Divorce And Mediation Blog

When I interview a new client or prepare an existing client for a hearing or trial, I find they usually want assurance of what will happen when we get to court, or some guidance on what a judge would do at trial in evaluating whether or not to settle. Unfortunately, the majority of the issues in Family Law are left to "the sound discretion of the trial judge."

In fact, that is language that is found in a high percentage of appellate court decisions in family law cases precisely because there are many unique situations, and unique personalities - it is the philosophy of many appellate courts that the trial judge is in the best position to fashion a rule to guide the family's life. Unfortunately, this also increases the unpredictability of the process.

The more experience an attorney has in going to court, the more likely it is that he or she can predict the range of likely outcomes. The ability to make such predictions is dependent upon watching judges make these decisions over a long period of time, and in particular watching the judge assigned to your case make similar decisions in other cases. We often talk to our peers about their experience so we can better predict what a particular judge may rule in your case.

Predictability becomes more difficult as we have more judges assigned to the family law bench. In Vista court, we have five full-time family law judicial officers [judges and commissioners], and one part-time handling support issues. The downtown branch has eight [and three others doing support], and there are several in South Bay and East County.

The commissioners who do nothing but support cases in the Family Support Division of the Superior Court have less latitude since child support has specific guidelines the court's are required to follow most of the time, and spousal support is guided by informal guidelines - even there, however, the judge has wide discretion in determining income and applying various factors when entering data into a computer to calculate net incomes and support.

When you have a family law problem, the best thing you can do is discuss it with a Certified Family Law Specialist: Someone who has devoted his or her career to practice in this field, and who has a lot of courtroom experience. Even those who no longer go to court on a regular basis because they have chosen some form of alternate dispute resolution, had experienced a wide range of fact patterns and have grappled with the various rules that can be applied.

Because of the nature of the certification process, it is also required that they take more 15 hours of specific family law training each year to maintain their certification. The typical lawyer is only required to complete about 8 hours of education per year, and that can be in a broad range of subjects, including those that aren't substantive, such as law office management, bias, and substance abuse - specialists are required to take such classes to keep up their licenses, in addition to the 15 hours in family law. They truly are experts in predicting what judges will do in your case.

I your spouse isn't working to capacity, you can ask the court to attribute to him or her an earning capacity for support purposes. But, how do you do that?

A vocational evaluation can be conducted to show the court that a party has the ability to work and that jobs are available. The evaluation is a means of having an expert conduct a study to provide the court with information about the ability of one or both of the spouses to earn more than they claim.

In our present economy, there may be few jobs available, but that doesn't mean that a spouse can remain unemployed for a long period of time and still continue to collect full amounts of child and spousal support, or avoid paying, as though he or she were incapable of working. The evaluation process is essential to get expert opinion to the judge who must make a determination - you can't just tell the judge how much they can make, or even what they used to earn in earlier days - only an expert can provide such evidence.

Once a judge has information that the party has job skills, he or she may order that the person make job contacts, and report them on a form listing the name of the company, the manner of the contact, to whom the person spoke, the job for which they applied, and the outcome of the contact. We often see those who we think are not anxious to find work making the required five or ten job contacts a week simply by logging onto the Internet and forwarding a resume - some judges require personal contact.

Most vocational evaluators will testify that jobs are usually found through personal contact (including family and friends), and that the success rate in sending a resume without such contact is very low. At least one appellate court has observed that it is easy for a person to avoid working if he or she wants, so the judge is ultimately required to make a gut reaction to a set of facts to determine whether the litigant is affirmatively seeking employment.

In one of my cases years ago, the non-working spouse would report on the court form, that she was going to an industrial park, usually on Monday or Tuesday, then going door to door passing out resumes and picking up a business card from the receptionist. Every two weeks, she would then report back 20 job contacts, but it was painfully obvious that she was only looking for work one day a week.

We suspected that she was actually working somewhere the rest of the time, probably under the table. The judge looked at her qualifications (fluency in four languages), the master's degree she had from college, and assigned to her a relatively high-income level, and ordered child support accordingly and ended the husband's spousal support obligation. A good vocational evaluation is essential to that process.

In the present job market, it is relatively easy to claim that someone is not earning a living in his or her chosen field, for example a real estate broker. A judge has to decide whether or not to push that person to look for work in some other industry, or try to weather bad times because the person was previously successful and will probably be successful again when the market picks up. In the long-run, the decision to pursue one career move or the other may affect the persons long-term ability to pay increased child or spousal support.

