On the House agenda this week, along with the utterly predictable Keep Your Health Plan Act, is another bill that might be called the Screw the Little Guy Act.

I wrote about this bill last May, and via a blog called The Pop Tort I see that it could be voted on this week. This is H.R.982, called the Furthering Asbestos Claim Transparency (FACT) Act of 2013. Here’s some background from my earlier post —

As asbestos manufacturers faced lawsuits from sick and dying workers, many went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to protect their assets. Some of these manufacturers were required to set up asbestos personal injury trusts, which were responsible for compensating present and future claimants. The FACT Act of 2013 would require these trusts to disclose much personal information about the claimants, a requirement that seems to have little purpose except to dissuade people from filing claims. (According to the General Accounting Office, personal information about individual claimants may be obtained today with the permission of the claimants or in response to a legitimate subpoena, but otherwise the privacy of claimants is respected.)

Or, as the Pop Tort blogger explained, the bill does two things:

1) it requires asbestos trusts to disclose on a public web site private, confidential information about every asbestos claimant and their families, including their names, addresses, where they work, how much they make, some medical information, how much they received in compensation and the last four digits of their social security numbers; and 2) it allows any defendant in any asbestos lawsuit the right to demand any information about any asbestos victim from any asbestos trust at any time for any reason.

The New York Times editorial board said in June,

The Republican bill, known as the Furthering Asbestos Claim Transparency Act (FACT) of 2013, would allow asbestos companies to demand information from the trusts for virtually any reason, forcing the trusts to devote limited resources to responding to fishing expeditions that will slow the process of paying claims.

The bill would also increase the burden on claimants to supply information. But it puts virtually no burdens on asbestos companies, like disclosing the settlements they have reached with plaintiffs or requiring them to reveal where their products were used and when, so that workers know which companies or trusts might be liable for their injuries.

So, yeah, the only purpose of this bill is to intimidate sick people, or their survivors, from filing claims, and if they do file claims to be sure they get as little as possible as late as possible.

I know it’s an article of faith among a lot of these bozos Republican legislators that people file claims who aren’t even sick. But if that were the case, it ought to be fairly easy to stipulate that claimants provide a diagnosis of mesothelioma or other asbestos-related disease from a qualified medical provider. Oh, wait; the law already on the books does that. Never mind.

The Asbestos Cancer Victims’ Rights Campaign has an online petition to stop the FACT Act.

Start all the rumors you want. I’m sure they will be more interesting than what I was actually doing.

OK, so the world hasn’t changed much since Friday. Just some notes —

Second Amendment zealots are a threat to our freedom.

On Saturday, nearly 40 armed men, women, and children waited outside a Dallas, Texas area restaurant to protest a membership meeting for the state chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a gun safety advocacy group formed in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

According to a spokeswoman for Moms Demand Action (MDA), the moms were inside the Blue Mesa Grill when members of Open Carry Texas (OCT) — an open carry advocacy group — “pull[ed] up in the parking lot and start[ed] getting guns out of their trunks.” The group then waited in the parking lot for the four MDA members to come out. The spokeswoman said that the restaurant manager did not want to call 911, for fear of “inciting a riot” and waited for the gun advocates to leave. The group moved to a nearby Hooters after approximately two hours.

MDA later released a statement calling OCT “gun bullies” who “disagree[d] with our goal of changing America’s gun laws and policies to protect our children and families.” The statement added that the members and restaurant customers were “terrified by what appeared to be an armed ambush.” A member of OCT responded by tweeting, “I guess I’m a #gunbullies #Comeandtakeit.”

In most civilized parts of the world, behavior like this would not stand. If these thugs are allowed to get away with this, the day could come when no advocacy group of any sort dare meet anywhere.

See also “Hillary’s Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies With Elizabeth Warren” by Noam Scheiber. I don’t know if Elizabeth Warren would be more electable than Hillary Clinton in 2016, but I agree very much with the larger point — most Democrats, especially younger ones, have moved past the Clintons and long for a rebirth of genuine economic populism and progressivism.

I’m going to be offline until Sunday afternoonish. Do try to behave.

Charles Pierce is sputtering over the 31 percent of self-described liberals who voted for Chris Christie on Tuesday.

There is no reason on god’s earth why a self-identified liberal would vote for Chris Christie. He’s a tool of the ascendant oligarchy, awful on women’s rights, terrible on infrastructure, very high on union-busting, and a short-tempered, thin-skinned bully into the bargain. If you’re a New Jersey Democratic legislator who needs a little somethin’-somethin’, I can see why you would support him. But 31 percent of liberals? Please. Because of that number, and because he also got 32 percent of the overall Democratic vote, the Christie ’16 narrative is now set in stone. He’s the Obamist candidate who can bring folks together. He can end the “divisiveness” in our politics, which will be a way for us to anesthetize ourselves to the reality that one of our two major political parties determined that the nation would not be governed by a black man. We will all move on to glory together because of Chris Christie’s healing hand.

I can’t spy I’m terribly surprised, because Christie somehow has done a bang-up job keeping his social wingnuttiness under the radar. I’ve met people I know to be liberals, living here in the Greater New York City area, who have decided Christie is an OK guy. They genuinely have no idea how right-wing he really is. They often assume he is an Obama supporter.

