1. I was wondering just how Americans got so stupid and so mean that they would actually let real politicians espouse a tax plan: "Tax The Poor!" that my idiot younger brother once proposed while drunk at a Packer game, and
2. You all were spending $2,500,000,000 to dress up as slutty this-or-that.
Don't tell me we can't pay for health care and need to raise taxes on the poor. Americans spend an average of $4,756 per minute on Halloween costumes.
Yep.
Nearly five thousand dollars a minute.
Keep that in mind when you vote for a person who promises to cut your taxes, because it's going to be awfully ironic when you end up in Hell dressed as a Slutty Devil.
How much does justice cost? That depends on who's doing the selling. If you're a Wisconsin court, justice can cost as much as $150,000. If you're a Wisconsin legislator, "justice" goes at the bargain basement price of $10,000.
Recently, the Wisconsin Assembly introduced a bill that would limit attorney's fees to a maximum of 3 times the award of compensatory damages awarded to a plaintiff in a case. The bill, in its current form as SB12, creates a new statute that incorporates the traditional factors that go into determining an attorney fee award in fee-shifting cases, and would apply the 3x-limit only to cases in which compensatory damages are awarded. In a case where only injunctive or declaratory relief is awarded, a plaintiff could still get a full award of fees, while if you get an award of damages and injunctive relief, the court must merely presume that the 3x cap is reasonable.
On its face, this statute is absurd. It applies across the board, meaning that mortgage brokers under chapter 224, negligent banks under section 138.052, lenders who don't provide notice to tenants, landlords who fail to make promised repairs or rent life-threatening apartments, and, last but not least, murderers, cannot be hit up for attorney's fees.
That's right: The Republicans want to make sure murderers and thieves don't pay more than a nominal amount of fees. Section 895.446, the "treble damages" statute, allows for an award of compensatory (or "actual") damages, plus tripling of those, plus actual fees, for people who are (among other things) victims of theft by fraud and crimes against bodily security. This bill would help immunize people like that from getting sued by making it harder for people to pay their lawyers.
Most consumer cases, of course, are over relatively nominal amounts of money -- with the attorney's fees/fee shifting being used to encourage attorneys to take on these cases and enforce consumer protection laws. With an attorney general who's more interested in letting the governor off the hook than enforcing consumer protection laws (J.B. "Van" Hollen once said most consumer complaints amount to people crying about not getting enough Chicken McNuggets) that type of private enforcement...
...private enforcement, Republicans, by private businesses like mine, which employs 33 people in our office alone...
... would seem important, unless it's more important to you -- "you" being "Republicans" -- to sell a little "justice" old-school style, by taking money to pass laws:
Republicans in the Legislature are trying to pass a bill to cap attorney fees that can be awarded in response to a case in which a firm owned by a GOP donor had to pay more than $150,000 in legal costs.The legal fees were included in a settlement after a man who bought a car from John Lynch Pontiac-Chevrolet alleged he had to pay nearly $5,000 for repairs he never approved.In response, Rep. Robin Vos (R-Burlington) has written a bill that would limit the amount of attorney fees that could be paid in such cases to three times the amount that is disputed in a case. In the Lynch case, the attorney fees would have been limited to $15,000 because the case centered on $5,000 in repairs.The Burlington dealership is owned by David Lynch, a Vos constituent who has made 36 contributions to Republicans totaling $10,650 since 2008. He gave nothing to Democrats during that time.
(S0urce.) Lynch, of course, is mad that he had to pay $151,000 in legal fees in the case he got sued in. Those are fees he agreed to pay, in a settlement, but why should a good, cash-carrying businessman be held to his agreement when there are legislators to be bought and sold?
Should Lynch be mad? Should he be able to buy a change in legislation that will let him rip people off in the future? Before you decide, consider the actual opinion and the background facts of the case that got Lynch so mad he decided to buy himself some "justice," Republican-style.
The case in question is captioned Kaskin v. John Lynch Chevrolet-Pontiac, 767 N.W.2d 394, 2009 WI App 65 (Wis. App., 2009). Kaskin was a guy who bought a brand new truck and when it hit 3300 miles, developed some troubles with it. So he took it to John Lynch, which provided him an estimate of one penny to repair it -- because John Lynch, owned by a major Republican contributor, assumed that the truck was under warranty.)*
*What was that thing my third grade teacher said about assuming things?
A week later, John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, called Kaskin and said that bad fuel had ruined the injectors and they'd replaced them all. Oh, and, they added, You owe us $5,000 smackeroos.**
**Not a direct quote from the Good Republican.
Kaskin didn't think he should have to pay; after all, he'd been estimated one penny as a cost, hadn't been asked whether they should go ahead, and now owed $5,000 smackeroos. But John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, would not release this truck.***
***I note that by repairing the truck before telling Kaskin what the problem was -- the claimed bad fuel -- John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, may have done the car manufacturer or the gas dealer a favor there. If "bad gas" really had ruined the fuel injector, a questionable proposition given that "bad gas" typically requires buildup to ruin a fuel injector and the car had only been driven 3300 miles so far, then Kaskin could have maybe figured out where he bought the bad gas and tried to hold them liable for the $5k. If, on the other hand, it was a fuel injector problem, Kaskin might have had remedies against the manufacturer under laws like the lemon law. But by repairing the problem without even telling Kaskin, John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican who was no doubt watching out for other "small" (giant) corporations, might have spoilt the evidence, which in turn could eventually have prohibited Kaskin from making a claim against those other potential culprits.
Hmmm.
So Kaskin paid the $5,000 smackeroos -- I promise that's the last time I'll use that word in this post -- and sued, ultimately losing in the circuit court because, the court reasoned (siding with John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican and therefore entitled to special treatment in the legislature, if not the Court of Appeals, as we'll see) Kaskin hadn't suffered any pecuniary loss: He'd paid $5,000, and gotten $5,000 worth of repairs.
