Ohio attorney helping clients w/ contracts, suits & ADR, estates, & more. Also a dad, tech enthusiast, & former Sycamore Township, OH Trustee (2020-2023).
Cincinnati, Ohio
Joined July 2008
- Tweets3.9K
- Following1.1K
- Followers389
- Likes6.4K
Pinned Tweet
TLDR: Feds Rain Down Jail Time on Drought-Faking Farmers.
I represent federally reinsured crop insurance companies in claim disputes (among other things). Crop insurance is federally regulated and is heavily subsidized by taxpayers. Most claims are paid without controversy, and some initially denied ones result in payment or other resolution via arbitration or other dispute resolution processes required by the government-issued policy terms. Many claim disputes concern disagreements over whether the loss is due to naturally occurring covered perils (example: drought), or whether the shortfall in crop production or damage was instead from causes which were uninsured or even self-inflicted (examples: improper agricultural practices; crop abandonment; failure to control weeds).
Our law firm's insurer clients try to pay every claim they can, but they must follow federal crop insurance program rules because program integrity and taxpayer dollars are at stake, and ultimately those rules require a farmer to prove that his loss is valid before it can be paid. The law as to other types of insurance coverage is usually the opposite, requiring the insurer to pay the claim unless it can prove it shouldn't. But with crop insurance, federal law puts that burden on the farmer, not the crop insurer, and any state law which says otherwise is preempted.
Sometimes our clients deny claims because things just don't add up and the claimed "loss" might be from fraud, waste, and abuse of the system. In those cases, the insurer must report the situation to the feds so that USDA and federal law enforcement can investigate. Here's a great example of two farmers who were abusing the crop insurance system by tampering with rain gauges. They effectively tried to fake drought conditions and got caught. Now both are going to jail. See the link for details as to this interesting situation.
This wasn't a claim our firm was involved in, but we've certainly handled others with really odd or suspicious circumstances where we've unearthed apparent or actual farmer fraud in substantial, sometimes multi-million-dollar claims, leading to government action to preserve crop insurance program integrity and taxpayer dollars. Our firm's efforts have saved our clients from having to pay some pretty significant fraudulent claims and the taxpayers from having to subsidize them. That's something I am quite proud of. #cropinsurance #insurance #arbitration #FCIC #RMA #USDA
--
Two Southeastern Colorado Farmers Sentenced to Federal Prison and Will Pay Over $6.5 Million for Defrauding Federal Crop Insurance Programs justice.gov/usao-co/pr/two-s…
Tom James retweeted
Click through and read the whole thing by @instapundit: “we’re talking about this because a group of 1500 senior government, military, and NGO officials have been talking about overthrowing the government among themselves.” What to do about it👇
Tom James retweeted
I know a lot of people I respect and admire disagree with what I wrote in the below article, but it's OK for patriots to disagree on some things while agreeing on the most important things.
I have not gone soft here--my sole concern is to win the war that Islamic Jihad long ago declared on the United States of America.
My position is based SOLELY on that concern, and nothing else. I could not care less about the feelings of the "Oh we're better than that" crowd. We are in a fight for the existence of our nation, our Constitution and Western Civilization. The gloves are off. My only concern is winning.
The article is a quick read: 600 words. Please feel free to disagree in the comments, you won't hurt my feelings.
Tom James retweeted
Long thread, very much worth your time.
I have many thoughts on the Nikole Hannah-Jones story, especially having attended the kind of schools she sent her daughter to, but if we're looking for takeaways, here's a simple one. When an expert in education so thoroughly demonstrates a jarring and near complete lack of expertise in the act of getting an education for her own daughter, we should stop taking advice from her on curriculum, instruction, and all other fads disguised as wisdom she offers. That seems like the least we could do. Her daughter's personal struggle, which is indeed sympathetic, wasn't much of a teachable moment for her, as she doesn't seem to have updated any of her priors (and actually fudges funding facts, so as not to disrupt the narrative of under-resourced schools). But it should be a teachable moment for us, about the outsized influence of a scholar who claims to know better than anyone what her daughter would be up against in the school to which she chose to send her, but was inexplicably surprised and left her daughter completely unprepared for it.
Tom James retweeted
A Hero That Trusted His Intuition.
The problem wasn’t that Morgan Stanley didn’t believe him.
Rick Rescorla had already been right once. After the 1993 basement bombing of the World Trade Center, the firm’s security chief walked the towers, studied the site, and reached a conclusion most people preferred not to hear: the World Trade Center was still a target. Next time, he said, it would not be a truck. It would be an airplane.