Had the New Jersey Democratic Party establishment actually run against Christie rather than throw their candidate under the bus, there is no doubt in my mind that election would have been a lot tighter. Christie would still have been the likely winner, but not 60 to 38 percent, or whatever it was. And were it not for Hurricane Sandy, it would have been a real race.

Here’s the point: I think Christie would find a national campaign a lot less forgiving, especially since the national Dem party is not going to be so accommodating. He’ll still be given a lot of passes by news media, but one hopes there would be some opportunities to force him to take public stands on abortion and marriage rights and other social issues.

Christie’s other vulnerabilities are that a big chunk of the GOP base hates him as a RINO. And I’m also not sure how well his New Jersey tough boy shtick will wear West of Pennsylvania.

So, while Chris Christie certainly looks like the most viable candidate the Republicans might rally behind in 2016, he’s not invulnerable. And he’s going to have a fight on his hands for the nomination.

Update: See also Chris Christie: All Coat, No Tail by Dave Weigel. The results of the NJ governor’s race do not tell the whole story.

New Yorkers gave liberalism a resounding yes and elected Bill de Blasio mayor of New York. Or, as I have come to think of the office after many hours of riding the subways and reading the announcements out of boredom, el Alcalde de la Ciudad de Nueva York. It sounds better in Spanish.

New York activist lefties to begin complaining about de Blasio selling them out in 5 … 4… 3… 2…

Chris Christie won another term in New Jersey. According to a local television news story I saw yesterday, the state Democratic Party didn’t bother to crank up its GOTV machine for the Dem candidate, Barbara Buono. Buono has accused the NJ Dem establishment of “making a deal” with Christie. From what I know of the NJ Democrats, that is very plausible.

Terry McAuliffe won in Virginia by a slightly smaller margin than had been predicted. This result is being spun into a public referendum vote against Obamacare.

Pundits and baggers alike are grieving over news stories about people losing their dearly beloved health insurance policies, which they had cherished through the years, and how some people may have to switch doctors even through they’d been paying out of pocket anyway, etc.

And they’re all acting as if this sort of thing just never happened before, but in fact it happened a lot.

Never mind the thousands of people who used to fall victim to “rescission” every year. That was the practice of dumping policy holders when their bills got too big — the following was written in 2009 —

In a nutshell — yesterday three big insurance company executives — WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. — told the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations that their business models depended on being able to cancel the health insurance policies of customers who cost them too much money. An investigation by the Committee had found that over a five-year period, these companies had canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people in order to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims.

And never mind the one-in-seven Americans who were denied coverage because of preexisting conditions. Not being able to get insurance in the first place probably doesn’t count.

And of course if you changed jobs, by choice or not, that nearly always means getting a new insurance provider. I think people kind of accepted that and didn’t complain about it.

No, let’s talk about people who got insurance through their employers before Obamacare. Especially if you worked for a small- to medium-size company with one insurance provider, there was always a possibility that your employer would change to a different provider that offered a better deal. And that new insurer might not have your health care providers in its network. I’ve personally seen this happen a few times, so it cannot have been that unusual.

In the 1990s, when HMOs were the new new thing, I actually was not able to develop a relationship with a regular health care provider. My insurance got jerked around so much that every time I needed a doctor I had to start over with a new one. Fortunately my health care issues were relatively minor.

Others were not so fortunate. I remember about 1995 I was working for a small company with maybe 40 employees, and the employer changed to a new insurance company. One long-time employee, a woman, had a husband in cancer treatment. He was covered by her insurance. You guessed it — his doctors were not in the new network. I remember her breaking down in tears when she realized this. Her husband was forced to switch doctors. I repeat, this was in the mid-1990s. I don’t believe their story was in the Wall Street Journal.

After I moved in New York early in 2000 I found a primary care physician I like very much who is in everybody’s network. So even though I’ve been covered by five different policies these past 14 or so years, I haven’t had to switch doctors. And big corporations tend to offer menus of insurance plans by more than one company, and unless your regular doctor is a complete loser he’s probably in somebody’s plan, somewhere.

But the bottom line is that under the old system, millions of Americans must have been forced to switch doctors at one time or another, and nobody boo-hooed about it. All of a sudden, now it’s the most awful thing that could ever happen to anybody.

Give me a break.

Of course, part of what’s happening now — beside the tootsie in the Wall Street Journal who lied her ass off about her old policy — is that insurance companies are making a last-chance dump of less-than-profitable policy holders. And most of it is bringing policies up to code — see, for example, Obamacare “victim” now says loss of previous health plan may be “a blessing in disguise”

I’m just calling bullshit on all the bobbleheads who are suddenly weepy about people losing their doctors. How come it never bothered you before?

It appears the individual who claimed the ACA is keeping her from her cancer doctors is lying her ass off.

We are getting way too blasé about mass shootings. Yesterday’s shooting at the Los Angeles airport is already dropping out of the headlines. (Oh, yeah, another loser white guy shoots people. Yawn.)

I noticed that the most recent blog posts were mostly from righties. And mostly they were crowing that California’s gun control laws sure worked real well, huh?

But if you want to see what happens when the dregs of humanity get internet access, see the comments to this Reason post. (HT Charles Pierce)