Not so fast... the Court of Appeals didn't say, but should have. The circuit court said that it didn't matter if Kaskin authorized the repairs or not -- remember, he'd said that John Lynch, Good Republican Car Company, could go ahead with repairs if they cost no more than a penny -- but the Court of Appeals thought otherwise because they did something I like to call "reading the law."
In fact, they began their opinion by making everyone else do just that:
WISCONSIN ADMIN. CODE § ATCP 132.09(1), (4)(e) (Oct.2004) states, in pertinent part, that "[n]o shop may ... [d]emand or receive payment for unauthorized repairs, or for repairs that have not been performed." We hold that a major purpose of this provision is to prevent either unexpected repairs, unexpected expense or both. Therefore, if the work done here was unauthorized, then the harm to the consumer, Randy W. Kaskin, was that he was deprived of his prescribed right to be informed and his concomitant right to consent or refuse consent. The remedy for a violation of this right is that the repair shop must forego being paid, even if the shop did, in fact, satisfactorily repair the vehicle.
If you're John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, that's not starting off on the right foot for an appellate opinion in case accusing you of doing unauthorized repairs. It's always easier for people who want to rip off consumers if you don't, you know, read the law, the requirements of which the Court of Appeals said are both "clear cut" and "stringent."*4
*4 Don't you just hate it when you're subject to a clear cut and stringent law that says "Maybe you should call your customer and let them know you're going to charge them five thousand simoleons [I made no promises about other slang] before you actually hold their brand new truck hostage?
But, I mean, what's the big deal with telling consumers what you're going to do and what it's going to cost? That is, can't you trust a company owned by a Good Republican?
Apparently not, as the Court of Appeals found reason to explain. The idea of requiring authorization is to have informed consent for repairs, and
The "informed consent" concept is an integral part of consumer protection law, not only here, but across the nation. Many states have adopted stringent rules regarding motor vehicle repair. See Jay M. Zitter, Annotation, Automobile Repairman's Duty to Provide Customer with Information, Estimates, or Replaced Parts, Under Automobile Repair Consumer Protection Act, 25 A.L.R.4th 506 (2008). These states have crafted statutes or rules requiring disclosures by automotive repairers before work is begun, just as this state does. Why? Washington State's automobile repair law provides an answer. Its code "is a consumer protection statute designed to foster fair dealing and to eliminate misunderstandings in a trade replete with frequent instances of unscrupulous conduct." Bill McCurley Chevrolet, Inc. v. Rutz, 61 Wash.App. 53, 808 P.2d 1167, 1169 (1991).
A trade replete with frequent instances of unscrupulous conduct? How DARE the Court of Appeals imply that John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, would do something unscrupulous. He hadn't even tried buying a change in the law to immunize him from further consumer protection lawsuits based on him scamming customers yet!
But to make up for implying that sometimes car repair shops might act less than scrupulously, the Court of Appeals gave John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, a Good Idea:
The repair shop ...believe[s] this construction to be unfair, especially if, as they claim is undisputed in this case, the repairs made actually fixed the vehicle in a satisfactory manner such that the consumer received a valuable benefit. We understand that and commiserate with the repair shop and amicus curiae to the extent that the repair shop acted in good faith in not engaging in excessive and unnecessary repair. But to paraphrase an oft-repeated and now trite expression, the law is what the law is. If the association feels that the statutory damage provision is out of proportion to the harm done by the lack of authorized consent, its recourse is through the legislature.
That was back in 2009 when the Court of Appeals issued that opinion. April, 2009, in fact. So, one might ask, why didn't John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, go immediately to the legislature to demand that the law not be what the law is?
One might ask.
Perhaps, one might then theorize, John Lynch didn't go running to the legislature because John Lynch went on to read what else the Court of Appeals said:
And frankly, our view is that the requirement of a written repair estimate with an estimated price is a simple procedure that does not impose a great economic burden on repair shops. This is important because the policy makers in this instance obviously weighed that insignificant cost to the marketplace against the need to curtail the persistent practices of exploitive merchants bent on targeting the unknowledgeable motor vehicle owner. The policy makers no doubt intended to protect consumers against misunderstandings arising from less-than-clear estimates and the legal disputes and litigation that result from the fait accompli nature of claims for repair work already done.
I'm sure that was it. I'm sure that John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, was not just lying in wait and contributing only to Republican causes until the Republicans captured the legislature and he could buy himself a law that would make it okay to engage in persistent practices ... bent on targeting the unknowledgeable motor vehicle owner.
In fact, I bet that it was simply a change in the market. Economic downturn and all that, right, that made the insignificant cost of "asking a customer to approve a repair before doing it" no longer insignificant.
That was probably it.
Even then, the case wasn't over: the Court of Appeals simply remanded for the circuit court to determine whether Kaskin had actually authorized the repairs... and Lynch promptly settled, paying the $150,000 in fees plus damages.
Now, keep in mind, that John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, had many many options. They could have
(a) called the manufacturer to ask if the repairs were under warranty. (b) called the customer to ask if he had determined that the repairs were under warranty (c) called the customer to say "Repairs'll be $5,000, want us to do them?" (d) once they realized the customer was mad, they could have refunded some or all of his money, losing only $5,000.
They didn't do any of that. They chose to litigate, and litigate so strenuosly that they and their opponents racked up a presumed $300,000 plus in lawyers' fees -- suing over whether the customer should or should not have paid $5,000.
In other words, John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, felt it was worth spending $150,000+ in lawyers' fees to defend his right to keep $5,000 -- but felt it was unfair that Kaskin got to spend $150,000+ in order to not pay $5,000.
In other other words, John Lynch, owned by a Good Republican, wanted an uneven playing field. He wanted to force a consumer, who doesn't know about repairs and wasn't given a choice in this case to litigate against a well-heeled car dealership, with the outcome being at best the consumer would get $5,000. Which means that absent the fee-shifting provision built in to the statutes, Kaskin would never have sued.
Never.
And the consumer protection laws requiring that repair shops get your permission before charging you $5,000 and then holding your car hostage until you pay it would be meaningless.