These kinds of decisions are left to the sound discretion of the trial judge. Whichever side of the issue you are on, your position is best presented to the judge by a certified family law specialist; and vocational evaluations are essential.

If you can present evidence of a pattern in the manner of job contacts, or even show that you have followed up to determine that the contacts were actually made, you are more likely to be successful in that process. If you treat it casually, or assume that the judge will simply believe in your position, you are likely to be disappointed in the outcome.

Well here's another complaint about non-lawyers handling your divorce, from our local newspaper, the North County Times

Allegedly the drunk entrepreneur operating a "divorce assistance office" [or as I call them "practicing law without a license"] was drunk and pointed a .357 at two customers.

Maybe this is the way to keep the costs and heartache down: "Settle now, or else"; or how about "Focus on me and your own problems won't seem so great." Well, they do have a website and claim to have thousands of satisfied customer for divorce or bankruptcy, although they don't claim to have any license or training. The "founder," one Dennis Jester, puts an "MA" after his name. That implies he has a Master of Arts degree: Maybe in Art History, or Hotel Management - doesn't say!

I hope he qualifies for a court appointed lawyer and doesn't try to represent himself. :)

Betty Broderick was denied parole yesterday for the murder of her ex-husband and his new wife a few decades ago. I believe she is a crazy, angry, ex-wife with no sense of boundaries and no ability to acknowledge her own fault, and needs to stay in prison, probably forever.

Through 35 years of handling divorce litigants, I've never had a murder in any of my cases, and very few serious injuries by one spouse against the other no matter how many threats were made, how angry people were, or how disastrous the outcome of court proceedings.

When threats to kill have been made [to a spouse, new girlfriend, or relative], I'm generally comfortable in reassuring my client that the risk of actual harm is pretty minimal - people make threats in the heat of arguments, usually to get attention, and don't really carry them out in the vast majority of cases, especially in middle and upper class America where my clients reside. As long as they aren't blinded by drugs or alcohol, they always have the ability to understand that mayhem isn't a successful life strategy, let alone socially unacceptable. Then, to paraphrase Chris Rock, there's always that episode of CSI that makes them think they might not get away with it, so they do something less permanent.

Betty was an angry person. Her marriage failed. I have no doubt she contributed to its failure. Maybe it was as simple as choosing to marry someone who wasn't faithful or one likely to think that a stable marriage for his children was less important than an exciting new relationship. On the other hand, maybe the craziness she later exhibited was symptomatic of a person who wasn't too easy to live with, and may have been emotionally abusive in her own right; maybe anyone fun and pleasant to be with was a welcome change, and it wasn't just that she was younger and thinner.

When you speak to the other participants in her legal process, as have I, you hear a very different picture of Betty - she was loony during the divorce process - her inability to obey restraining orders was a clear indication of that [her having had multiple, competent lawyers, is always a concern as well].

I wasn't a friend or even an acquaintance of her ex-husband, and never met him; I have no opinion about his merits as a lawyer, father, or spouse, and frankly don't care. But I've seen cases with people like Betty, and it's not a pretty sight. You can't explain anything to them; you can't get them to behave; they blame everything on their spouses, their lawyers, minor's counsel, therapists, or the judges; and, they are the creators of their own demise.

They believe that everyone is against them, and don't understand their own role in the process - true paranoia. Usually it doesn't lead to violence. They usually just go from lawyer to lawyer to find someone to believe in them for a while, or they try to represent themselves until they antagonize the judge and everyone else in the process.

Maybe they run over the ex-spouse's mailbox every year on their anniversary, but rarely murder. They rant and rave and repeatedly tell their own versions of history, but the experience of the judicial officers, custody evaluators, and documentary evidence, generally show a different reality than they try to present as the case unfolds.

This isn't a woman who was beaten, controlled, and manipulated during a marriage, and felt she had no where to go - there's a certain sympathy for the woman in that situation who feels she has no alternative but to stop the abusive spouse's breathing. Even then, I'm not comfortable that they go into the general population when they establish the level of abuse - they had other remedies, their minds just didn't allow them to see them in most of those cases.

With Betty, we have someone who felt she had to get revenge for being left behind. I understand her anger, fear of the future, and sense of loss. I don't understand her reaction - with an abusive spouse, murder may be the only obvious remedy - Betty wasn't seeking a remedy for her situation, she wanted punishment.

She wanted to be cared for the rest of her life, and wanted to remain a socialite - in a sense, she now has both, all stemming from the death of her ex-husband - perhaps she got what she wanted, although without the freedom to mill among us. I think it's wise to keep her there, both for our safety and to serve as an example to others who may need her lesson to guide their behavior.

