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Join host, Jamie Bordas, and his often-called-upon guest, Chris Regan, on this week's episode of the Bordas & Bordas Legal Review. In the wake of the gas drilling deaths in Greene County, Pennsylvania, and Belmont County, Ohio, as well as the gas explosion in Marshall County, West Virginia, Jamie and Chris discuss the dangers and difficulties of gas well drilling in the Ohio Valley. In addition to the danger of construction accidents and explosions, science is beginning to explore the toxic exposure issues resulting from the unprecedented shale gas boom. Can the desire to produce and the need for safe practices be reconciled by the companies involved, or will these incidents continue? Learn about all this, and more, on this week's edition of the Bordas & Bordas Legal Review. You can view the Bordas & Bordas Legal Review locally on Comcast Channel 14 or also online, both streaming and in the archive. The current episode is embedded within this post. Click here to view the program on vimeo, or watch the embedded version if your browser supports it. Click this link to see the WLUTV schedule so you can view a live-stream of WLUTV and check this page for a schedule of when the program airs.

Tune in to this week's informative edition of the Bordas & Bordas Legal Review when our host, Jamie Bordas, and his guest, Chris Regan, discuss the Supreme Court of the United States' recent McCutcheon decision that declared unconstitutional the aggregate limits on campaign contributions that have existed as a matter of federal law for decades. Jamie and Chris also analyze the Northwestern football player union drive and the implications it will have for the law, and college sports in general, if it continues to be successful. You can view the Bordas & Bordas Legal Review locally on Comcast Channel 14 or also online, both streaming and in the archive. The current episode is embedded within this post. Click here to view the program on vimeo, or watch the embedded version if your browser supports it. Click this link to see the WLUTV schedule so you can view a live-stream of WLUTV and check this page for a schedule of when the program airs.

A gigantic gas explosion in Adair County, Kentucky occurred this past February 13 th. The explosion was so massive that a crater 60 feet deep was left behind. Two homes were totally destroyed and two people were hospitalized as a result. The explosion has brought attention to a significant safety problem affecting all of America, that is particularly serious in the Ohio Valley and its communities in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. The public is only now learning that the federal regulating agency for gas pipelines only has approximately 100 inspectors to handle 300,000 miles of natural gas pipelines in the United States. The government resources being devoted to the issue are woefully inadequate to the size of the problem, which, as this incident illustrates, can result in homes simply exploding with little or no warning. Organizations like the Nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust advocate stronger oversight of the companies and more specific guidelines about how often our compressed explosive gas lines have to be examined. It aptly compared the situation to a road system which instead of having a speed limit with a definite number on it just has a smiley face that says 'drive safe.' Given the risks of devastating injuries that can occur in these types of explosions, the inadequate safety regulations we currently have are not getting the companies to do the right thing. Accountability through greater enforcement, legal action and jury verdicts will be needed to wake these companies up to the scale of the problem. Nothing less will do if we are going to influence large corporations like Chevron, Shell, Exxon, Chesapeake, and their like, to put the focus on the safety of local residents and workers in the gas drilling and distribution industries.

Read the Report here: http://www.ntsb.gov/doclib/reports/2014/PAR1401.pdf

Have you noticed that this week was full of important news? Do you want to hear some clear and interesting discussion of the headlines? Make sure you catch this week's episode of the Bordas & Bordas Legal Review to see Jamie Bordas and Chris Regan discuss Michael Sam's NFL draft, recent judicial ruling about gay marriage, the US Supreme Court's decisions on President Obama's ability to make recess appointments, political turmoil in the Ukraine and the West Virginia False Claims Bill! This episode is jam-packed with important information for you, and shouldn't be missed! Click here to view the program on vimeo, or watch the embedded version if your browser supports it. Click this link to see the WLUTV schedule so you can view a live-stream of WLUTV and check this page for a schedule of when the program airs.

Tune in to the Bordas & Bordas Legal Review on West Liberty Television to receive top-flight analysis of the intersection between the legal world, sports and the culture at large. This week, Jamie Bordas and Chris Regan discuss the attempt by Northwestern College football players to form a union and collectively bargain for fair treatment from the university and the NCAA. In the show's second segment, Jamie and Chris discuss Michael Sam, the Missouri linebacker, who is seeking to be the first openly-gay player drafted into the National Football League. You will not want to miss this exciting and informative half hour of television that explores the legal ramifications of the situations at Northwestern and Missouri. Click here to view the program on vimeo, or watch the embedded version if your browser supports it. Click this link to see the WLUTV schedule so you can view a live-stream of WLUTV and check this page for a schedule of when the program airs.