THAT is what your Republican Party stands for nowadays. Your right to get ripped off by people who know more than you and can't be bothered to make a phone call to get your permission.
This morning I heard on WTDY a snippet of a song about Governor Patsy, and decided I'd start posting, to help out in my own small way, those songs that I can find.
I confess to being a bit -- well, a lot -- behind the curve on the whole Occupy Wall Street phenomenon/protest, but what happened over the weekend -- when the WORLD seemingly was occupied -- caught my attention.
That changed on Saturday night, when I couldn't sleep and used commercial breaks during a re-airing of Mission: Impossible 3 to review my Twitter feed from the day, and got caught up reading retweets from a Mother Jones writer named Josh Harkinson, who sat in on the occupation of the Washington Square park in New York City.
I read Josh's Tweets, which continued until he said he was going to stop Tweeting and record this video:
There's been a lot of talk about the goal, or goals, of "Occupy Wall Street," and the related occupations around the country -- some fault them for having no goals, or an amorphous goal, while others (wrongly) compare them to the Tea Party "movements" that sprung up following Obama's election.
That comparison is particularly odious; the growth of the Tea Party has largely been driven by corporations which tapped into Tea Party racism to benefit themselves, bankrolling visits by Andrew Breitbart and Sarah Palin to show "support" for divisive Republican party politics-- support largely expressed by racists who have found, in Obama and minorities in general, an outlet for the anger they feel. In short, Tea Party members feel the same insecurities we all feel, but they're channeling that, with the help of the Koch Brothers and similar ilk, into the politics of hate.
After watching Harkinson's video, I read up more on Occupy Wall Street, which now has its own Wikipedia page, a page that includes this as an outline of the goals:
Perceptions vary as to the specific goals of the movement. According to Adbusters, a primary protest organizer, the central demand of the protest is that President Obama "ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington".
I found that looking for the goals of Occupy Wall Street, because I've heard a lot about whether or not there even is a goal to the protests, and so I wanted to see if what the protesters were saying was their goal was what I actually think is their goal.
I haven't occupied anything and I don't know any occupiers (although I do follow, on Twitter, @legaleagle, who I think was occupying Milwaukee for a bit over the weekend) so I'm not exactly the person to speak for them, but as part of the 99%, I can speak with them, so I'll try to do that, and explain why I think I know what they're doing even if they don't say it exactly the way I do.
In Chicago yesterday 175 people were arrested for occupying Chicago.*
*I italicize the word occupy because I can already tell it is going to become a catchword that gets used and then overused then broadened. Just as every political scandal worth its salt is a -gate, every protest worth talking about will henceforth be an occupation, but the word is as good as any about protests, because occupation is a better goal than protest. Wars are won by holding land, as any good general can tell you. Protesters who set out to demonstrate or oppose may make a short-lived point. Protesters who occupy stand a better chance of winning the war. And the occupation began, this iteration, by the Winter Warriors who first began marching around Wisconsin's Capitol and then quickly moved in and refused to leave. Remember, dissidents-wh0-hope-to-take-power: your buzzword is occupation.
That was only a percentage of the 2,500 people who occupied Grant Park in Chicago. While the media focused on the thousands who occupied Times Square in New York, protesters occupied (among other places) Tucson, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Orlando, Denver, Detroit, London, Belleville, France, Madrid, Rome, Toronto, Tokyo, and Melbourne:
"Our protests are to show our solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and also protest various problems -- from indigenous issues in this country to government problems," said Alex Gard, one of the Melbourne organizers. "We know we have it better than the protesters in the States ... but there are still problems in this country."
That quote may help shed light on where the occupation begins and why its goals seem so amorphous to some. Again:
"We know we have it better than the protesters in the States."
...said an Australian man.
Not to run down Australia, but since when is the rest of the world supposed to feel sorry for the United States? Since when do other countries protest to highlight the living conditions in countries like ours?
One of those links above leads you to site with all the usual graphics that confuse even people like me, who (theoretically) have an education, and graphs are great except they're not because they don't always make the point in ways people can understand.
People living in parks makes that point: that the United States has become the country other countries feel sorry for.
Not our military might. Not our disproportionate use of resources or our economic impact. They don't feel sorry for those. They feel sorry for the people who make up our country.
People like those four people that Josh Harkinson interviewed to show what occupiers looked like: a laid-off 24 year old truck driver who lives with his parents because he can't even get a low-paying fast food job. Or people like Michael Smith:
Who got his hours as a machinist cut in half and can't find a second job to make up the gap.
Yes, in the United States now, you can even hope to achieve the American Dream unless you are willing to work not just one, but two jobs (and to find them.)
Smith had this to say to Harkinson:
"They say that everything has gotta be spread across the board, but the poor and middle class are bearing everything...The rich have got to be taxed.... I wanted to get involved because I believe that people can't keep sitting on the sidelines."
In Minneapolis ("Occupied since October 7", as the slogan grows -- has your city been occupied? For how long?) -- police took down transparent rain shelters but 150 people still slept there, and the OccupyMN group released a financial report. (They've taken in $12,000+ in 6 days, marking Occupations as a growth industry. With that kind of start-up money, can it be long before venture capitalists start seeking a way to get in on an IPO for occupations?)
That information helps explain what I found as I investigated this, and also explain why I think I know what the occupations are all about, but first let me give you one of those statistics that I mentioned that doesn't as adequately explain why the occupations are happening but which still is necessary to include in here: The Human Development Index.
The Human Development Index is a measure of a variety of factors that include how economic policies impact the quality of life. According to the latest UN Rankings, the U.S. is currently fourth in the world in terms of broad quality of life measured by the Human Development Index.
That's not bad at all, although it does fly in the face of the USA! We're Number One! mentality my generation grew up believing in and the next generation, I gather, did not.
What is notable about that is that the U.S. moved up from ninth in 2007 to fourth in those areas that are measured for quality of life. That is, after nearly two full terms of Worst President Ever, we were ninth best in the world. (Originally, estimates had us as low as 12th.)
