A Man with A Plan

I went looking for some good news and found this gem just waiting to make me LAUGH.

The headline says it all:

"MAN BUILDS GUILLOTINE TO KILL HIMSELF"

Aside from the obvious, the story has two additional facts that sent me rolling on the floor. First, the name of the police chief quoted is "Dale Covert". Poor guy, to be stuck on a local police force with a name like that. You just know he's repeatedly applied with the feds; alas, the CIA has no sense of humor.

Second, the deceased airhead (get it), may or may not have been an engineering grad, but he was from Michigan!


An 0-2 record can really get a person down.

Legal Disclaimer: If, after reading this post, you A) are from Michigan, and B) build a guillotine and use it on yourself, I bear no responsibility for having provided you with the idea.

I will, however, laugh.

Shouldn't We Be Smarter Than This?

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Please join me in getting depressed reading about the new Kaiser Foundation survey on health care costs.

Since 2001, the annual employee payment for health insurance has increased by 78 percent, compared with a wage increase of 19 percent and an inflation rate of 17 percent. In my case, if I take 'advantage' of the health insurance offered through my employer my 25 percent of the total premium will cost me roughly $3800 a year. On top of that there are $20 copays every time someone in my family visits a doctor and at least $10 every time a prescription is filled but only if the drug is on the lowest of three pricing tiers.

If all that isn't bad enough the obvious conclusion is that health insurance is quickly becoming too expensive for small and medium businesses. This means fewer employers are able to pick up the tab today than they were six years ago. (In case you didn't know, most employers pay 75% of the total cost, or in my employer's case roughly $10,000 a year per employee. We have over 150 employees, you do the math).

When do we finally get to the point where we decide that enough is enough and start forcing our elected representatives to take notice and change the laws that govern how health care is funded?

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that as costs continue to increase, and more and more workers lose insurance coverage because their employers no longer can afford to offer it, that the bulk of those paying for insurance today will be the uninsured tomorrow.

Who picks up the cost for the growing uninsured? Federal and state governments in large part, as well as you, me and everyone else who presently has insurance. We pay higher premiums and get squeezed more and more, even as health care continues to be delivered to those without insurance; their numbers are clearly growing.

What's the answer? It's pretty simple. The answer is to get us out of having to "pay for health care" through an insurance premium and create a new requirement that we pay for medical care via dedicated taxes. It's not so radical because to a very large extent, we're already doing that (i.e Medicare, Medicaid, SHIPS, etc.), but today the true costs are hidden from us.

In sum, let us all join the uninsured and get away from an ever-increasing cost structure based upon insurance, one that sooner or later is going to collapse from its own excess. After all, the only parties benefiting from the current system are health insurers and their investors even while the true costs are not paid for by everyone in the system.

Baby Bisphenol A Malfeasance

Here’s a question I never thought to be asking myself:

What brand of bottle do I buy if I’m looking to feed my newly arrived child or children (in the case of twins)?

You could ask friends or family members for their recommendations or simply purchase your bottles on the basis of how much shelf space they have at the local BabiesRUs. If you do what we did, you’ll do both. Thus, based on the recommendation of a close friend and the size of the display, we chose Dr. Brown’s a brand of bottle manufactured by Handi-Craft, Inc.

We brought the bottles home in May and have been using them to feed the girls ever since. At no point did it occur to us to ask whether these bottles, with their six feet of shelf space and a sales price higher than many other brands, might also contain harmful chemicals.

Now don't we feel stupid (if not a bit sick to our stomachs).

While doing some Internet research, we’ve discovered that the bottles contain a chemical proven to leach out with repeated uses and which has been linked via a number of studies to reproductive problems, impaired immune system functions, cancer, etc.

The chemical is Bisphenol A and it’s found in a large number of plastic bottles. Manufacturers, however, are not required to list the ingredients contained in their product and there are no identifying markings on the bottles themselves.

There are bottles made from plastics that don’t contain Bisphenol A, including the containers holding milk and other food products in your local grocery store. Why? Because although no standard exists for containers specifically designed to hold food for infants, there are federal and state rules in place mandating what kind of plastic containers can hold pre-packaged food.