This week's edition of the Bordas & Bordas Legal Review tackles the two topics dominating headlines: The Charleston Chemical Spill and Richard Sherman's post-game interview. What are the potential legal ramifications of each? Who is being or may be sued? Who is talking about Richard Sherman and is there a racial dimension to the controversy? Learn all these answers and more as Chris Regan and Jamie Bordas discuss the pressing issues of the day on WLTV's Bordas & Bordas Legal Review. Click here to view the program on vimeo, or watch the embedded version if your browser supports it. Be sure to check out the WLUTV schedule to watch a live-stream of WLUTV and for a schedule of when the program airs.

Don't miss the first episode of the Bordas & Bordas Legal Review for 2014 that deals with the political mess created for Chris Christie when it was recently learned that emails and text messages from his staff had were obtained by the New Jersey press. The emails and texts tended to show that the Governor's administration had deliberately tied up the George Washington Bridge creating traffic back-ups that were hours long, in both New York and New Jersey. Chris Regan and Jamie Bordas will dissect the scandal and the potential effect on Christie's 2016 presidential hopes. In addition, the Legal Review will cover the breaking news in West Virginia, Friday, January 10th, of a major incident of water contamination in the Kanawha region of West Virginia. As many as nine or ten West Virginia counties are without usable water for drinking, cooking, bathing, brushing teeth, etc. as a result of a company called Freedom Industries that spilled a chemical called 4-methylcyclohexane methanol into the Elk River. Regan and Bordas will discuss the legal implications of the spill, as well as the history of industrial accidents and the attitudes toward incidents like this in West Virginia and around the country. Click here to view the program on vimeo, or watch the embedded version if your browser supports it. View the WLUTV schedule here to watch a live-stream of WLUTV and check this page for a schedule of when the program airs.

All this week you can see Jamie Bordas and Chris Regan discussing the life and legacy of John F. Kennedy on the 50th anniversary of his assassination in Dallas, Texas. The Bordas & Bordas Legal Review continues to bring you the fascinating issues of interest to our local area, our State and the Nation as a whole and this episode is no different. Kennedy's influence on the space race, the civil rights era, the Vietnam War and his enduring place in the hearts and minds of Americans are all covered to help our viewers reflect on this solemn but also fascinating occasion. You can view the Bordas & Bordas Legal Review locally on Comcast Channel 14 or also online, both streaming and in the archive. The current episode is embedded within this post. Pick up this episode through the WLUTV archives, and be sure to check the WLUTV schedule for other B&BLR show times and programming.

