Declarations

Declarations

Tandem response

“It makes no sense for us not to plan all of our responses in tandem.”

— Alabama Gov. Bob Riley as he and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour vowed to cooperate in the event of a storm, just as the two Republicans did during Katrina when Alabama sent its National Guard to Mississippi.

Beer dates

“It’s the stupidest law I ever heard of. You can see I’m over 21.”

— Comer Wilson, 66, who sports a long white beard, and who hasn’t had to show his ID to buy beer in Tennessee in a while. But as of July 1, Wilson and everyone else in the state are required to show identification before buying beer in Tennessee stores. Tennessee became the first state to make universal carding mandatory, however, the law does not apply to beer sales in bars and restaurants, and it does not cover wine and liquor.

Miss. freeze

“A security freeze stops identity thieves from using stolen information about you to set up fraudulent accounts that can ruin your credit record.”

— Gail Hillebrand, director of a Financial Privacy Now campaign for the nonprofit Consumers Union, explaining Mississippi’s new law that allows people to put security freezes on their consumer records to try to combat identity theft. A consumer must file a police report, and then may send a copy of that report to a consumer reporting agency to put a freeze on a file. The agency may charge up to $10 to carry out the request.

S.C. fire probe

“The flashover killed these guys. It wasn’t the roof. What we have to find out is what were the conditions that caused this to flashover.”

— Jim Bowie, of the South Carolina Firefighters Association, as officials continued a probe into the remains of the Sofa Super Store where nine firefighters were killed battling an inferno June 18. There are questions about the fire’s cause and whether the nine should have been in the building. The store had neither smoke alarms nor sprinklers.

Listening

“I think the bottom line is that he simply did not listen to his senior staff.”

— Max Mayfield, predecessor of Bill Proenza, director of the National Hurricane Center, who has been reassigned and replaced by Ed Rappaport after 23 employees – about half his staff – urged his immediate removal. He had been on the job since January.

Suit dismissed

“This case was giving American justice a black eye around the world, and it was all the more upsetting because it was a judge and lawyer who was bringing the suit.”

— Paul Rothstein, a Georgetown University law professor, hailing the rejection by a judge of a lawsuit that sought to take a dry cleaner’s promise of “Satisfaction Guaranteed” to its extreme. The plaintiff, himself an administrative judge, became a symbol of legal abuse by seeking $54 million from a complaint that a neighborhood dry cleaners in Washington, D.C., lost the pants from a suit and tried to give him a pair that were not his. But a judge decided that Pearson was not entitled to a penny, and in fact owes the owners of the dry cleaners $1,000 in clerical court costs.