Kagen's Critics Are Getting Help

by Bert

Reporter Craig Gilbert earns page 1A in the Journal Sentinel today for a story about the right-wing dogpile on U.S. Representative Steve Kagen. The gist is that Kagen is getting bad publicity, started by a story in a Fox Valley monthly newspaper called Scene, for disrespecting White House leaders such as poor, sensitive Karl Rove. The FDA also warned Kagen, a doctor, about using unauthorized drugs in his medical practice. Gilbert's story is, of course, more bad publicity.

Kagen may deserve this coverage, and I personally support publishing lots of negative real news ("real news" excludes Rush, Sykes, Folkbum guest bloggers, and other mere echo chambers) about politicians of any stripe.

But I seem to recall some recent bad publicity for another Wisconsin congressman, James Sensenbrenner. The Rolling Stone, a publication that carries more weight than The Scene , named Sensenbrenner the second worst congressman in the nation in a story last fall. I checked LexisNexis just to confirm my memory, and, sure enough, Sensenbrenner's bad publicity earned no story from Gilbert, page 1A or otherwise. (A J-S column by Patrick McIlheran did mention it in passing.)

[A late update from your humble folkbum: See this post for my original take on the Rolling Stone rankings. Jim McGuigan thinks the Journal Sentinel should be giving this kind of scruitny to Scott Walker, too. Thanks to Burt for bringing this up--Jay]

Friday Random Ten

The The Snow is Now Getting Old Edition

1. "Closer" Joshua Radin from We Were Here
2. "You Can Always be Gone" Catie Curtis from Truth from Lies
3. "Salt Peanuts" Miles Davis from Steamin' with the Quintet
4. "Clarity" Ellis Paul from American Jukebox Fables
5. "All in Time" Don Conoscenti from Paradox of Grace
6. "Too Little Too Late" Michelle Shocked from Mercury Poise
7. "Crazy Love" Erica Wheeler from Almost Like Tonight
8. "New Deep" John Mayer from Heavier Things
9. "Like Bonsai" Susan Werner from Time Between Trains
10. "Tecumseh Valley" Townes Van Zandt from Live at the Old Quarter

Meet Terry Falk

by folkbum

folkbum-approved MPS school board candidate Terry Falk is having a forum next week:

*Meet Terry Falk*
Candidate for Milwaukee Board of School Directors, District 8
Puddler's Hall, 2461 S. St. Clair St., Bay View
Wed. January 24th, 5-8 p.m.

After you're done there, swing by Club Garibaldi (corner of Superior and Russell in Bay View) for Drinking Liberally.

The obligatory I'm-not-dead-but-I-just-don't-feel-like-blogging-right-now post

by folkbum

Time is running out, however, for you to participate in helping shape the Milwaukee Public Schools' strategic plan. The on-line comment period will close soon, so click that link, read up, and let your ideas be heard, please.

Sensenbrenner relies on bushisms

by Bert

Jim Sensenbrenner remains an eager defender of President Bush and the war in Iraq. The Waukesha Freeman told Monday of his arguments for the war at a town hall meeting in Oconomowoc. According to the story, Sensenbrenner makes the same embarassingly ignorant error of fact that our own president made in an interview July 14, 2003. Their explanation of the specific reason for the war was that Saddam Hussein thumbed his nose at the U.N. because he refused to allow in weapons inspectors.

"Although the U.N. passed 17 resolutions calling for Hussein to be open for weapons inspections, few countries were willing to enforce them, Sensenbrenner said."

Check your data. In fact, Hussein caved in to the threats that he would be attacked and allowed in inspectors in November, 2002. So inspectors were allowed in, but Iraq was attacked about four months later anyway.

Of course, there have been other defenses of the war besides this historical mistake about inspectors -- too many, really, to make any one of the defenses credible. Put that aside, though, for a moment and just think about the mental laziness of the leaders we have in charge both in the White House and in Congress during this war.

They are not mentioned in the Freeman story, but Congressman Sensenbrenner also lays some lapdog licks on Bush's latest plan, supporting the idea that escalating the number of U.S. soldiers is the best way to bring our soldiers home. I could also take on that argument here, but I am feeling mentally lazy this morning.