Hard economic times may have caused a temporary decrease in the divorce rate, but along with it, an increase in domestic violence. In a recent article, this phenomenon was discussed.

Economic stress, and the general failure of couples to discuss and understand family finances, are two of the prime causes of divorce. When times are tough, it seems that people learn to appreciate the stability of multiple possible sources of income, and the ability to make adjustments to keep the family unit flowing.

Unfortunately, people have a tendency to learn these lessons, but forget them as soon as money becomes available. Are we just building pent up demand to divorce because we aren't solving the core issues - lack of communication, and economic pressures?

A high percentage of potential clients who come to see me are unaware what the economic effects of divorce will bring to them, and often reconsider when they find out their life styles will change. And, it is surprising how many of them do not know what their spouses earn, what they have accumulated in savings and retirement, and how much debt has been emassed during the marriage.

While the divorce rate may be down temporarily, the number of crazies in the system seems to have gone up - people filing motions to set aside old judgments, apparently because they haven't been lucky playing the Lotto.

Today, courtesy of Google, I received a link to a webpage titled something like "Free Divorce Help in San Diego", followed by an advertisement looking like an article touting a private mediator with a law degree, but apparently someone who never passed the bar examine to become a lawyer. Aside from the irony of starting by offering free help, then charging, the page contained a lot of misinformation.

As with much mediator advertising, it was peppered with misstatements about the cost of the legal process. It reported that lawyers charge "at least $500 per hour" and many charge non-refundable retainers as much as $7500, and "total fees of $100,000 are not unheard of for a divorce."

Although legal services are expensive, let's set the record straight. In San Diego, the number of competent lawyers consistently charging $500 or more per hour is probably well under a dozen. Yes, a divorce can cost $100,000 or more, but that's because the parties are unreasonable and lousy candidates for mediation in the first place - and few lawyers have done cases that have gotten that expensive.

Retainers of $7500? Again a small number of lawyers, or those where the attorney knows going in that there is going to be a large amount of work to do, or there are other issues [a lot of property to keep track of, custody disputes, prior lawyers, a particularly obnoxious attorney on the other side] - and non-refundable retainers are generally prohibited in California, so you are only going to pay for the actual work needed.

And, this person bragged that most cases are mediated for less that $5,000: Now that's still a fine fee to charge if you are a lawyer, and in my experience far more than having a competent family law lawyer mediate your divorce and process it through the courts, as long as the people are reasonable and mature. Yes, most of us charge on an hourly basis for the work, so there is no limit, but you can have it done competently for less, in most cases.

One regular warning I make here is that you need to examine the credentials of the mediator: In my mind, it is more than taking a short class in how to help people reach agreements, and knowing some basics about the law. You want accurate information about your legal rights and responsibilities and knowing the mediator's thought processes have been honed by litigation, where biases and assumptions are tested daily. A J.D. degree means the person went to law school - it does not mean or imply the person knows the law, or ever competently practiced. Masters and Bachelor degrees are meaningless in choosing a mediator.

There is no substitute for education and experience as a family law specialist with years of litigation experience. Scare tactics to draw you in should be viewed with suspicion. If you can hire a true expert for the same price, why go to someone with a good sales pitch that lures you in with a promise of free or cheap resolution of your divorce? Someone who badmouths competitors on the basis that they are educated, knowledgeable, and experienced. There are a few, money hungry lawyers, whom you can't trust, but the vast majority know what they are doing and went into the legal profession because they wanted to be able to help people.

Today's San Diego Union contains an article on the front page with a headline that "S. D. County home prices inch higher." While this is certainly welcome news, it hardly serves as notice of the end of falling prices and is not enough to make settling divorce cases easier.

The statistics cited in the article refer to median home prices in the county - for those non-math majors, that means that one-half of the houses sold are above, and one-half below that median number. The increase, if you can call it that, is .5%, year to year for October. That can easily be a statistical anomoly, and not reflect an actual increase in prices, although the article does reflect a 2% increase in the number of sales - of course that increase is from the extremely desperate days of October, 2008, just before the election, when it seemed our financial world was about to end, which is probably not a good guide post from which to measure the market.

What I notice in my family law practice is that houses at the very bottom of the market are selling as a few buyers think they can pick up a rental propery cheap [especially based on early 2005 prices].