An airplane. In a 1993 report.
Executives listened. Then they looked at the lease.
Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant in the complex—twenty-two floors of the South Tower, thousands of brokers, and a trading infrastructure that could not be packed into boxes and wheeled across the Hudson.
They literally made it a trading center.
The contract with the Port Authority ran until 2006. Walking away from premium Manhattan space of that scale would have meant penalties measured in the hundreds of millions, plus the operational chaos of relocating an entire downtown machine. So the company stayed.
Rescorla adjusted. If they could not leave the building, they would learn to escape it.
He built a protocol and treated it like doctrine. Unannounced drills. No exemptions. Brokers who billed by the minute were pulled off their desks and sent into the stairwells two by two, starting from the top floors, leaving a lane for firefighters coming the other way.
People complained. He did not care. Practice, he believed, was the only thing that would beat panic.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. From the 44th floor of the South Tower, Rescorla could see the fire. Then the Port Authority came over the speakers: the South Tower was secure. Stay at your desks.
Rescorla grabbed a bullhorn and ignored them.
He started the drill his people already knew by heart. Floor by floor, two by two, down the stairs. He sang as he moved—Cornish songs from childhood, then “God Bless America”—keeping the line moving, refusing to let the stairwell become a stampede. Seventeen minutes later, the second plane struck the South Tower.
By then, most of Morgan Stanley was already on the way out.
Of the 2,687 employees in the building that morning, all but 13 survived.
It was stunning.
Rescorla could have been outside with them. He went back up instead. Colleagues told him to leave. He said he would, as soon as he was sure no one was left behind.
He was last seen around the 10th floor, heading higher.
The South Tower fell at 9:59 a.m. They never found him.
He was one of the 13.
He was a hero in every sense of the word.
Remember Rick Rescorla, he remembered for us.
Tom James retweeted
A good series of posts to read and ponder.
If you think *that* post stirred up the vaccine industry shills, wait until you see how they respond to this:
The govt (DOJ)/vaccine industry's chief expert witness that specialized in denying the vaccine autism link *changed his mind* based on advancing scientific knowledge. He said vaccines can cause autism, after all, in exceptional cases, and that he personally treated some. This is like the robber's best friend admitting his friend pulled the job.
If Dr. Zimmerman had come down the other way, the vaccine industry and their propagandists would declare it "settled science."
But since he came down the "wrong way" on this key issue worth so much $$$$, the vaccine cultists have bent themselves into pretzels trying to minimize him, his findings, spin it. See how they reply to this post for entertaining pretzel-ing.
The fact is: if vaccines triggered autism in one child with mitochondrial disorder, it's silly to conclude that's the only child on the planet it could happen to. Quite the opposite. Now that a biological mechanism is identified, it implies more instances. Perhaps many more. (Scientists say today mitochondrial dysfunction is more common than we knew when Dr. Zimmerman labeled it as a factor in vaccine-induced-autism.)
Secondly, many other predispositions can cause autism when triggered by vaccines, but the medical health establishment has made no public investment in identifying them.
For example, vaccine court and the government have acknowledged kids born with tuberous sclerosis also had autism triggered by vaccination. The government has paid awards to some of those families for that reason.
Tom James retweeted
One of the all-time great Rock Hall moments: Dolly’s “Jolene” with Rob Halford (Judas Priest), Pat Benatar, Annie Lennox, Simon Le Bon (Duran Duran), Pink, and Sheryl Crow. Zac Brown Band held it down as the house band.
Rest easy, Dolly 🤘
Tom James retweeted
In 1988 Dolly Parton pulled every 7th and 8th grader in Sevier County into a room and told them to pick a buddy.
She made them sign a contract.. if BOTH graduate, she hands you both $500. One fails, nobody gets paid.
The county dropout rate went from 35% to 6%.
She handed out the checks herself.
In 1989 she offered $500 to every kid in the county who wanted to go to the local college.
When Gatlinburg burned in 2016, she sent 900 families $1,000 a month for six months.
You've probably heard that part.
Here's the part you haven't:
The fund raised more than expected, so she showed up in May and handed every one of those families another $5,000 on top.
Then she quietly put $3 million into the recovery group that handles the years after the news trucks leave.
She built her county an entire hospital.
She played a benefit concert in 2007, Dollywood and the Stampede matched it, and LeConte Medical Center opened in 2010 with a birthing unit and a women's center in it.
In 2022 she started covering 100% of tuition, books, and fees for Dollywood employees.
Full-time, part-time, AND seasonal.