Friday Random Ten

The Don't you just sit there feeling sorry for yourself Edition

1. "Cupid's Got a Gun" Nitty Gritty Dirt Band from Acoustic
2. "If Love is Not Enough" Peter Mulvey from Rapture
3. "I Can't Stand It" Eric Clapton from Another Ticket
4. "Are You Out There" Dar Williams from End of the Summer
5. "The River, Where She Sleeps" Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer from When I Go
6. "Like Bonsai" Susan Werner from Time Between Trains
7. "My Stupid Mouth" John Mayer from Room for Squares
8. "Blue Sky" The Allman Borthers Band from The Essential . . .
9. "Sister Clarissa" Michael Smith from Such Things are Finely Done
10. "Chief" Patty Griffin from 1000 Kisses

Vote Vicky

by folkbum

As a Milwaukee-centric blogger, I have basically paid zero attention to the spring silly season up Madison way. However, a post today at Forward Our Motto alerted me to the fact that a college classmate of mine is running: Vicky Selkowe.

I have no idea how many of my Madison readers live in the 15th, but if you do, I encourage you to check her out. And, based on the report of her opponent's speech to the Dane County Democrats I found there at Forward Our Motto, she seems to be head and shoulders above the competition.

Good luck, Vicky!

100,000

by folkbum

My SiteMeter will roll over sometime today. I added SiteMeter almost a year after starting this blog, so I'm sure I actually passed 100k real visits some time ago. But there's still a satisfaction in seeing all those zeroes.

UPDATE: The Lucky Visitor: At 11:28:31 am today, someone at Wraparound Milwaukee, clicking through from WisOpinion.

A Reaganomics Reality Check for Rush

by Bert

It's laughable to think that any human could be as perfect as right-wingers make Ronald Reagan out to be. But I feel less like laughing when their hero-making also mangles history. Rush Limbaugh declared Tuesday that "Reagan was truly a hero" for lowering tax rates on the wealthy. For evidence, Rush painted a rosy landscape of the time in which we all lived under Reagan.

". . .but of course as we all know, the eighties was a boom time. It was a boom economy; the bottom didn't fall out."

Anyone from here in the Midwest who is on the far side of 45 years old can remember those days. This is when Allis-Chalmers closed in West Allis, when Parker Pen began to die in Janesville, and when dozens of other factory towns took a body blow to their prosperity. Farmers outside the collapsing factory towns also could see no sign of a boom back then. Remember the Jessica Lange movies, the Farm Aid concerts, the news photos?

Rush and other talking gasbags have tried many times to turn our memory of the 1980s into something it wasn't. Farmers who survived those times would call that putting lipstick on a pig.

Graul says Ziegler's not "partisan"; really, she's just hiding it

by folkbum

Well, we all had some fun with the Judge Ziegler photoshop contest. But the race for the open seat on Wisconsin's Supreme Court is actually a serious matter. People on the left and the right seem to recognize that the election this April (with a cursory primary before that) will have implications for years to come.

Supreme Court Justice is, technically, a non-partisan race. But like a lot of our "non-partisan" races, there are obvious partisan overtones. So far, they've mostly centered on Ziegler's opponent, Madison attorney Linda Clifford, and her being up-front about her politics. Democratic politics, that is.

This post at Letters in Bottles, for example, quotes extensively from Clifford's bio at her law firm to warn that she's "Wisconsin's Own [David] Souter." (And warns, ominously, that Clifford plays the harpsichord.) The Spice Boys can barely write a sentence about Clifford without throwing around "ties to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle" or "lifelong Democrat" and so on.

I'm not entirely sure what the big deal is; Clifford makes no secret about her politics. I mean, check out Clifford's supporters page--it's Democrat after Democrat after Democrat among the hundreds listed there, including people like Tammy Baldwin, Jon Richards, Tim Carpenter, and Dave Hansen, people not known for their political moderation. Clifford just doesn't try to hide it.

Zeigler's endorsement page, on the other hand, has seven names on five endorsements. And I doubt that the list of citizens who support Ziegler's candidacy is really as, um, empty as her website would seem to indicate:And it's not just missing from Ziegler's site; while people will write about Clifford's contributions from "Doyle budget director David Riemer," for example, no one seems to be writing about Ziegler's contributors, like prominent Republicans Russ Darrow or John Torinus. While every story ever has to include information about how much money the Cliffords have raised or given to Jim Doyle, no one is writing about the money flowing from various Zieglers to Republicans--including from Judge Ziegler's husband and father-in-law to the Thompson-McCallum administration that gave Judge Ziegler her current job.