In one case, we have two houses to value; one in the $300,000 range, and one nearer $700,000. Because of delays, we've had two appraisals of each house - the same appraiser says that the less expensive house has actually increase in value about 10% in the last year, while it is opinion that the higher priced house remains unchanged. With the median at $325,000 [according to the article], it may just be that the bottom end has firmed up as buyers think they are getting a bargain, while the number of foreclosures and repossessed houses continues to keep the overall market soft.

Those few friends who are looking at houses in the range above $700,000, are finding they can buy nearly new, custom built houses far below the cost of construction - one friend remarked that the top end is equivalent of being given a free lot, then a discounted bid on building - he's interested in moving, but is really picky because he finds so much from which to choose - he doesn't have to suffer noise problems or bad layouts, as there are other houses on the market.

Before taking a step into buying a new house, think carefully. We may not be at the bottom. And, remember, one factor in keeping the bottom firm is that interest rates on these sub-jumbo loans remain very low, and money is available to many buyers in that price range. That does not necessarily mean that people are trading up, only that houses at the bottom are becoming attractive to investors, while pricing remaining a gamble. If interest rates rise, prices will drop. As always, be sure you have the financial stability to keep the property you buy even if housing prices and rental values drop, and interest rates go up.

The last couple of months in my practice have seen a flurry of frivolous motions to set aside or modify existing judgments, based solely on one party's desire for a different result than they had originally agreed to. Maybe it's the economy driving litigants to re-divide assets, or attorneys who need the work, but it seems to be an epidemic in my office - often where one party has been denied relief by the judge, that person keeps coming back with a different strategy.

The basic rule of law is that a judgment is final, and can only be set aside or modified for specific reasons, such as fraud, mistake, an undivided asset, or failure to serve an appropriate declaration disclosing assets. The policy of the law is that judgments should be a final resolution, not an invitation to further litigation.

Let's say, for example, that boyfriend gives girlfriend an engagement ring - they get married - they stay married for 10 years - they get divorced - in their judgment the wife is awarded all her jewelry. A few years later, the husband decides he wants his ring back. Should he get it? What did wife give up to get her jewelry? Maybe nothing, maybe a lot, but the parties negotiated an agreement.

How many times do we litigate the value of the wife's jewelry, or whether it is community or separate property? How many years do we allow the husband to wait before he changes his mind, and files a motion to divide the ring?

Or how about a case we see often: The house is awarded to husband, and he pays wife an equalization payment for one-half the equity. In this market, he may not be able to refinance the property, or it may be upside down and can't be sold or refinanced, but he intends to stay there so he buys her out. Because of the conditions of the market [or just bad lawyering], no one put anything in the marital settlement agreement about refinancing the property to take wife's name off the mortgage. Wife got her bargain, and husband got his - how many years later can wife come back and sue, claiming she should have gotten an order that her ex-husband should be required to refinance the property to take her name off or, if he can't do that, he must sell the house? What if the house had equity when they got a divorce, but now it is upside down - can the court order him to sell the house at a loss?

It is easy to come up with these hypotheticals because we and our friends see such motions filed all the time. To curb these frivolous motions, the legislature has seen fit to set limitation periods for the filing of such motions, depending on the nature of the grievance. For fraud, the longest periods generally, the right to sue usually starts at the time you knew about the fraud, or should have known about it - in other words, if you had all the documents all along, but didn't look at them, maybe you should have known about the "alleged fraud" and the period might run from the date of the judgment rather from a date years later when you bothered to look.

The point of this post is to point out a flaw in the system, allowing people to sue when there is absolutely no merit to their position, with no consequences. Yes, courts have the power to order sanctions for frivolous motions, judges just don't tend to want to upset anyone by actually ordering sanctions. Who is more likely to complain? The party who is sanctioned, or the one who doesn't get a sanction award - I guaranty you it is the former - judges tend to take the easier path, sometimes assuming that people really aren't mean spirited, even when they clearly are.

On a law practice website I share with a friend, we have an article about non-lawyers and inexperienced lawyers pretending they can mediate a divorce settlement - sure, they MIGHT be able to help the parties achieve a fair and cheap resolution of their issues, but if that happens it is by accident.

An essential part of the process is that each side knows his or her rights. These cases aren't about two businesspersons or two neighbors fighting over a contract or boundary dispute, it's about fundamental fairness between two people who owe each other about the highest duty known to the law: That, coupled with the ability of each to continue to function financially, to provide housing and food on their tables, plus some semblance of a normal standard of living. Half the process is ensuring that each party knows his or her rights, and the other half is getting them to be reasonable in assessing the alternatives.