In 1991 she paid for a bald eagle sanctuary because the birds couldn't be released back into the wild, no press release.
And when Hurricane Helene came through here in Western North Carolina, she wrote a personal check for $1 million and her companies matched it.
She didn't owe North Carolina anything, but she helped us anyway.
She started the Imagination Library because her daddy couldn't read or write. Before he passed, he told her it was the most important thing she ever did.
Rest in Peace, Dolly 🇺🇸
Tom James retweeted
This is terrific. As I wrote last year in @CivitasOutlook, “One of the underappreciated aspects of what’s gone wrong [in higher ed], especially with law schools, is accreditation. Analyzing the rules governing legal education may not be as attention-grabbing as showing how critical theory has perverted pedagogy or documenting the inquisitions of DEI offices, but it’s crucial for understanding underlying pathologies and thus for any possibility of reform.” 1/2
🚨 Holy smokes! The Trump Administration just moved to terminate the ABA's status as a law school "accreditor." This will be one of the most meaningful changes to open doors for Americans and steer legal culture toward justice, not radical indoctrination. The American Bar Association (ABA) is a left-wing advocacy group, filing 80% of its amicus briefs for liberal arguments and 0% for conservative. It uses its monopoly on recognizing which law schools are "accredited" (get student loans) to force DEI hiring, recruitment, and inflate the cost of education.
Tom James retweeted
We conservatives need to learn how to wield power. The most effective conservative governor of all time is leaving office soon. Instead of championing his efforts and recognizing that we can pull the levers of government to actually shrink government control and ensure even more conservative outcomes in the future, we as a movement tried to negate him over the dumbest reasons ever. We don’t deserve good leadership if we can’t recognize it, champion it and emulate it. Long live @RonDeSantis and I pray the constituency is able to one day soon see his wisdom, efforts and triumphs as the model for success across the nation.
Hey @united - you need a tag printing kiosk after US Customs at ORD Terminal 5 for those of us who arrive on United and who are departing on a separate United reservation. Our bags couldn’t be checked through from our origin and we just need new tags. We are stuck in the long Agent Assistance line waiting to complete that simple task. Clearing Customs was faster than our wait to get halfway through this line.
This is wonderful. Watch the video too and your eyes will moisten a bit.
🚨WOW!!!
A Nashville TN police officer is being hailed as a hero for talking a man off the edge of a bridge... not with force or with tactics... but with a hug, and four words:
"I love you, bro."
Bodycam caught the ENTIRE thing.
The man stepped back from the edge and broke down in tears, hugging him. ❤️
His name is Lieutenant Mike Hotz of the Metro Nashville Police Department.
On July 23rd, a man stood on the edge of the Victory Memorial Bridge above the Cumberland River, livestreaming, saying he planned to jump.
Lt. Hotz didn't rush him.
He walked up calm and said: "Hey man, my name's Mike. Can I just holler at you?"
No demands.
No lectures.
Just two human beings talking.
"I just want to help you talk through this... this worst day of your life."
Here's what most people don't know:
Mike Hotz is a COMBAT VETERAN.
He says he's lost count of the brothers he served with overseas who battled suicidal thoughts. He wasn't reading from a script. He KNEW that pain.
The man cried. Several times.
Then Hotz made him a promise: "I'm not gonna try nothing crazy. I promise you to the Lord himself. Can I shake your hand?"
The man took his hand.
He stepped away from the edge.
And that handshake became a HUG.
"We're here to love you, bro. We're here to love you. I love you."
And when it was over, when the man was safe with counselors, Hotz quietly stepped away from everyone... and PRAYED. He thanked God for putting him in the right place at the right time.
This same officer built Nashville's ONEbox program, putting overdose reversal kits in 500+ locations across the city. The DEA just honored him for it.
Saving lives isn't what he does. It's who he IS.
His message to all of us: have the uncomfortable conversations. Ask people how they're REALLY doing.
GOD BLESS Lt. Mike Hotz and every officer who runs toward the hurting.
THIS IS THE AMERICA I KNOW!!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Yep. Ditto to what Matt said.
I don't think the GOP fully grasp how badly they are fucking up right now.
I'm talking to people who normally have ZERO interest in politics who are legitimately pissed off.
They are not seeing the major reform they thought would happen and are REALLY MAD about it.
No true accountability.
No true mass deportations.
No meaningful decrease in the deficit.
Lots of very long vacations and no work.
No bills being passed that REDUCE the government involvement in their lives.
I'm very worried the GOP is sleepwalking toward a midterm reckoning they don’t see coming.