Bernard Ziegler, the father-in-law, gave many thousands before and after--though more after--Annette Ziegler got the post. Her husband's contributions follow a similar pattern. (Ziegler was appointed in May, 1997.) And while those two kept their wallets out of the Mark Green campaign, many in the Ziegler family businesses weren't so restrained.

All of this is not just to point out problems with the way the media are reporting the race. The title of this post is all about Mark Graul, who cannot be called anything but Republican, having worked for Mark Green's congressional office before engineering Green's spectacular loss to a relatively unpopular incumbent. Graul is working for Ziegler. It was Graul, for example, who had to explain that it was just some over-eager staffer who did the photoshopping we all had a good larf about. Graul is trying madly to spin his candidate's partisan history:

Ziegler's campaign adviser Mark Graul, who was the campaign manager for the Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Green, denied that the race would be partisan. He said Ziegler had a conservative view on judicial philosophy, which means she does not intend to legislative from the bench. [. . .] Graul said he didn't know whether Ziegler has a history of voting for Republican candidates.

That's laughable. Either Graul has no frickin' clue who he's working for, or he's lying through his teeth.

What's most frustrating is that the writer of the AP story--Scott Bauer, a regular on the Madison beat--didn't bother to fact-check this. He cops out by saying he couldn't get a comment from Ziegler, but he didn't at all need to rely on the judge herself when he has access to the same records that I did in coming up with the links all throughout this post. He lets Graul's absurd-on-its-face spin go by without a word, despite his having been careful to tell us of Clifford's support for Jim Doyle.

I'm not saying that the Spice Boys need to tsk-tsk Ziegler for the way money clearly tainted Tommy Thompson's decisions (since you know as well as I they'll only do that against Democrats). Rather, I'm asking for the media to notice when Graul is lying to them about his candidate's supposed non-partisan nature. I'm asking Graul himself to stop the lying, since it only makes him look stupid--or like a liar.

Mostly, I'm asking for someone, somewhere, to notice, perhaps, that while Linda Clifford is completely upfront and open of her partisan past, Annette Ziegler seems to be so ashamed of hers that she'll scrub her website and send out lackeys to lie for her.

Maybe I'm biased, but, for my money, that's the bigger story.

Bucher: My Wife Does Not Look Fat in That Dress

by folkbum

Waukesha County (Dissociated Press)--In response to a Waukesha Freeman essay written by his wife, Jessica McBride, former Waukesha County District Attorney Paul Bucher (left) called a press conference today to assure everyone that McBride "does not look fat in that dress."

McBride's essay, which was published over the weekend, was laudatory of her husband and his career as Waukesha County's "top cop."

"The guy’s curriculum vitae is something like 40 pages long," McBride wrote. "Meals on Wheels. DARE. Crimestoppers. Boy Scouts. You name it. One recent year, he stood outside the Pick ‘n Save ringing bells in the cold for the Salvation Army.

"He was that kind of prosecutor."

Bucher, clearly embarrassed by the awkward public praise provided by his wife, said he felt the need to do something in return.

"Jessica is such a great wife," he said at the press conference this morning. "There's nothing I wouldn't do for her, even lie if I have to."

After presenting a photo of his wife wearing the dress in question (right), Bucher made his declaration: "My wife does not look fat in that dress. She just does not. I'm serious."

Bucher's statement also included some more things he wanted to make sure his wife was aware of. "That leak in the basement," he said, "I'll get to it next week."

He added, "And I wasn't looking at that red-head, I swear."

Bucher took only a few questions after he made his prepared statement. Some of the reporters in the room seemed incredulous. "Look, I will not say anything else about it," Bucher said, after being pressed by reporters. "This press conference is over."

McBride could not be reached for comment.

Podcastic Prizecast

by folkbum

Aaron and I hosted a podcast with our photoshop contest winner, David Casper, this week. It was Thursday night; I thought I was getting over a cold, but it turns out that it was just warming up to try to kill me. I have felt like crap and barely had a voice since then--and you almost hear my voice disappearing as the podcast goes along.