Within the last month, I've had two prospective clients come see me who have been in the mediation process with unqualified mediators. In one case, two "housewives" with no semblance of training in law or mediation, have a website - they are giving the married partners their untrained version of family law, performing guideline calculations with no evidence they know what judges do with various financial issues, and when they are done they are preparing a marital settlement agreement, which is the unlawful practice of law.

In the other case, the parties have been before a trained therapist for more than 2 years, and have not a single written agreement to show for it. Has it lasted so long because they are progressing to a meaningful conclusion? No evidence of that, and the parties don't seem to be getting along well, either. Do they know anything about the law? Not much from what I could tell.

If your goal is to gain an advantage because you know more about your rights than your spouse, you may perceive it is to your advantage to drag him or her to an untrained person to mediate the divorce - on the other hand, you may be in for an expensive litigation battle when the other decides to set aside your divorce decree and require you to start over, or in anger abandons the process and proceeds to litigation.

Your choice of mediator should include only those with a substantial background in family law, and mediation training.

I recently heard a news story from KNX Radio in Los Angeles that there is a petition drive to put an initiative on the California ballot to ban all divorces. The expressed reason is that divorce is a sin.

The petition drive may, or may not, be a joke. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether to sign the petition when it comes to a shopping center near you. I could always give up family law and start practicing criminal law again - without divorce, violence may be the only way out if your spouse doesn't have the common curtesy to die of natural causes - that might spike the crime business. :)

Those of use who practiced law when divorce required proof of fault remember that divorces still happened, but they were even more messy than they are today. It will be fun to watch the debate, however.

There's a story everyone should read in the New York Times. It is about a young woman, paralyzed from the waist down, as a result of e. coli tainted hamburger.

This is a rare, but violent case, in an industry under-regulated, and heavily protected by the wealth of the industry that cares more about providing us cheap beef than safety. A few years ago, a best seller [Fast Food Nation] detailed the problems in the beef industry, but illustrates what happens when an industry provides its own regulation, and government inspection isn't adequately funded.

This shouldn't be a liberal/conservative issue. This is our health - how much of a guaranty do you have that in a restaurant, or even in your own home, that the cook has killed the bacteria in cooking? What price do we pay when we don't adequately regulate business?

Do we prohibit litigation ["tort reform" as always proposed by business] so that industry does not pay the full price for its conduct - if you listen to the business community, the free market should control everything, except penalties for the damage it causes - sort of like corporate bailouts for the consequences of their gambling.

There has been a change in the Settlement Conference process in the North County Branch of the San Diego Superior Court, in an effort to move cases along while dealing with a shortage of court rooms and volunteers to help settle cases. In Vista, all cases have been subject to a mandatory settlement conference for more than a decade, and the process very successfully resolved almost all of the cases without trial. As discussed below, that process has been falling apart.

Our settlement conferences at the court have been set on Thursdays, a day when the judges would set longer cases and trials to be heard.

The existing process had each of our 5 Family Law judges assign his or her cases to a Thursday calendar, in rotation among them - all of a judge's cases would be set for the same day, at 6 week intervals. The problem is that the first available date might have been 3 or 4 months out - if one lawyer was unavailable, the next available date for your judge's cases fell 5 weeks from that date and your first possible settlement conference would be 4 or 5 months away. Invariably, one of the lawyers would have a conflict with that date as well, and the 5th week after that put you 5 or 6 months out, and so forth. Occasionally, I lawyer didn't want the case moving closer to trial, and may have made up an unmovable conflict so that the date got set farther and farther out - and occasionally the judge would be on vacation and unavailable for the normal rotation.

Under the new process, to avoid such delays, each judge will set one case each Thursday morning and afternoon - for some judges, the problem is that there are many more cases being set for trial, so that judge's cases may be set many more months later than another judge simply because all the slots will be filled more quickly. The new process takes effect in January - we'll see if it works better than the existing system, or even better than no mechanical system to control the calendar.

Historically, the Vista Branch of the court has had many volunteers acting as pro tem [temporary] judges, assisting in settling cases. [We used to also sit as judges to help pick up the slack, but a lot of judges thought it would be better to have more judges appointed and more assigned to Family Law, than allow lawyers to volunteer their time to fill in.] That process brought out most Certified Family Law Specialists to volunteer our time - that came to a screeching halt when the California Supreme Court decided we needed regular education, fingerprinting, a background check, and a bunch of confidential information floating around the clerk's office as a condition for providing free services to the court and the public. Until then, the volunteers had to be picked for the panel by the judges, but that wasn't good enough [maybe other counties were more careless].

