August 31, 2012
A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I took a young Peruvian friend down to the federal courthouse to receive his naturalized American citizenship. I was thinking a lot about him and the 52 other new Americans naturalized in Columbus, Ohio as I watched this year’s Republican National Convention. Ohio First Lady Karen Kasich [...]
August 31, 2012
Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, is calling on Gov. Rick Perry to replace Insurance Commissioner Eleanor Kitzman, charging that in the year since she was appointed the regulator has “shown a clear pattern of disregard for consumer interests in Texas, indifference to the will of the Texas Legislature, and a bias favoring insurance [...]
August 28, 2012
As the Gulf Coast braces for Hurricane Isaac, one hopes the region will avoid not only the massive destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina eight years ago, but also what came next: a raft of uncertainty as the courts became deluged with disputes over whether particular damage was caused by wind, or by water. Ordinarily, such [...]
August 27, 2012
Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corp. can now breath a major sigh of relief, as Tropical Storm Isaac delivered just a glancing blow to South Florida and the Keys before making its way out into the Gulf of Mexico’s warm open waters. Though the state-run insurer said it had received 300 Isaac-related claims through mid-day Aug. [...]
August 27, 2012
Transparency has been a key concept not only throughout this election cycle, but in the upcoming budget fight at the Texas Capitol. Where does public money come from, how are lawmakers spending it and what is the public gain from all those expenses? In order to help answer some of those questions, Texas Comptroller Susan [...]
August 24, 2012
According to its official tourism marketing corporation, the State of Florida welcomed 87.3 million visitors in 2011, whose $67.2 billion of spending generated nearly a quarter of the state’s sales tax revenue. As the nation’s most important locus for travel, an industry that employs an estimated one million people statewide, one might expect that Floridians [...]
August 23, 2012
I see that “grown-up” is still in the dictionary, having been joined this year by “aha moment”, “game-changer” and “f-bomb.” But finding real honest-to-goodness grown-ups in the political world is getting harder every year. President Obama ran a campaign ad during the London Olympics claiming that this election is neither about the two parties’ candidates [...]
August 22, 2012
This week marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew, which made landfall Aug. 24 as a Category 5 storm in Elliott Key and Homestead, Fla. At $15.5 billion in insured losses, Andrew was the costliest storm in U.S. history at the time. Catastrophe modelers with Karen Clark and Co. estimate that a similar storm making [...]
August 20, 2012
Texas Insurance Commissioner Eleanor Kitzman is hearing an earful from the coastal community as she listens to residents’ concerns in the Corpus Christi area. Coastal occupants are complaining about the cost of windstorm insurance policies provided by the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association , better known as TWIA. Mark Gugevich, who spoke at a recent [...]
August 16, 2012
During the national debate in 2010 on the federal health care proposal that became the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, I was watching one of the weekend television news shows. It featured a Newsweek reporter who said “an eight-year-old wouldn’t believe that we are going to cover additional millions of people and save money [...]
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