Anyway, it's long--76 minutes. But worth every penny of the free download.

"Stay the Course" and other hogwash

by Bert

The Bush administration is getting ready to change again the often wobbling and waffling reasons why we are waging war in Iraq. In the New York Times on Saturday, a profile of a new military commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, included a paragraph about other changes besides personnel:

The overarching goal of the American military operation may be altered as well. Under General Casey, the principal focus has been on transferring security responsibilities to the Iraqi security forces, so American troops could gradually withdraw. Now, the emphasis will shift to
protecting the Iraqi population from sectarian strife and insurgent attacks.

I interpret this new goal as using our soldiers to act as a referee in a civil war. If this will be the new role for our soldiers, I hope that the president spells this out plainly in the speech about Iraq that he is expected to deliver Wednesday. But, I am going to predict right here that we hear phrases such as "cannot accept defeat" and "global war on terror" more often than we hear the phrase "civil war."

Rahm Emanuel must go, part II

by folkbum

Last month, I called for Rahm Emmanuel to get out, based on what he knew and what he concealed--and how much he lied--about the Mark Foley scandal.

Today, I read this, and could barely contain my anger:

Early on in the process- in mid-2005- Dave contacted Democratic Party organizations throughout the district, as well as the state party and the DCCC in Washington. Everyone was enthusiastic and encouraging. Glen Rushing, the DCCC point person for the region, told Dave he was "just the type of candidate we're looking for." He offered to introduce him to Alabama Congressman Artur Davis, the DCCC-appointed mentor for Democratic candidates in the region, who following their first phone conversation offered to help him with his race. Rushing then promised to get him in touch with Florida DCCC chief, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Emanuel's lieutenant for the Southeast.

Then something happened, something very dark and secretive, something people are just uncovering now. DCCC Chairman Rahm Emanuel found out something that could- and did- change the dynamics of the race in FL-16 dramatically. Emanuel became aware that Mark Foley- well-known for years Inside-The-Beltway, albeit not among his church-going constituents, as a very active (and very hypocritical) homosexual- was molesting the underage male congressional pages, and that he had been for many years. Did Emanuel call the police? Did he even call the staffers who are charged by Congress with looking out for the welfare of the pages? Doesn't look that way. What it does look like is that he called a fast-and-loose Republican businessman he knew, someone, like Emanuel, with elastic values and an even more elastic code of personal ethics. He offered him a congressional seat and all he'd have to do was switch party registration and become a Democrat. That man is freshman Congressman Tim Mahoney.

Suddenly there was a new DCCC point person, John Vogel, and he had no idea who Dave was. Rushing called and suggested Dave talk to someone named... Tim Mahoney. Dave did. And Mahoney offered him an intricate bribe to drop out of the race and run against Republican Bill Young in FL-10 instead. Dave Lutrin never had a single conversation with Rahm Emanuel. But Emanuel's paw prints are all over this operation. It's the way he worked in district after district, everywhere in the country, seeking to find business-friendly, quasi-Republicans who would soft-peddle their opposition to the war in Iraq and never mention "impeachment." Many of us have experienced first hand Emanuel's tactics in CA-11, FL-13, and IL-06 to name a few. Scared of career-ending retribution, virtually no Democrats have been willing to go on the record about DCCC practices that are at variance with internal party rules.

There's more at the link, and at FireDogLake, where Lutrin has been talking about it. Disgusting.

Good Wisconsin School News: What Page?

by folkbum

Update: Page A1. Good for them.

I thought about staying up until morning to learn the answer for myself. Instead I'll just let it hang in the air overnight. But some good Wisconsin education news hit the "NewsWatch" today:

Children in Wisconsin have the eighth best chance in the U.S. of succeeding in life, at least based on a scoring system created for a national report on the state of education released today.

In a separate kindergarten through 12th grade "achievement index" in the report, Wisconsin rated 10th in the nation.

Both results were included in the annual "Quality Counts" report from Education Week, a weekly publication widely read among educators, released on Wednesday. [. . .] The "chance of success" index was based on a comparative analysis of 13 factors affecting the lives of children in each state, including family income, educational attainment of parents, the percent of children in pre-school programs, the percent of parents who are fluent in English and the percent of adults who hold steady jobs.