Many of us resented the fact that we had been acting as pro tem judges for 20 to 30 years, with virtually no objections or problems; more training in how to act like a judge [and the training is really boring, especially after the first time since it must be repeated every few years - 8 hours trapped in a room listening to a judge (who may know less about a courtroom, and certainly knows less about family law) tell us how to be polite and avoid conflicts of interest.

The result? The system has fallen apart - most of the best lawyers decided they could charge for our skills as "private judges", instead of having to volunteer at no pay, then be required to go to additional seminars. We usually charge less than our normal rates, and the lawyers who know us get to pick the right person to help settle our cases rather than taking pot luck at the court house, depending on who volunteer that day. You can imagine how successful an inexperienced lawyer is at persuading a long time specialist.

Essentially, as a private judge we are getting paid for serving as a mediator in cases where both sides have competent counsel, hopefully have legitimate disputes, and the issues are interesting. This is usually more rewarding for us, financially and intellectually, than going to the courthouse and dealing with two unprepared litigants who often just can't get their emotions under control and have no sense of appreciation for the volunteer's time - they don't care that we help them divide the towels and silverware that aren't worth the value of our time.

I used to volunteer regularly - I've been doing it more than 30 years. I am not currently on the panel, although I regularly volunteer to help lawyers settle issues when I am around the courthouse and they need a 3rd opinion [as do most specialists].

We are waiting to see if the new system helps at all.

As noted below on this blog, I provide health insurance for my staff because i care about their health, about them as people, and their productivity. I am concerned about the growing cost of health care, in part for that reason. I am also concerned because my health care and that of my spouse keep going up.

Last year, we changed our office policy to Costco, because it cut our rates substantially, even though the insurance comes from the same company I had before - apparently there is enough profit in health insurance that Costco can make something, yet the health insurance carrier [the same one we'd been using] makes a profit, and can still cut my costs. Anyway, last year, by changing policies, slightly increasing the co-pay by another $5, and our cost went up slightly - otherwise, it was scheduled to go up about 15% .

One year later, on our policy anniversary date, our rates will go up about 25% from that. Of all the wackadoodles who complain that a government policy or health coverage will raise their taxes or the deficit, I wonder how many have considered the rapid increase in insurance costs - from the looks of many of the loudest protesters, they are covered by Medicare, a government program they'd fight to the death to keep.

At 15% per year, health care costs will double every 5 years. At 25% [this year's increase], it will double every 3 years. The average is somewhere in between, we hope. The cost of health care and insurance is rising at least 5 times as fast as wages and earnings.

Total health insurance funded by my family will cost about about $26,000 this year, covering 6 people, aged 12 to 66, one of whom is covered by Medicare, so prior years' taxes cover part of the cost. Part of that is paid by my wife's employer, but it ultimately comes out of the money available to pay her a higher salary, just as more the cost of insurance for my employees limits what I can afford to pay them.

Health cost is in crisis because of these rapid increases that seem to be accelerating. Between 1/7th and 1/6th of the nation's economy goes to health care - and we don't have the best health care in the world despite the unsupported assertions of the opponents of reform. It is time to wake up people, and fix a broken system.

Tax breaks, or buying insurance from "out of state" companies that aren't regulated, isn't the answer. We need to get out from under the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the health care industry [drug makers, health insurance, etc.] on things that aren't necessary [advertising, manipulating doctors, profits, huge bonuses, etc.], and vote for substantial changes. When we here that Medicare is rife with fraud, what we don't consider is that the fraud is perpetrated by capitalists [doctors, pharmacists, insurance companies] who are bilking the government system - it isn't the system that is corrupt, its the private sector.

Proposed reform isn't socialism, it's self-preservation. Our auto industry can't compete with the Japanese, in large part because it provides health insurance. Our small businesses are being eaten alive by health insurance costs. Nothing is working but the system of lobbyists bribing our elected representatives. We are being scared by fears of a socialist government, but if you ask people they think that means Communism, as in the USSR - they don't realize that the postal service, police, schools, Medicare, and national parks are all government owned businesses. We, as a society, are so far from socialism that the risk that our government will own most aspects of our economy is merely a myth, designed to scare us into submission.

