Less than a week later, the buzzards…um, lawyers are already picking at the remains. A local lawyer has filed a lawsuit against DialAmerica for failing to adequately warn its employees of the closure. Give us a break! West Virginia’s trial bar has already tried its best to sue many employers out of business here. Now they want to make it state policy to sue the businesses for going out of business?

Just the other day, one of the longest serving tenants in the Charleston Town Center’s history – Bennigan’s Restaurant – was forced to close its doors. Watch out Bennigan’s! Somewhere in Charleston, there’s a personal injury lawyer who is probably drafting the lawsuit against you right now.

It’s no wonder that West Virginia is one of only a handful of states with no listings on the Fortune 500.

West Virginia is also suffering through a “negative natural increase” in population. In other words, there have been more deaths than births in West Virginia over the past seven years. Surely, this figure is caused in some part by the fact that so many younger West Virginians have left the state for greener job markets. Chances are there are more native West Virginians living in Charlotte, NC than there are in many of our state’s smaller cities.

Politicians need to get smart when it comes to our state’s declining population. Snappy slogans and shifting city limits won’t actually solve the problems facing our state. It’s about time for meaningful reforms that would energize our state’s job market and attract younger natives back to their home state.

In January, Starcher was so jacked about vacation pictures of the chief justice, he burned the phone lines on his state-issued cell phone in chats with High Court candidate Menis Ketchum and the incoming honcho of the state’s personal injury bar.

Now, according to the Gazette’s Phil Kabler, Starcher is suddenly camera shy, ducking the annual group photo of the tribunal. A memo Starcher authored, perhaps on the same computer in which he exchanged e-mails with another Supreme Court candidate, explains his “rationale” for the cop out: a rationale that since he was snubbed for the Chief Justice title last year, he was snubbing back.

Even Kabler raised eyebrows over Starcher’s “holding a grudge” and the weirdly-composed third-person point-of-view of the memo. In the end, this may have been Larry’s immature attempt to participate in Justice Robin Davis’ pet project: Year of the Child.

Maybe the chairman has an opinion about West Virginia Consumers for Justice, the personal injury lawyer front group that spent nearly $2 million on behalf of former Justice Warren McGraw without disclosing its contributors. Surely, Kessler’s less than zealous pursuit of the Consumers for Justice’s contributor names has nothing to do with the fact that a trial lawyer associated with the group - Tim Bailey - recently contributed to Kessler’s campaign.

Bailey just so happens to be a law partner of House Judiciary Chairwoman Carrie Webster, who has also pushed for new campaign finance reforms. Webster’s firm stands to possibly make as much as $1 million in legal fees as a result of one of Attorney General Darrell McGraw’s no-bid legal contracts. Could Webster’s actions be motivate by the fact that her law partner wants to prohibit election spending criticical of the Attorney General’s abusive practices?

Campaign finance laws shouldn’t be used to selectively quiet political viewpoints. Perhaps Chairwoman Webster can ask Tim Bailey to explain to the Judiciary Committee just who contributed to the Consumers for Justice.

Meanwhile, State Senator Brooks McCabe pointed out the real possibility that Charleston’s overall population could drop below the 50,000 person mark when the 2010 census is completed. “If we’re saying we’re open for business, and don’t have even one city over 50,000, I would argue we’re being naïve,” McCabe frankly noted.

Until our legal system is competitive with those of other states, especially our neighbors, West Virginia will continue to rank as one of the worst states in the nation for business.

Bailey, according to the Wall Street Journal, was camped out at Sago in a playpen of personal injury lawyers, trolling for clients, shamelessly seeking to profit from the grief of the mining families and tragedy of their local community.

His imitation of the H. John tactic, it seems, has paid off. Bailey has reached a confidential settlement with a manufacturer of mine materials used to seal Sago.

Meanwhile, other Sago plaintiffs are miffed that the lawsuit they hoped would reap at least $10.5 million, before punitive damages, was settled for less than a fifth of that. With West Virginia courts delivering punitive damage verdicts in the quarter-billion dollar range these days, no wonder.