People are pissed off that they voted Trump into office and then the GOP continues to slow-walk every reform people want.
Where are all the DOGE cuts that were promised?
Where is the SAVE ACT?
Why haven't we defunded the Taliban yet?
Why are bills passing the House and then disappear in the Senate?
Why are the GOP still funding Left-wing NGOs that target and hate MAGA Republicans?
Why are members of the GOP pushing for mass amnesty instead of mass deportations?
People are waking up and they aren't happy about it.
People believed they were voting for the Trump agenda. and instead, many feel like they’re getting the same old Washington.
If Republicans in Congress don’t start producing tangible results, they’re going to discover that frustration has consequences...
...And by the time they realize how deep-seeded that frustration is, it may already be too late.
Tom James retweeted
Sen. Graham was never stronger than he was on this day. What the Democrats did to Justice Kavanaugh was a total disgrace.
Tom James retweeted
Read @mike_frags @NRO on some amazingly dishonest legal hackery in the anti-Trump cause by a bunch of former federal judges nationalreview.com/bench-mem…
Tom James retweeted
The judicial philosophy of "disparate impact" has done more to promote racism and inequality in America than all of the SPLC's "hate groups" have ever done, combined, by a factor of about 10,000x.
Tom James retweeted
The only way to fully reform the Pentagon is mass firings of bureaucrats.
But if @elonmusk didn’t have the political capital to pull that off, what chance does @PeteHegseth have?
The Democrats and the blob have no power to get anything done. But they have enormous power to throw wrenches into working machinery.
If Hegseth fired half the Pentagon tonight, the warfighter would suffer in the short to medium term.
Supplies, ammunition, food replenishment for the carriers off Iran: all of it would be “accidentally” misplaced.
Remember all those stories about sailors going malnourished on the USS Ford?
Complete fake news.
Or was it?
Those stories weren’t reporting on what is happening now. They were warnings about what WILL happen the moment Hegseth or the CNO push too hard on reform.
That’s what most people don’t understand about the media fakenews. They don’t pull these factual wrong stories out of thin air. The narrative serves a purpose.
The fake news is often a warning of what will happen if MAGA doesn’t back off.
Look at what happened with ICE. Noem did not give a damn about the blob, so what did the blob do? They didn’t just shut down ICE. They kneecapped the entire U.S. Coast Guard.
They put maximum pain on something Trump cherishes: active duty service members.
I think that was the fundamental disagreement between Elon and Trump.
Trump wants to get shit done, but he understood that if he fired half of DC, everything would grind to a halt for a few years.
Look at the NSC. He gutted the place, which was a fantastic move, but the shipbuilding office got crushed in the process. They eventually pulled off the Maritime Action Plan, but it took a year.
Elon was willing to absorb the short term pain to get the long term result. It’s not that he doesn’t care about the warfighter. It’s certainly not ignorance of what the blob can do to inflict pain on warfighters. He was just willing to accept short term casualties to save the nation in the long run.
He was willing to sacrifice pawns, and even his knights, to win the game.
Trump thinks he can rebuild the foundation without losing any of his construction workers in the process. He thinks he can fix the foundation without evicting any of his tenants.
This is not black and white.
Neither is wrong.
And fundamentally, I think Trump is an optimist about the future of our Republic. He believes the nation will survive him.
Elon thinks we need to colonize Mars because there is a non-zero chance the entire Earth is screwed.
He’s an optimist too. Just on an entirely different timeline.
Trump wants to see real progress and real improvements before he dies. Elon is willing to sacrifice during his lifetime if it means the Republic is stronger in 100 years.
Both are patriots.
Trump just has a few more red lines he will not cross than Elon does. The biggest of those red lines is the wellbeing of our warfighters.
The problem is Democrats know it. And they are willing to kick the USCG in the balls to win the midterms.
And Trump is willing to back down, fire Kristi Noem, and sideline the deputy who was pushing USCG reforms, all to keep Coast Guard sailors from getting hurt.
I don’t blame him. It pains me too seeing our coasties suffer because of political nonsense.
Drain the swamp tomorrow and millions of tax refunds, programs for the poor, essential cancer treatments, scheduled lifesaving surgeries at the VA, and worse will grind to a halt for weeks.
Possibly months. Maybe a few years.
Don’t drain DC, and change will take decades to happen, if it happens at all.
Trump was willing to pay that price on essential services overseas. That’s why he let Elon shutter USAID.
But he is reluctant to grind domestic services to a halt, and he is unwilling to let Democrats and the blob hurt any service larger than the USCG.