The "socialism" we are lead to fear is a communist system, where everyone [in theory] earns the same no matter how hard they work, how much they save, how they sacrifice, and how much they create. A tax rate of 50% doesn't stifle competition, hard work, or imagination. In the 1950's, the top Federal tax bracket was 90%. We lowered it to 70%, yet that plus state and local taxes, didn't keep us from making us the most inventive country in the world, or the most economically successful.

Yes, we have taxes that are unfair - all taxes are unfair. The goal is to find a mix between paying for government and not eliminating our desires to improve our economic positions and be more successful than those around us, or our parents. The cost of health care really can't enter into the discussion - it is a problem that needs to be solved and none of the solutions offered by the right are designed to solve that problem. Using tax policy [deductions, credits, etc.] makes taxation more complex and doesn't directly attack the problem - it just ties into the idea that any tax is bad if it hits people with the money to pay it.

Yes, I don't like high taxes, but I also don't like health care costs out of control - does it matter where my money goes? Not really. If the government can get the rapidly rising costs under control, I'm for it - maybe that requires government health care, or maybe it only requires government competition. One way or the other, the problem needs to be fixed.

I am celebrating my 45 year as a registered Republican, but the party is trying my patience. I survived the Bush years, although in some financial disarray to my retirement accounts, but I expect Republicans to be reasonable - I'm about to publically recognize their drive for power makes reasonable thought impossible.

Capitalistic theory operates on the assumption that society advances economically when we are allowed to be rewarded for hard work and inventiveness. The Chinese seem to understand that lesson. What Teddy Roosevelt understood more than 100 years ago, however, is that unregulated capitalism leads to boom and bust cycles, aggressive monopolies, and periodic economic and social disruption. He tried to fight this battle with William Howard Taft, but lost to party politics and big money when he tried to start a 3rd party to do so.

Throughout the 19th Century [the 1800's for some of you], and into the first 30 years of the 20th, we largely had unregulated capitalism, banking, and investing. Every 10 to 15 years there were huge recessions or depressions. The Great Depression started regulation started by Teddy Roosevelt, and the lessons learned sustained those regulations for the next 70 years. The next 75 years, we have had recessions, but nothing like what lack of regulation had produced before. The current recession was headed to Depression until the government realized we need to solve the banking crisis and prime the pump - even George Bush recognized this need, and started the process.

Somewhere, there has to be a mix: Government intervention and control to permit capitalism to flourish without the havoc it is prone to create when it isn't controlled.

The Bush Administration taught us several good lessons: Don't appoint your friends to make decisions just because they are your friends, don't appoint people to positions governing who believe there should be no government, and open government so what it does is transparent - oh, and don't let the regulated draft the regulations.

Now if that sounds like the ravings of a liberal, I'm sorry, but I don't think I've changed that much since I supported Barry Goldwater 45 years ago - the arguments of the conservatives then aren't recognizable to conservatives today. That wing of society has gone over the edge.

Gone are the Republicans like Dwight D. Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt, Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, Everett Dirksen, and others, who didn't want government controlling our daily lives, but understood it served a purpose - in part to protect us from foreign enemies, and in part to provide services it could provide more effectively, more fairly, or more economically, than private industry driven by the profit motive or the need to create economic empires, irrespective of the impact on society.

General Motors has long known it couldn't continue to pay for health care for its employees and retirees, still build cars here and still complete against cars made in strange foreign cultures, like Canada. Part of the imbalance causing our present health crisis is that General Motors shouldn't be in the health care industry, competing against companies like Toyota that aren't. As an employer, I shouldn't be in that industry either.

If Republicans care about their country, as we claim, we need to participate in a process to effectively bring health care costs under control. At present, it looks like we are just trying to repeat our rhetoric [government bad, tax cuts good, pure capitalism perfect], and seeking to regain power. How much more effective could our elected representatives appear if they seemed to be part of the solution, rather than the problem? Trying to take advantage of those simpletons who think Obama isn't an American, or that Congress will pass legislation to kill old people, is a way of gaining power, but not of fixing the problems of society.

What the Conservatives are forcing on us is a 51% majority in Congress cramming a health system down our throats that we will be stuck with forever - wake up, quit trying to scare us all, and solve the problem. It's time for both sides to get together to solve the problem, and quit telling us we are going to be killing grandma. Otherwise, you won't like the solution.

The recent story of Prof. Gates and the Cambridge cop has been blown all out of proportion by the media, trying to make it a racial issue to further divide Democrats from Republicans. I agree with the President that the cop did something stupid - it's not a racial issue, just an overreaction to a fairly minor incident, and the President didn't assert it was anything else. [Perhaps the stupidity was in the mouth of the "journalist" who asked his opinion in the first place, during a press conference on health insurance.] The professor probably acted stupidly as well, but we'll never know what really happened.