That 2007 ranking came out after 27 years of mostly-Republican rule: 27 years of mostly-tax-cutting, mostly-supply-siding rule; even the intervening 8 years under Bill Clinton were pretty conservative years, given that Clinton had to "tack right" to stay in power in after 1994.
So we were 9th, and now we're 4th, after just three years of Obama-ing, with 2 of them being Obama+ Democratic control. Things were improving, right?
They were -- which alarmed the 1%, and that's why the first two years of the Obama administration saw a change in tactics by the right: Republicans began focusing on things like "REDMAP," a move to take over state legislatures and redraw congressional districts. Republicans focused on loosening up campaign finance laws (a move I generally support even though for now it hurts, but that's for another day). Republicans resorted to (as I noted the other day) simply lying about what people said and when they said it.
2008 almost served as a watershed moment: Obama accepted his party's nomination and suggested that life would get better: The oceans would recede and the day after the elections, you could almost feel that palpable sense of optimism; the worst economic crisis almost everyone alive had faced, a Depression**
**there really is no significant difference between a recession and a depression. A recession, in government economics' terms, means a slow-down that lasts six months or longer. A depression is a word that people simply no longer use; popular legend has it that FDR used the word recession in 1937-38 to talk about the slowdown then occuring in order to avoid telling people that the depression was still going on. Depression, like "Bank Panic", appears to be a term that is relegated to the past.
and a Depression that had gone on while we were fighting in two wars, wars which impacted people largely by stories of soldiers coming home limbless, while we felt guilty about feeling angry that we had to take our shoes off at the airport.
The first 8 years of the 21st century were, in short, a disaster: people elected a numbskull president who sat next to his Svengali and presided over a gradual erosion of every single national ideal we ever had.
Including, but not limited to, conservatism: Under Worst President Ever, federal spending grew by a greater rate than at any time in the previous fifty years. So he didn't even believe in the things he believed in. By the end of Worst President Ever's term, he was signing off on a massive infusion of government cash into banks. That's conservative?
At that same time, long-cherished American ideals such as, say, privacy and civic life were being eroded as the government pushed itself increasingly into every nook and cranny of our lives, sometimes figuratively-- the ability of the government to subpoena records about what you checked out at the library-- and sometime literally: the first full-body scanner in the U.S. was introduced at a New Jersey mass transit station in 2006.
During those times, people were almost literally scared to death: Anthrax was being mailed to people, the D.C. snipers were picking off consumers at gas stations while the gas they were buying (under heavy fire) continued to rise and rise in price -- one study found that gas prices doubled between 2003 and 2007.*4
*4 That's right, Michele Bachmann and other Tea Party racists. Doubled. During Worst President Ever's term.
I could go on, and I probably should, because as I read about occupy Wall Street and the other occupations and then read everyone from Tom Tomorrow to Twitter feeds about the goals of Occupy Wall Street:
I keep thinking that it's almost like people forgot what 2000-2008 were like.
I've been alive for 42 years, and I can tell you, the period of time between when Bush stole that election with the willing cooperation of five Supreme Court justices who proved then and there they were willing to put politics ahead of even the rule of law*5
*5 Making Citizens United not even kind of a surprise when it happened, and, as I said, I support the idea of unlimited restrictions but I also support the rule of law, putting me at odds with 5 of 9 Supreme Court justices today.
... the era between that day and the time when Obama was declared the winner of the 2008 presidential election was the worst time I can recall being alive.
Every single day of those 8 years felt like things were going from bad to worse:
Constant terror alerts: bring your duct tape to work today, just in case!
News stories about schools being dropped from No Child Left Behind.
"Extraordinary renditions."
Wars wars wars wars wars and the effect of those wars is still going on as our country lets military contractors enslave Filipinos to work at Taco Bells in food courts in Iraq while living in railroad canisters so that 21-year-olds can get their legs shot off in a war that didn't need to happen and we can all feel good when they come back home and we build them a wheel-chair accessible ramp.
Those Iran Hitchhikers who definitely weren't spies were mistreated in part because for 8 years (and still) we mistreat our prisoners of not-war/eternal-war.
It was 8 years of bad to worse to even worse. When Bush squared off versus Gore, does anyone remember? Things were pretty good and maybe going to get better: we'd survived an Internet bubble, we'd had a balanced budget or two, we weren't really at war with anyone, and yeah, the 1994 "Contract With America" had resulted in a country that would, by 2011, execute a man based on recanted statements, but we'd fix that and the worst problem facing America, in 2000, was whether Social Security would remain solvent for a long time, or a longer time.*6
*6 Reviewing the issues from 2000 is like reading "A Kindergardner's Guide To Presidential Politics," while somehow also being like reading page two of a newspaper today. Gore talked about fighting crime by putting 100,000 police on the streets, and suggested that gays and lesbians have equal civil rights, while Worst President Ever took a strong stand in favor of tax cuts and against racial preferences. The more things change, the more you realize that 2000-2008 was at best a holding pattern, and at worst, a kidnapping.
But Bush and his cronies took care of that. They reduced our country from one which thought that we'd licked the world to one which was afraid to try to carry too much toothpaste onto an airplane.
And then Obama got elected, and the Democrats took control, and TARP was seemingly working, and we passed Health Care Reform and even though there were racist Tea Parties out there shaking things up, life still seemed to be on an upswing.
That's not just pie-in-the-sky optimism and Obama's going to pay for my gas naivete. That Human Development Index showed it: After dropping to ninth, over the course of the previous 7 years, we were climbing and climbing fast -- in just three years we'd leapfrogged up to 4th and were possibly going to be a country where it was worth living again.
