I've been up for a couple of hours and didn't get much sleep last night so maybe I'm not thinking clearly.

I don't know the whole story but in my befuddled, cloudy, caffeine starved mind I can see no scenario where this should be possible.

What am I talking about? I knew you'd ask.

The news banner just showed that Philip Morris paid 2 Million dollars to settle a lawsuit where a toddler was severely burned by a cigarette in a car fire. That's all the information I have and maybe it would make sense in bazarro world. Or is THIS bazarro world?

If I ever need a lawyer, I want that one!

Wildman, (flabbergasted, again)

-- Anonymous, October 03, 2003

Answers

Everyday that I read the paper I keep shaking my head at some of the outragious lawsuits that go on. An accident is an accident, why do people want to blame someone else and then get money for it.....oh, that's right, because they can.

Stupid judges should start showing some BALLS and stand up to these lawyers that are really in it for no other reason then to make money.

-- Anonymous, October 03, 2003

Pretty hard to feel sorry for Philip Morris, parasites that they are. Can't figure out why they settled though, unless they were just afraid of the powerfully bad publicity those pix of the burned girl could produce? It does seem wrong to me that the mother wasn't found more negligent. Sheesh, you don't leave a small child alone in a car, period, and she shouldn't have been smoking in that car where her poor daughter was sitting. Looks like the lawyers got way more than their share, eh?

-- Anonymous, October 03, 2003

Phillip Morris is aparently planning on cocentrating their tobacco sales out of country and going to start pushing their food and product lines heavier in this country. I was reading an article on how our domestic cigarette market is being driven to lower price indian markets anyway by all the lawsuit settlements and now that most all of our traditional cigarette manufactures have diversified into foods, toddler products and other "soccer mom supported " areas, they expect a lot of traditional brands and the lawsuits to disappear as the new market areas are effectively seperated from the tobacco markets. Plus they been transitioning for 25 years and those U.S. smokers keep dying out so as soon as the cigarette companies are driven into the ground here and the majority of the addicts are dead, then they can peddle the old brands in the far east and load us down on mac and cheese and microwave dinners under their restructured corporate groups. Cancer does cure smoking.

-- Anonymous, October 11, 2003