinking plane. A pleasant woman at US Airways told him not to worry; he would be made whole for his losses. But then the matter shifted to US Airways' insurer, the American International Group, operating under government stewardship since its bailout last fall. "Everything went downhill," said Mr. Jorgenson, a software executive in Charlotte, N.C., whose laptop and keys have not been recovered. When a homeowner has a burglary or a driver has a crash, all it normally takes is a call to the insurance company and a description of the loss to activate the policy. But aviation liability insurance is different. It is activated by a finding of negligence on the part of an airline. If there is no neglig...

Usually I fall on the opposite side of things from Michelle Malkin - but this piece of hers was so on target and truthfully funny I am reposting some excerpts here: The Kabuki Theater of AIG Outrage by Michelle Malkin All the world’s a stage, wrote Shakespeare, and in the world of Washington, the curtains have opened on the most elaborate farce of the year. Welcome, taxpayers, to the Kabuki Theater of AIG Outrage – where D.C.’s histrionic enablers of taxpayer-funded corporate bailouts compete for Best Performance of Hypocritical Indignation. Over the weekend, cloaked in their finest populist costumes, the Beltway’s hair-sprayed and powdered politicians and White House aides took to the airwaves to inveigh against $165 million in employee retention payments paid out by the government-backed insurance giant. Those bennies were reportedly part of a larger $450 million round of bonuses. After subpoenaing AIG, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo informed Congress that 73 employees in the...