Until 2010, when the Republicans fought back and took control over seemingly everything and began just cramming stuff down our throat, passing bills without even following the usual formalities and bankrolling idiots into the Senate and redistricting and proving that they weren't going to go away quietly because, after all, they'd been in charge for 20 of 28 years, and kind of in charge for 6 of those other 8, and then the recession dragged on as the Republicans wanted it to, and then and then and then -- between November, 2010 and September, 2011, can anyone argue that life seemed like it continued to get better? We went right back to the Dark Ages and it had nothing to do with Tea Parties, who are simply racist tools, and nothing to do with changing electoral preferences and, frankly, nothing to do with Obamacare, but it had everything to do with the fact that the 1%, that power elite, were simply not going to give up and so rather than try to fight a charismatic president and a Democratic congress that wanted to, you know, make government work, that 1% -- the Art Popes and Kochs and others -- simply got some other pawns to remap the way they were going to stay in power and then there we were: Teachers getting pay cut, judges retiring almost en masse, state Supreme Court elections being stolen, and I began waking up in the morning checking headlines to see if they'd taken away the insurance benefits that let my kids get special ed.
There was a bit of a pushback, in 2008, and then there was a massive retaliation to that pushback: Remember the surge in Iraq? 2010 and the resultant redistricting and REDMAPing and union-busting and all that were a Republican/1%/aristocratic surge against the people, a surge that was working as Florida made it harder to get unemployment benefits and Republicans began openly joking about shooting minorities...
... and then, one day, people began occupying Wall Street.
I didn't, as usual, know that was coming or even what it was about; I had to be corrected by Emily Mills after I made an (ill-advised) joke about it. But they began doing it the same way soldiers fight in wars and those students overthrew Mubarak: they moved in even though people like me didn't know about it and people like Art Pope didn't want it. They moved in and protested and lived in camps, and so the occupiers came. They occupied Madison's Capitol for a while, and now they're occupying Wall Street and Chicago and Ketchum, Idaho and lots of other places like Nashville, and their goal, to me, seems simple: to live in the world we want, not the world they -- that 1% -- are willing to give us. They're camping out (because they don't have jobs anyway) and voting on things that matter to them (like should they buy sleeping bags to camp out in) and collecting money given to them by people who support their efforts on our behalf and in simply doing sothey're living in -- occupying -- a world they want, not the world they were told to accept.
And as I began to actually follow them I saw the media asking what it was these occupiers wanted, and I read all these stories about what the occupiers wanted, and I realized then that it was like everyone had forgotten what 2000-2008 was like -- it was like they forgot how terrible our lives had become, how even though everything was supposedly getting better and we had phones with the Internet on them life began to seem less and less secure and it began to seem more and more like we'd never get that house, not even a nice house, just a house, and credit card debts were mounting and medical bills were mounting and there were metal detectors outside the registrar of deeds' office...
... it was like everyone forgot what that was like and hadn't noticed that 2010 and 2011 were just becoming more of the same -- settlements with banks that would immunize them from claims they'd stolen people's houses with forged paperwork and all that.
Not everybody forgot, though.
Not the people Occupying Wall Street, and not the people who support them. Those mostly-kids who graduated college and went into a world where even law firms were no longer hiring, those 24-year-old machinists who have to live with their parents, those people almost all of them under 30 who had therefore spent their entire adult life living in a world where the rich were occupying them...
...they didn't forget.
I'm not surprised that the Occupy Wall Street protesters -- around the world -- have somewhat vague, amorphous goals, or at least goals that seem vague and amorphous to the powers-that-be. Did you ever see a really messy house, one of those houses occupied by hoarders, say, and wonder where do we begin?
That's what the occupiers are facing: where do we begin? And people who ask them what their goals are, you're part of the problem because it's not so hard, really: The way I see it, their goals are to occupy our country again: to live in our country and have it be ours, because for a long time it hasn't been ours and for a long time, things were getting worse and worse and worse, worse in ways that graphs could show, confusingly, and statistics could show, confusingly, and examples could show, confusingly, but worse.
Worse in the kind of way that lets a so-called "think tank" say something like "the poor aren't so bad off, after all, they have refrigerators" and people by then have been so conditioned to accept what they're told that a great many of them nod and say yeah, that's right.
That kind of worse.
For a brief moment there, there was some hope -- that maybe things, which had been going from bad to worse to even worse to oh my God how can they get any worse -- that things might stop that slide and reverse course.
But then they didn't. They didn't reverse course.
And then they started getting worse all over again as the select few -- that 1% people keep hearing about and some people, remarkably and stupidly, keep defending -- decided to simply take for real what we'd almost taken before.
This generation of occupiers -- joined now by unions and others on the outside -- didn't grow up believing that we were number 1, they came of age in a United States that was, at best, ninth and which was pitied by Australians. And that's not what they wanted, and that's not the country they believed should exist.
So they began to occupy the country they were already living in and in occupying it, were insisting that this country, their country, our country, be the country they wanted, not the country the 1% were willing to give them.
That's my take, anyway. Maybe that's not how the occupiers would put it, but that's what they're doing, as I see it: They're the foot in the door to the good life that Americans used to actually have a shot at; they're taking up space in our world, to keep the 1% from locking us all out of the lives we should have.
Relax, everyone; it's not like Republicans knocked down 78-year-old grandmother Marlene Quinn and broke her hip! All they did was take her heartfelt story used to support unions, and completely twist it so that it looks like she actually is against unions!
When you look at it that way, it's kind of sweet, right? Oh, what? It's not?
Here's what I'm talking about: Marlene Quinn is, as I said, a grandmother -- and actually, a great-grandmother. In November, her great-granddaughter was saved from a house fire (that's a picture of Zoey, the great-granddaughter in question, with the picture and news coming from this source.)
Ohio, as you may have heard, is in the middle of a battle over what they call "Issue 2," a November 8 ballot initiative to veto (or, in this case, repeal) the Ohio law banning collective bargaining. Issue 2 opponents -- that is, people who want to keep the law in place and deny collective bargaining to unions -- are being funded by "The Alliance For America's Future" and the like, but it's not enough, for Ohio union busters, to rely on billionaires financing a Virginia-based group. They also want to twist Marlene Quinn's words.
