Maryland Injury and Disability Law : Washington DC Metro Injury & Disability Lawyer & Attorney : Greenberg & Bederman : Accidents, Falls, Medical Malpractice : Maryland, DC, Virginia

There is quite often a big discrepancy between perception and reality. A recent CNN poll asked respondents how much of a percentage of the federal budget certain federal programs received. For instance, people were asked to guess if Medicare got less than 1%, or between 1% and 5%, and so on and so on.

What was quite shocking to us was the amount of money that respondents thought went to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. These are the folks who bring you NPR and PBS. Of all the respondents who took the poll, most of them thought that the CPB got between 1% and 5% of the federal budget.

If the Corporation for Public Broadcasting got 1% of the federal budget, it’s safe to say that Oscar the Grouch wouldn’t have to live in a trashcan anymore. He could live anywhere he wanted to in the world. Bert and Ernie could certainly have not only their own apartments, but probably their own mansions. And NPR and PBS could certainly stop giving those pledge drives that happen at least once a month.

In reality, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting gets about .0014% of the federal budget, which is around $506 million. While that isn’t small potatoes, it isn’t anywhere near 1% of the yearly federal budget.

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How would you feel if you were about to get on a plane, and you saw the pilot with enormous dark circles under his eyes? What if he was stifling a yawn? What if he had a vacant and dull expression? What if the co-pilot looked the same way? Would you want to get on the plane?

How would you feel if you were about to get on the bus from D.C. to New York, and the driver was nodding off in his seat? Would you want to go on that four hour ride?

There are quite strict rules in place to prevent pilots and bus drivers from going long periods of time without sleep. The lives of many people are in the hands of the pilot or the driver. When you are flying at 40,000 feet or moving along the highway at 60 mph in a multi-ton vehicle, and when you are carrying dozens of passengers, the last thing you need to be is drowsy.

So if there are strict rules in place for pilots and bus drivers, why are there no rules in place for doctors? Doctors are expected to diagnose what is wrong with us, they are supposed to know how to heal our physical ailments and they are expected to write prescriptions. A mistake during any one of those processes can be dangerous to the patient. If a doctor makes a wrong diagnosis it can result in serious damage to the patient, or even death in worst case scenarios. A doctor prescribing the wrong medication can cause severe harm as well. If the medicine is ineffective, or if it reacts badly with other medication or the patient’s body chemistry, it could result in more harm.

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Presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently used the phrase “self-deportation” as a solution for dealing with illegal immigration here in the United States. This became fodder for a lot of comedians and late-night talk show hosts. Everyone seemed to believe that Governor Romney was suggesting that all the illegal immigrants should simply pack up and leave of their own accord, which we all know is unlikely to happen.

What many people didn’t realize was that Governor Romney was referring to an actual process that is taking place in quite a few states. The idea behind “self-deportation” is that if you make it incredibly difficult to simply be an illegal alien, then illegal aliens will leave. If you need to show proof of either citizenship or legal immigration status for every transaction, be it wiring money, cashing a check, filling up gas, going to school, buying groceries, or any of the mundane yet crucial acts that everyone needs to do to survive, and you can’t provide that proof of citizenship, then you will leave.

There is a weekly radio show called “This American Life” that is carried on most NPR stations, and last week they ran an interesting piece onillegal immigration. They looked at a new set of laws that were in place in Alabama and how the rules not only affected illegal immigrants, but legal ones as well. We heard a lot about immigrants who were perfectly legal, yet faced hostility and ostracism in communities that were welcoming before these anti-immigration initiatives took place.

It made for dramatic and thought provoking listening. The one part of this story that really made us take notice was the fact that Alabama did not even have a very big illegal immigration problem in the first place. There was no pressing need for immigration restrictions, because there simply weren’t that many illegal immigrants in Alabama.

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Has technology made our lives better? The answer to that question is, as it is with so many others, “It Depends.”

There are pluses and minuses to many of the technological advances that have taken place over the past twenty years of so. Texting is an incredibly quick way of communicating, but it turns out that many of us have very little of importance to say to one another. There is also the strange phenomenon of people ignoring a crowded room to send texts, not to mention the unfortunate side effect of texting while driving, which often leads to fatal car accidents.

The availability of information is amazing as well. If you want to find out the population of the Netherlands, or the lyrics to your favorite song, or the capital of New Zealand, or any fact that you need at all, you can simply go to Google and have the information that you need in seconds. That’s the plus. The minus is that sometimes the information isn’t always accurate.

Try going to Google and typing in “Barack Obama” and “birth certificate.” This will lead you down a rabbit hole that seemingly has no end. Despite the fact that everyone knows that the President was born in Hawaii, despite the fact that he has made his birth certificate available for scrutiny, it is easy to get the wrong information out there on the internet.

While the speed in which you can access information is impressive, the accuracy levels are less so. Information is only worth something if it is accurate, and since there is nobody checking everything that is put on the internet, you have to be selective about where you get your information.

Technology isn’t perfect, and usually what makes it imperfect are the human beings that make and use it. For instance, if someone makes a calculator that causes every bit of addition or subtraction to come up with a rigged answer, that isn’t the calculators fault. It’s just doing what it was designed to do.

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We all remember June 22, 2009 here in Washington, D.C. That was the day that our subway system’s antiquated sensor system finally gave out completely, causing one train to collide into the back of another on the Red Line. Eight people died and dozens were injured, many of them severely.

This wasn’t a freak occurrence. The National Traffic Safety Board had been delivering scathing reports on the safety of the Metro transit system for years, but since the NTSB can only offer “recommendations” that don’t carry the weight of the law, Metro simply kicked the can down the road and let the system continue to deteriorate.

As you can imagine, there were quite a lot of lawsuits filed. A freak occurrence is one thing, but this was a case of negligence that had been quite literally documented for years. There was no way of getting around the fact that WMATA let this happen.

We represent some of the victims of this tragedy, and we are honored that they placed their trust in us. It’s no secret that many of the settlements have already been reached, but there are still a few cases that are pressing on and moving to trial.

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Have you ever been on the receiving end of one of those chain e-mails? We aren’t talking about spam, but e-mails that have been forwarded to you by people that you know. Many of them contain jokes, but more often than not they contain political information. Usually the subject heading says something like “You won’t believe this,” or “The REAL costs of (whatever.)”

There was an article in the Washington Postabout chain e-mails which held that most of them consist of pie-in-the-sky facts and figures and have no real basis in reality. The article also states that the majority of them don’t just come from a random delusional paranoid, but are actually created by political operatives who support a cause or candidate. They are constructed with deliberate misinformation and are made to give you the idea that you are receiving “privileged” information, which is the sort of information that “they” (whoever “they” may be) don’t want you to know.

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The 800 block of West Diamond Avenue in Gaithersburg, Maryland isn’t a “block” in the traditional sense. It is an enormous shopping complex containing multiple businesses. This shopping center is bordered by I-270 to the east and Quince Orchard Road to the west. Running through the middle of all of this is a street called Bureau Drive. In other words, this section of Gaithersburg is surrounded by highways and busy, multiple lane roads. It isn’t a very hospitable environment for pedestrians. There aren’t many bus stops around. There is a MARC station nearby, but that doesn’t make for flexible transportation options. If you want to get to this place, your best bet is to drive.

In the southern corner of the lot is a business called Dogfish Head Alehouse. As you can guess by the name, this is an establishment that serves beer, wine and liquor in addition to food. So the question that we have is this: How much sense does it make to put a business that both serves alcohol and provides a place to drink it in the middle of a parking lot stuck between major roads?

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