It appears that baby bottles don’t get the same regulatory protection.

I wish I was making this up.

Your Mom is so Hot!

Lawyers are human too. They have needs. Still, those ethics rules are there for a reason.

Learn it, love it, live it!

From the ABA Journal and delivered my way via Legal Blog Watch:

Legal Ethics
Sex With Client’s Mom Requires Waiver

It may be OK for a lawyer to have sex with a client's mother—if the client approves the relationship in a written waiver of the conflict. But you can't ethically have sex with the client, unless the relationship got started prior to the representation.

That is the gist of a Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion that imposed a six-month suspension on attorney Carlos Gamino, for violating each of these rules—with two different clients. Although the Waukesha lawyer denied both relationships, the court upheld a referee's findings that Gamino had slept with one client, as well as another client's mother. It also sanctioned him for a lack of candor with the tribunal.

Gamino, who has now served his six-month suspension and is making payments on restitution of between $20,000 and $25,000 for court costs, was reinstated to the Wisconsin bar today.

Here's the Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion.

I'd like to be a fly on the wall to listen in on this waiver explanation!

Nessun dorma ... One Now Sleeps

Driving into work this morning I heard the news that opera singer Luciano Pavarotti died last night at his home in Italy of complications from pancreatic cancer.

I'm not sad because I believe that the ending of a well-lived life is cause for celebration, not mourning (and by all accounts Pavarotti lived well). I am, however, reflective this morning because someone who did something truly amazing is no longer with us. Opera-wise, the 20th Century was ushered in by Enrico Caruso and completed by Pavarotti.

I saw and heard him sing in 2002 during a concert in Washington DC. In a way it was a rare privilege because out of the more than six billion people on this planet, only a fraction ever gets the chance to be personally inspired the way Pavarotti and his voice were so exceptionally capable of doing. In my experience, the inspiration of seeing him sing came freely; i.e. without strings attached and I've noticed that inspiration these days more often than not carries a price.

While I can revisit his music regularly, I also can’t help but consider that the world is now a tiny bit less beautiful as a result of his death.

His singing was simply goddamned glorious.

"E noi dovrem, ahimè, morir."

Logic Solves Everything

Does it matter if he cries?


No, not if he doesn't understand why he's crying.

Using the same logic...

Does it matter if he orders an invasion of Iraq?


No, not if he doesn't understand why he's invading Iraq.

Ah, I get it now. Logical.

First Week of September

My internal clock tells me that it’s time to head back to school and begin the learning process once again.

It’s amazing how going back to school fulltime can shift a person’s perspective from being on a year-round work schedule (vacation optional) back into a mindset of summer’s over, time to once again crack the books and make grandiose plans of making the dean’s list THIS semester.

An impolite way of describing the above might be to suggest that this fall I’m neither scheduled, nor permitted to regress.

But fall is quickly approaching. I can feel it.


After twelve weeks of heat, the trees seem to be holding their breath with an expectation of impending mild days and cool nights, both of which are so necessary for them to drop their leaves and slumber quietly.

The chiminea is clean and ready to glow with a freshly laid fire of pinion, and with football season’s arrival there’s certain to be a pre-game party or two at the house. Speaking of athletics, organized running events begin again during the fall and the Duke City Marathon is scheduled for October 23. While I'm not sufficiently in shape to take on all 26.2 miles, I plan on running in the half-marathon again this year.

The long and the short of it is that like the spring, autumn conveys a sense of fresh beginnings to me and I’m looking forward them all.

Normal is as Normal Does

Question:
What’s the definition of normal?

Answer:
Spending three hours on Saturday afternoon watching the Badgers beat Washington State, 42-21; all the while drinking a beer with my main squeeze sitting next to me on the couch.

Oh yeah… all of the above even while each of us has a four-month old baby girl on our lap. Babies who, I might add are simply facinated by watching football on TV.

What’s "normal" is often in the eye of the beholder but after four months of baby care it sure feels damn good.