Marlene, see, made an ad proposing a No vote on Issue 2 -- no meaning get rid of the law, apparently -- and Republican promptly cut-and-spliced her into looking like she's a yes vote:
See what they did there? The public outcry over this in Ohio prompted all but two stations to pull the ad, and Democrats in Ohio have introduced a bill to prevent the mis-use of such materials in the future, but the damage is likely done: Millions of people will have seen the ad, with a woman theoretically thanking the lack of collective bargaining for saving her great-granddaughter's life.
Once a lie is told, it can't be untold, and since we live in a country where 12 people can hear a defense lawyer say "maybe her baby drowned in a pool", produce no evidence of that, and vote to acquit, the Republicans know that all they have to do is put the lies on the air, and they'll be believed. But at least spreading the word about the fact that they lied might help. So pass it on: Republicans lie, and Marlene Quinn wants a no vote on Issue 2.
Also, help more tangibly: We Are Ohio wants your donations to help put an ad on the air correcting this problem; click here to help them out.
It's 5:53 a.m., and I'm awake and working on my blogs instead of sleeping until... well, I'd usually only sleep until 6 a.m., so it's not that bad that I'm up, but still, I don't like losing that last 15 minutes of sleep on days like today, which began with Mr F and Mr Bunches both waking up at about 5:45 a.m.
Or, at least, that's when they woke me up. Mr Bunches woke me up by yelling "Dad!" and getting me in there to restart the movie he's currently watching ad infinitum ("Lilo & Stitch"), while Mr F had likely been awake for a lot longer, given that he was wide awake and tapping a stick against a wall to kill the time.
Mr F doesn't sleep. Or at least, not like we sleep. Sweetie and I joke that Mr F only sleeps every fourth day, and that's about right: Most nights, we can hear him in his room (which we keep locked to avoid him wandering around or getting out of the house at night) until well after we fall asleep, and many nights we can hear him around 2 or 3 a.m. wake up and begin his day. Then, about every fourth day, that catches up with him and he can't be woken up, as happened this past Sunday when he fell asleep on the couch from 4 to 5, then, after I gave him a bath to wake him up, he fell asleep again and then fell asleep in the car while we were driving around until finally we let him go to bed at 7 p.m.
So sleep is on my mind this week: Sleep and autism.
Studies of sleep in children with autism have generally reported severe problems associated with sleep onset and maintenance. Irregular sleep–wake patterns, problems with sleep onset, poor sleep, early waking, and poor sleep routines have been found at all developmental levels, with increasing severity at lower developmental levels.
Additionally, shortened night sleep, alterations in sleep onset and wake times, night waking and irregular sleep patterns (with the presence of a free-running rhythm in one case) have been reported.
That's Mr F right there: all of them. The study concluded that autistic kids are more likely than any other group of children to have sleep problems and also concluded that it's likely due to something specific in the kids.
And it doesn't just cause dads to be awake before 6 a.m.; it also leads to problematic behavior during the daytime, including communications delays. Or, perhaps, the study notes, communications delays lead to sleep disturbances:
A relation between social and communication difficulties and sleep problems is possible. The sleep–wake cycle is a circadian rhythm and there is evidence to suggest that, as well as the light–dark cycle, humans use social cues to
entrain circadian rhythms.
Routine and social cues are thought to help young infants develop stable sleep–wake patterns with the longest sleep occurring during the night hours. Children with a primary social-communication deficit may therefore find it difficult to use such cues to entrain their rhythms, resulting in problems with their sleep–wake schedule.
See? You didn't know that you know when to go to sleep because society tells you, did you? And autistic kids may not pick up on that.
The study also noted that melatonin deficits may be a problem, about which more in a minute. Another possible cause of sleep disturbance was increased anxiety, which makes me sad -- I don't like to think of Mr F and Mr Bunches being too nervous to sleep, but it seems to fit at least Mr F's personality. And, finally, there was some stuff about EEG's in sleep and REM sleep patterns.
Bottom line: We don't know why autistic people don't sleep well, which makes it kind of silly to recommend cures or interventions, but, then, we do lots of silly things, and the paper goes on to recommend some cures and interventions for something that we don't know the cause of.
To editorialize for a moment: Suggesting a solution for a problem without knowing the root cause of the problem is stabbing in the dark, or treating only a symptom, and either one may or may not be better than doing nothing. Consider an old joke:
Man: Doctor, my arm hurts when I go like this.
Doctor: Don't go like that.
That solves the problem, right? But it's not medical care. Or suppose a person shows up at the ER with a gunshot wound, and the doctor removes the bullet fragments and sews up the wound and sends the person on his way. Would you consider that an effective treatment? Or should the doctor have inquired how the bullet got there?
Just some thought experiments. Now, on to the solutions for the unknowable problem!
The study begins by noting that medications were the most common form of help for autistic kids with sleep problems -- but that about half of the parents questioned thought behavioral interventions worked just as well as medications. In our house, we've talked about medications at times for Mr F, and I downloaded the Autism Speaks Medication Decision Kit, a helpful packet that helps provide information and questions to guide you in a decision on whether or not to medicate your child-- for whatever problem. (Get it here.)
Using it, I decided (with Sweetie's help) that we wouldn't medicate Mr F, at least not yet -- because most of the medications listed don't have any clearcut effects on Mr F's conditions and some of them can have severe side effects. It seemed wrong to me to put a 5-year-old on strong antipsychotic medicines when he's not that much trouble.
If your child is on medication, or you've considered it, you should definitely get the kit and read it through. It raises a bunch of issues that I hadn't considered at all, and has helpful questions to ask your doctor, and yourself, about the medications.
Another attempted treatment was faded bedtimes, or moving bedtimes gradually to get the kids to sleep at the appropriate times. This was found to have little effect on the autistic children in the study, something I could've told them. (Currently, our routine is to begin bedtime at about 7:15, with the boys getting medicine, then a story read to them, then a bath, then bedtime with a movie on their TV. The movie on their TV is imperative: they will not sleep without a movie on, and we've learned to put movies in that have a continuous play feature, because the movie ending will frequently wake Mr Bunches up, and you haven't lived until you've been woken up every 87 minutes to restart a movie.)