A similar problem occurred in Cardiff [coastal San Diego County] a few weeks ago where a woman about 67 was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed, after apparently refusing to tell a cop her date of birth - he'd come to her house with a helicopter and about 7 squad cars on a noise complaint about 9:00 p.m. in the evening - the noise was an amplified speech by a female candidate for Congress, speaking at a fund raiser in a residential neighborhood.

The woman was offended by the cop's attitude, and attempted to shoo him off by saying "you know where I live and my name, why do you need my date of birth." From there, the problem escalated into a stupid act by the cop - both immature participants were white. [There were some political overtones, such as the name calling by the reporting neighbor who had allegedly been yelling from the bushes.]

Maureen Dowd's column in the New York Times fairly summarizes my views of the Gates situation. Although the races were different, the attitudes were about the same. This type of thing seems to happen a lot, and it's not racial, although in that case the anger came out in racial tones - we all have our hot buttons.

A few years ago, I was stopped by a CHP officer for using the shoulder to go around a truck that was stuck trying to access a freeway where all the traffic was stopped for construction. I had seen the officer in my rear view mirror as I avoided the truck and knew I was doing nothing wrong.

He was angry that I had gone around the truck, and argumentative - I tried to suggest he had discretion not to issue the ticket, rather than trying to argue the law, but that seemed to make him more determined: "I use those shoulders", he responded, as though what I had done could have endangered him had he been giving a ticket. I sucked it up, politely accepted the ticket, and set the case for trial.

At trial, the same jackbooted officer [a motorcycle cop] arrived loaded for bear. I presented the judge the statute that allowed what I had done. The officer was rabid in his defense of his action, and amateurish in his rejection of the statute - adamant that it couldn't mean what it said - perhaps a part-time night school law student. He couldn't allow me to have the last word, acting as a bad prosecutor over and over again, firmly committed to the idea that he was right. I was acquitted, and was he angry. I fear running into him again. Maybe he had a friend killed during a traffic stop on a shoulder, and that was a hot ticket item for him - from my standpoint, he merely looked foolish and wasted a fair amount of my time.

I've known a number of police officers well, and the overwhelming majority would never have acted as he did, never have wrestled a middle aged white woman to the ground in her own home, or handcuffed a middle aged professor with a limp simply because he was angry and yelling at them. Let's not make this a national issue, when we have a health insurance crisis, two major wars, and an economic catastrophe to occupy our minds. It's just two testosterone driven people who pushed one another's buttons.

Periodically, I get to complain about the high cost of being a Family Law lawyer. Last week, my network printer hit about 500,000 pages, and we'd been having periodic service calls - I had pledged to order a new one when we inserted the last laser cartridge - they run about $180 each, and I thought I'd try to squeeze out the last of them, and have a standby when it ran out - the printer cost $2500 when you could buy a car for that sum. I thought I could never burn it out, but who knew we'd print that much.

Unfortunately, one of the paper trays was pulled out to fill it, and wouldn't slide back in. So we decided to limp along with one tray, plus the envelope feeder. Then the remaining try started jamming. End of the road, I figure - cheaper to waste the new cartridge than pay for a service call. OK, so I got my money's worth, but it was supposed to last forever.

The direct replacement for an HP 5Sx we've been nursing along for the last year, is about $2500, delivered, and weighs close to 100 pounds. Individual printers for each staff member that last a long time just take up too much room, so when I bought this office, I decided networking would save each staff person desk space. Saturday, I get to bring in several people to help me cart off the old one and put the new one in place, so we can be up and running by Monday.

The copier is at around 1,000,000 copies - when we bought it we got a super deal - we had a close relationship with a repairman, who found a very slightly used machine for us, and replaced every conceivable part - essentially, it was brand new, and has served us well. Our service company got bought up by another company and it won't continue to fix the machine since it sells a different brand, so a new one is on the horizon. The new cost for the existing machine was $18,000 [no, I didn't pay anywhere near that], and my connection is long since retired - looking toward paying retail for a new digital/scanner/printer/copier/whatever it does. I feel like any day it will stop working.

Then there's our $3200 scanner. I know someday I'll need to start buying a service contract and having someone deal with that - it has been running daily for 1 1/2 years. It's been absolutely reliable.

Amazing how the paperless society has created so much paper. It's certainly helping me contribute to the economic recovery. And I won't talk about the new carpet and paint.