Wisconsin scored above the national average in 10 of the 13 categories, including parent income and education and how children scored in fourth grade reading and eighth grade math. It scored below the national average in only one category - percent of three- and four-year-olds in preschool programs.

Again, my standard disclaimer: Just because we do well on some measures, we shouldn't rest on our laurels and goof off for the rest of the school year.

However, this is not a post about achievement, or what the ramifications of that or any one measure of it might mean. Instead, this is a post about the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's reporting.

I was reminded this week (in a post by Jo Egelhoff) about a Fordham Foundation study from last August, a study that gave Wisconsin's Model Academic Standards a grade of D-. The story about it was given a prominent page-one placement. The same is true of other stories this year that showed Wisconsin and our Department of Public Instruction in a bad light. However, as I noted in response to one of those, good news about Wisconsin's schools misses page 1A and lands, instead, on page 8B.

And as both I and others noted about the Fordham study itself, it doesn't square with reality, which seems like the kind of thing that should either be noted in a front-page story, or should keep a story off the front page altogether.

Hence, the question of my title. Here's good news; will it be 1A, or 8B?

Sykes Watch: The Death of Saddam

by Bert

Wasn’t Charlie Sykes sort of inconsistent once again on Tuesday morning’s WTMJ radio show? On the one hand, Charlie thought the Iraqi “government” made itself look bad by the tawdry way it executed Saddam Hussein Saturday. This is the quote from Charlie that I latched on to: “It’s not enough to say he [Saddam Hussein] had it coming.” In other words, even though Hussein deserved to die, there were better ways to get the same result.

I agree with Charlie on both the particular point that the way Saddam was executed makes the Iraqi “government” look bush league, and I agree on his more general point, which is that ends do not justify the means.

Now, let’s rewind the tape a bit. Just prior to complaining about the lynching-like execution of Saddam, Sykes said he agreed completely with a Wall Street Journal editorial that ran Tuesday. The editorial argued that the death of Saddam Hussein made the war in Iraq worthwhile:

“The 3,000 Americans who have given their lives . . . have done so in a just
cause that rids the world of a man who might have killed hundreds of thousands
more.”

Never mind the many more U.S. soldiers who will keep dying in Iraq now that we are rid of Saddam. Never mind other damage wreaked by this war: the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, the half trillion dollars spent, the worsening of terror threats against the U.S., the installation of an Iraqi government that also tortures and kills its citizens. At least in the case of the 3,000 soldiers already lost to their families, communities, and country, their deaths are a good value in exchange for Hussein’s death, according to the editorial, and therefore to Charlie.

The obvious reply is: There are probably better ways than this war to accomplish the neutralizing of Saddam Hussein. It’s not enough to say Saddam Hussein had it coming.

The Shorter Silly Season

by folkbum

The 2008 presidential campaign started roughly six seconds after Bush's re-election; it's started getting intense now (and jeebus help the people of Iowa). But we actually have a whole mess of elections before then, some coming up soon.

Here are some things that are interesting, at least to me, about the coming silliness:

• Quote of the year (day 3 edition):

  Jefferson Davis [. . .] greeted people as they passed through Village Hall, and chatted with a campaign supporter who joined him on his visit there.
  
  "I supported him in his first run and I'll support him again," said William Brouse, the supporter.

  If Davis gets more than two votes, Rechlicz should demand a recount.
  
  
• Every Milwauke Public Schools board district will have at least three contenders, meaning primaries all around. Three of the five seats will have no incumbent, which is surely what's sparking a lot of the interest. However, I'll tell you that the challengers to the remaining incumbents--Jeff Spence and Joe Dannecker--are not running because they like business as usual with the current (anti-union) make-up of the board. I'm also excited to see Leon Todd in the mix, since he always gets the party started. And it will be kind of interesting to see how board member-turned blogger (invitation only, sigh)-turned candidate Bruce Thompson uses the internets for his campaign.
  
  
• Linda Clifford and Annette Ziegler look like they have some hopeless competition. Sorry, Joseph Sommers, but the loyalties already seem solid.
  