Then there was parent training: Teach parents how to properly encourage good behavior (sleep) and discourage bad (not sleep.) Although only one family completed the 6-week program, that family reported reduced stress and slightly better sleep routines; I suspect the reduced stress came from parents being more able to cope with the stress through the training, but that's the cynic in me.
Then there's the one I might try: Light intervention:
Two additional treatments for sleep disorders which involve adjustment of the circadian sleep–wake cycle, are light therapy and chronotherapy. Light therapy may be used to treat a variety of rhythm problems, including sleep problems. Bright light suppresses the secretion of melatonin.
Additionally, it has been shown that periods of bright light treatment in the morning will advance the melatonin and sleep–wake rhythms, while bright light treatment in the evening has a delaying effect.
That is, show kids a light box in the morning to get them to sleep better at night, which might work for kids (like ours) who routinely wake up at 3 or 4 a.m., when it's dark out and then have trouble getting to sleep at night.
Finally, melatonin, which almost everyone we talk to treats as a panacea for this problem. At the boys' 5-year-checkup, Sweetie asked the doctor whether it was okay to take melatonin for their sleep, and he approved it: 1 mg each night, he said.
The first melatonin we were able to find was tablets, which is a problem, because the boys won't take pills -- they won't even take medicine from a spoon or those little plastic cups; we have to put it in a syringe and squirt it into their mouths.
We addressed that by pounding the pills into a powder -- literally, I hammer them into a powder, because I'm not a 15th century chemist and don't have a mortar-and-pestle -- and then mix them in with some other liquid, ordinarily some ibuprofen or water; it works better with ibuprofen because they (oddly?) like the flavor of that. (Lately, they've had a cold, so they get the melatonin mixed in with their nighttime cold medicine.)
That worked okay until Mr Bunches saw me scraping the pills into the medicine and then didn't want to take the medicine, at all -- because he now knew it had pills in it and it grossed him out. So for a week we had to wrestle him into the medicine and risk him spitting it back out, until he cut his foot one day and I began telling him the medicine was to make his foot feel better, after which he took it.
(So at night, Mr Bunches will say "Medicine!" and when I say "Yes," he still sometimes says "My foot!" even though his foot is long since healed.)
We also got some of the Natrol liquid melatonin, which we thought would be easier to use than the crushed-powder pills, but the boys hated the flavor of it -- spitting it back out each time, so we've foregone that and every night I get out my hammer, medicine, tablets, and syringe and go to it.
But here's the thing:
I don't think it's working.
Mr F has been on melatonin for a month now, and so has Mr Bunches, and I've seen no real changes in their sleep patterns, at all. I'm not ready to call it quits yet, but I suspect that the melatonin is like the gluten-free diet and other fad remedies: Not exactly the catalyst for change, but it gets the credit for change when it happens, like an ineffective quarterback who wins the Super Bowl in spite of himself.
And here's the other thing: I'm not sure melatonin is a good thing, because I took it for a week or two; I've also suffered from insomnia most of my life and have had sleep problems off and on for the last few months, and so I took the same dose that the boys took for a few weeks, and I didn't like it: My sleep felt less restful, and I had more realistic dreams that left me feeling tired -- it was like I never slept, at all, even though Sweetie would swear I did.
So after two weeks, I stopped taking it entirely, and I won't go back.
Which makes me wonder about why I'm giving it to the boys, if it doesn't seem to work and I didn't like it. But I'm not ready to declare it a failure yet, because a month seems too short to really test it out... for the boys? I don't know what effect it's having on them; Mr F can't tell me "It gives me vivid waking dreams that make it feel like I never sleep," so I have to guess whether it's doing good, or bad, or nothing. 2 out of 3 of those say don't give it to them...
...These are the kinds of decisions you never even suspect you'll have to make. I'll let you know what I decide.
Author Michael Offutt has posted the Smilin' Mr F badge on his blog,SLCKismet to show his support for government funding of Autism research and treatment.
Want your own Smilin' Mr F Badge? Copy this on to your blog
and say you support continued funding of research into autism treatment and prevention.
Time again for comment roundup-- now featuring a Dane Cook joke, some great music, and, at the very end, my WHO TO FOLLOW ON TWITTER -- picking out the best comments on all my blogs and responding to them.
Before I go on, though, have you checked out:
IO17:humans have been overtaken by them, a race of aliens who came to what used to be Earth with two demands. Now, a century later, a second race of invaders has arrived to battle over what humanity has been, and what it will be. A horror/sci-fi classic in the making!
On my post "... (The I Should Have A Catchy Title For Posts Like This Post)" where I compared the Chargers' new brand of wine to the ultra-classy gnome bank San Diego offers on their website, Rogue Mutt pointed out that the Chargers don't just steal hope from their fans, they also take other teams' ideas:
Every year the Red Wings have a charity wine tasting party and one of their former players even has his own brand of wine. So the Chargers stole that idea from us! Not sure who stole the gnome from whom though.
I figure they stole the gnome from Travelocity, or from King Of The Hill:
The top of my list would have been "V" (the original not the reboot I never watched) followed by Robotech (or Macross in Japan) and "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman. And Transformers if that counts--there was a TV series, several actually.
What was "The Black Hole"? There was a "Robot Chicken" skit about a new Special Edition of The Black Hole and they just keep showing one of the stupid little robots like in the poster going down this corridor. "Action!!!" the announcer says, trying to make it sound exciting, which I take it it's not. Though when I think of that I think of that "Silent Running" movie where some guy was on board a spaceship with some plants and a couple of robots. Why hasn't anyone rebooted that yet? Oh right because we only care about rebooting stupid '80s movies, not stupid '70s movies. Then after I think of "Silent Running" the movie I think of the song "Silent Running" by Mike and the Mechanics that has nothing to do with the movie and actually sounds more like it should have been the theme song for "Red Dawn," the remake of which was made in Michigan and is due out at some point, or maybe it already came out and flopped. I have no idea.