In the midst of the recent government shutdown, a story emerged that a group of people receiving welfare through the "EBT" program unexpectedly found that their EBT debit cards suddenly had no limit. The computer glitch allowed these individuals, who are dependent on food stamps to live, to go to Wal-Mart and fill up carts full of groceries to take home. A commentator, titling his article " The Louisiana Heist " described the scene this way: There was no food left on any of the shelves, and no meat left. The grocery part of Walmart was totally decimated." One man even managed to spend $700. This was certainly a windfall for these individuals, as food stamps ordinarily provide just a modest allowance of $100.00-200.00 dollars per month per person, and are available only to Americans with incomes below $20,000.00 for a family of four. The author of one editorial angrily demanded the arrest and prosecution of these scoundrels with their full grocery carts, saying: "This was theft, pure and simple, and its perpetrators should be treated as any other thief would be." Many news outlets presented this situation as an incident worthy of national attention and anger. The New York Daily News, more than a thousand miles away, called it " chaos." Another outlet called it an " outrage." The editorialist quoted above called it a "serious moral issue." And our society agrees. Welfare fraud is prosecuted aggressively in the United States, often resulting in prison sentences and fines in the tens of thousands of dollars for perpetrators. To take one example, an impoverished woman who qualified for the benefits because of her low income, but failed to disclose prior drug charges, earned a three-year prison sentence for receiving food stamps unlawfully. An unfortunate woman with two disabled children who had an on-and-off father received a felony conviction and prison time for claiming extra money. Another man received a one year sentence based on his failure to disclose that his wife lived with him. Even if the perpetrators of the Wal-Mart EBT shopping spree are able to avoid lengthy prison sentences, they doubtless face fines for the value of what they received, a criminal record and the loss of benefits and concomitant difficulty surviving. Those who called for their prosecution are sure to get their wish, in other words. Of course, there are other "outrages" in the United States these days. For example, a few years ago, through gross mismanagement and stunning avarice, the corporate leadership of a dozen or so large banks nearly destroyed the United States economy. Lehman Brothers, although certainly not the only offender, was among the worst. Some of the top bankers were drawing salaries in the tens of millions of dollars while they lead their banks into bankruptcies and bailouts. The bankruptcies in turn led other banks to the verge of collapse or collapse itself and taxpayers were compelled to bail these institutions out with billions and even trillions of dollars. As a PBS investigation soberly put it: "According to a team at Bloomberg News, at one point last year the U.S. had lent, spent or guaranteed as much as $12.8 trillion to rescue the economy." Thinking back to the poor fellow with the $700.00, grocery-laden carts at Wal-Mart, these bankers cost us enough to pull that "Louisiana Heist" eighteen billion times. In other words, these bankers took enough cash off the U.S. taxpayer to buy a truckload of groceries for every human being on earth and enough more to do it over and over again. Mortgage lenders, likewise earning hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, entered into fraudulent loans by violating well-established laws and responsible practices in order to line their pockets with money that working people had earned and entrusted with them when they realized their loan products were "toxic assets." They sold them off to unsuspecting pension groups and various government agencies, infesting the modest retirement accounts of our nation's working people and elderly with worthless securities. One of the worst malefactors was Goldman Sachs who deliberately led their own clients to purchase assets they knew to be worthless so that they could make even larger profits betting the other side of the market to enrich themselves. These people are responsible, not only for the theft of the billions and trillions of dollars they paid themselves to do this to the United States of America, but also for five years of recession and sluggish economic growth, including the most massive unemployment the United States has seen since the 1930s. The total loss to the people of the United States of America as a result of these actions of perhaps a few hundred, or at the most a thousand elite bankers, hedge fund managers, and their accomplices in the Treasury Department, is many trillions of  dollars. In contrast to the "EBT shopping spree" perpetrators, the people who stole billions and trillions from America are not going to jail. Few if any of them have been criminally prosecuted, and likely no more of them ever will be. Moreover, only one or two of them have been made to give back any of the money they stole from coal miners, fireman, police officers, secretaries, school teachers, waitresses, and every other American who has suffered as a result of their astonishing greed. Fines have been a few millions of dollars, a tiny fraction of what was taken. But that's not all. Not only have these individuals escaped any criminal prosecution, and not only have they been allowed to keep all the money they stole, they've all kept their jobs or been shuffled around to different ones in substantially the same positions. And they are all doing it again. That's right. The same people who led the entire economy to its biggest defeat in a century are still in command. It's as though General Custer was promoted after leading his troops to the massacre at Little Big Horn. And if you think they might be doing a better job this time because they've learned their lesson, watch out. They've learned their lesson, but it's not the lesson you think they've learned. They haven't learned to avoid taking spectacular risks with other people's money. They got paid for that. They haven't learned to stop defrauding their customers and investors and regular Americans because they got paid for that too, and they haven't learned that their actions which brought the economy to the brink of utter disaster need to be avoided at all costs in the future. They got paid for that, and paid well. The last few weeks, while the government was shut down, regular people suffered, veterans lost benefits, children with diseases lost chances to get treatment, medical research was delayed. That didn't stop the shutdown. When the debt limit deadline was approaching, rich Wall Street bankers felt threatened. And they got what they wanted, unlimited access to taxpayer money to fund their lifestyles. What this cadre of corporate criminals have learned, first and foremost, is that their wealth, and their influence in our political system allows them to get away with anything. That's the lesson we taught them. But those poor food stamp recipients with their "six to eight carts full of groceries," that's a real outrage - that's a "serious moral issue." Let's get right on top of those poor people walking out the front door with food to eat, while we ignore the bankers walking out the back door with all the money in the world. Meanwhile, in Ohio, the government is prosecuting a woman with mental health issues who took $2.87 from a fountain that people throw coins into. The prison taxpayers will pay to keep her locked up has been privatized. Thousands more of your dollars shipped to Wall Street over the moral issue of this woman taking three coins from the fountain. The moral: If you steal, be sure to steal at least a billion dollars.