  
• I got the same campaign press release everyone else did from Scott Walker. I thought about writing something this morning, but I couldn't think of anything clever to say about what was obviously a glitch in the Walker campaign's email servers, mistakenly sending out overnight something that should have been delivered, I don't know, last January 3. While the Charlie Sykes Stormtroopers couldn't get enough of Walker's empty and recycled rhetoric, several of the Good Guys were kind enough to remind Walker that, dude, it's over. Your silly season is long past, and you lost. And your "plan," which, especially the eudcation part, sounds suspicously like Mark Green's, lost by eight frickin' percent, already.

And that's all I got today.

Health Care Payment Defaults are a "Growth Business"

by folkbum

Conservatives' favorite health-care solution--high-deductible insurance plans supplemented by health savings accounts--is turning out to be a little more wrinkly than they might hope it to be:

The sharp increase in high-deductible health insurance plans is creating a headache for hospitals and other health care providers who are finding it increasingly difficult to collect the portion of bills due from individuals. [. . .] Recent changes in federal law allowing quicker funding of health savings accounts also might help individuals to pay, officials say.

The problem, however, is real for area medical providers. For example, in the first nine months of last year, the proportion of accounts receivable due from individuals using Advanced Healthcare grew from 22% to 29%. Advanced is a large physician practice based in Germantown. Other area providers report similar increases.

In other words, more people are starting to default on the payments due to their providers, payments that used to be made by insurance companies. Since this is a story from the business section of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the focus from there on out is on how bad this is for providers and businesses. There is no discussion of what the implications are for the patients--oops, sorry, that should be consumers, to use the parlance.

What it says to me, as a layperson, is that these kinds of high-deductible plans are not having the effect the conservatives desire. The idea behind these plans is that by giving, er, consumers more control over how their health care dollar is spent (in part by making them pay more of it out-of-pocket), consumers will eschew both unnecessary and unnecessarily expensive procedures. The HSAs help by setting aside a pre-tax lump of income dedicated to paying medical expenses.

There are all kinds of theortical problems behind these kinds of plans. (Seth is the expert.) But here we see the faults in practice, rather than in theory. And the practice seems to mirror what we already know about consumers--we don't always make the most informed or most affordible choices. I mean, forget about regular consumer debt, and realize that even before the coming explosion of these high-deductible-plus-HSA plans, more than 40% of us already have trouble paying our medical bills--including those of us with insurance. Put more of the costs into the hands of the patients--dangit, consumers--and two things will almost certainly happen: One, the predictions of increasing default as outlined in the Journal Sentinel story will come true; two, there will be a sharp increase in the already-booming medical bankruptcy field.

So my question is simple: Who could possibly think that a continued push for more of this a good thing? The answer, from the JS article:

As increasing individual responsibility for medical bills becomes more widespread, the market will find ways to adjust [. . .]. One sign of that is the formation last year of Health Payment Systems Inc. The Milwaukee company hopes to act as a collection agency for health care providers by paying them a discount for outstanding bills and then collecting the bills on its own.

As part of its service, HPS plans to offer consumers a detailed monthly statement of outstanding bills and other information, said Bruce Lefco, chairman and chief executive officer. "We are going to work particularly on the issue of educating the consumer," Lefco said. He sees it as a growth business.

Welcome to the growth industry of the year: Collecting unpaid medical bills. I guess that's good news after all.

It's a girl!

The Cheddarsphere is a little bit bigger today. From Tim Rock:

Quin Elyse Rock was born at 7:36 pm on December 31, 2006. She weighed in at 7 pounds 6 ounces and was 20.25" long (this being important information apparently).

Congrats to Tim and Kelly, and welcome to the world, Quin.

Judge Ziegler: We Have a Winner!

I promised that I would announce the winner today of our photoshop contest. I'd like to thank everyone who entered, and Aaron for co-sponsporing the contest. Without any further ado, the winning entry:That was created by David Casper of the blog Ask Me Later. We liked it because it played on the theme of Judge Ziegler's visits to various Justice Centers--here, she's vsiting the Justice League.

Honorable mentions should really go to Dave Diamond's "Star Trek," which was one of the most technically skillful; Patrick's "North Pole," which had a certain timeliness to it; and Puba's "Katrina," which, putting Ziegler in front of the lawless Superdome, also had a theme of justice to it. Update: Also, many thanks to WisOpinion for publicizing the contest early and for putting links to all the entries in one place.

Congrats to Casper, and thanks to Judge Ziegler for making our holidays a little more fun.