When I get really bored at work I launch into these stream of consciousness comments.
I'm not sure how you get from V to Mike + The Mechanics, but I did think, when V was originally on TV, that the alien girl who turned out to be a lizard was hot, which then caused me to be rather confused because I was attracted to an alien lizard. Being a teen is hard!
Also, I researched it, because that's what I do, and she wasn't actually an alien at all; she was a teenager who sympathized with the aliens and got pregnant by one, which really makes her kind of a 1983 version of Bristol Palin, if you think about it. Her name was Blair Tefkin:
What's weird is that when I began writing this post, I didn't actually think it would be primarily about aliens invading the Earth, but let's role with that idea and move on to why Stephen Hayes thinks monkeys are better than people:
I never put much stock in the notion of monkeys randomly typing and eventually ending up penning Hamlet. It's like speculating on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Quite silly, but there's another issue to be addressed. Its quite possible that we humans need to create works of art because we're inferior to animals, who exist contentedly without the need for such things. In a perfect world there probably wouldn't be a need for art--it pains me to say. Monkeys, and all other animals, live in a perfect world provided we leave them alone. An argument can be made that this makes them superior to humans. If a monkey ever did peck out Shakespeare, I hope it would have the good sense to hit the delete button.
Which is no reason to not own one, if you'll spare the double negative:
Anyway, hope you weren't thrown off by the fact that I didn't label that as NSFW, and also that it didn't really talk about owning a monkey at all. If there's one problem that plagues society, it's people mislabeling their pirated Dane Cook Youtube videos and making it hard for me to copy them here in a way that makes sense. That and Republicans.
I love aquariums. I had no idea you needed advanced tickets. It sounds like you learned a lot about apples...kinda like Homer Wells learned about Apples in the Cider House Rules.And yes...that's where Rogue's quote comes from in case you are wondering :)
See? Read my blogs and you will be fully-equipped to take part in society, provided that all you want to do in society is go to aquariums and read John Irving. Not at the same time. Well, you could, if you wanted to. I don't see why you couldn't, in fact.
That should be a thing: People Reading John Irving In Aquariums. That will be some more art I'll invent, since nobody has yet offered me a jillion dollars for the last art I invented.
Aren't both of them derivative of Flash Gordon? If I had to pick between Star Trek and Star Wars, I'd pick Star Trek. I like the political ramifications of Star Trek while Star Wars is more of a comic book. But Star Wars has always had the better special effects.
But I posted Slave Leia there, so here's Dale Arden:
In what really looks a lot like Slave Leia getup, doesn't it? You may be on to something, Stephen, but I have to point out that monkeys, for all their perfection, never thought to dress hot women up in metal bikinis, which proves that evolution works.
While I've been writing this, I went on to listen to Andrew Bird's Cataracts, because that's what I do, and I thought it worth sharing:
I like the whistle part. I once wrote a song, called If I Was Paul McCartney, that had a "Whistle Part Reprise" in it.
I'm not even kidding about that. You can hear the song here. And two other songs I wrote and played, because once I was going to be a rock star along with a famous writer. You could also get Big Mouth Frog t-shirts. I recommend listening to my song "The Big Mouth Frog Blues," too. It's awesome. Seriously. It is.
I'd also completely forgotten I put those online.
I should note that the line "What if I was Tom Brady/And I'd just won the Super Bowl" was written before VideoGate, and also that the point of the song was that it would change and always be the last person to win the Super Bowl. When it was first written, the line was "What if I was Brett Favre/and I'd just won the Super Bowl."
I should also note that I am correct, in that song, that the Pope is not allowed to date. I went to Catholic school for three years, after all.
your boys give me hope that having kids of my own someday won't be totally terrible ( :
Anna, having kids is supereasy. Provided that you also have a Sweetie to take care of them for you, leaving you free to do stuff like "take them to the park where they'll accidentally fall into a lake but it totally wasn't your fault".
I bet that cheerleader could throw for more yards than Curtis Painter.
I'm guessing Rogue wasn't looking at her quarterback rating, if you know what I mean.*
*I actually don't know what I mean, there. But it sounded good.
Why don't you try reading, and commenting on... The Best Of Everything: Our opinions are righter than yours: Everything you never thought you wanted to know about pop culture!
Nonsportsmanlike Conduct! The sports blog for people who hate sports and hate blogs. AfterDark: Your home for great horror stories, now featuring "IO17," a sci-fi/horror story about what humanity might be.
Thinking The Lions: Make Life More Interesting! By reading how I live MY life!
Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World! In the future, everyone will eat squid jerky, and the fate of the 73 dimensions will rest on the slim sexy shoulders of Rachel, who once was a pop singer but now just might be the queen of the lesbian zombies.
You might also want to read:
SLCKismet: Author Michael Offut's blog features amazing gifs, excellent reviews of books, movies, and TV shows, and also lots of thoughts on writing and culture.
Every Other Writer Has A Blog, Why Can't I? Rogue Mutt blogs about writing and how you're doing it wrong, reviewing and how you're doing it wrong, movies and how they're wrong. He's grumpy, but he's also right.
[i like that]: Anna's blog recently featured brownies that may or may not have pop rocks, and also every day has an amazing sense of wonder and optimism. You can't read her blog without smiling the rest of the day.
The Chubby Chatterbox: Stephen Hayes is an award-winning illustrator who has written a paranormal romance, among other things, and whose blog makes you think about the details of things.
The name of the #SarahPalin documentary was "The Undefeated". Well, I guess you can't be defeated if you don't run. Clever strategy.
Kurt Baron's a local (Madison) talk show host at WTDY. His couple of hours on the air each day bring a fresh spin to business, politics, and local life. Sure, he's wrong on the gun issue, but don't hold that against him.
