The Value of Talk

I have a New York Times widget on my smartphone. It allows me to amuse myself in the excessive amount of time I spend on public transportation, by reading the most e-mailed articles. At the top of today's list this morning was Talk Doesn't Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy. I have undergraduate and graduate degrees in psychology, and I work in social services, so this article should clearly appeal to me. Except all it did was annoy me.

The article implies that the troubled patients come in seeking help and are unjustly sent away with nothing. "Hold it. I'm not your therapist. I could adjust your medications, but I don't think that's appropriate." What's wrong with that? Talk to your therapist, that's what he or she is there for. Oh, you don't have a therapist? "So Dr. Levin sent the man away with a referral to a less costly therapist and a personal crisis unexplored and unresolved." Okay, so call the referral. Is this the first time you've ever asked someone to help you with something and been told that someone else was better suited to help you and therefore you should get your help from them?

"Competition from psychologists and social workers — who unlike psychiatrists do not attend medical school, so they can often afford to charge less — is the reason that talk therapy is priced at a lower rate." There's so much wrong with this sentence I don't even know where to start. Maybe I'm projecting the condescension on the phrase "do not attend medical school," but I doubt it. Medical school is hard, doctors learn mountains of valuable information in medical school. But nothing about medical school is training anyone to be a competent therapist. You know what is? Psychology degrees. Social work school. Supervision in jobs and internships doing therapy. And the cost of medical school has nothing to do with reimbursement rates. The only thing it has anything to do with is the value that insurance companies and society put on medication management. The price of those degrees depends on whether your institution is public or private and whether you have assistantship funding (in the case of psychologists, for PhD vs. PsyD, both of which are psychologists).

Two years of an MSW at a private school will cost you about $68,000 (based on NYU, but it's all pretty similar), while four years of medical school at a private school will cost you about $185,000 (based both on NYU, and what about.com tells me is the AMA's statement of the average). According to payscale.com a fairly generous average pay for social workers is $45,000, while this NYTimes article claims $190,000 for psychiatrists. Soo... a little math. The education cost difference is about $117,000, social workers' favor. The pay difference is about $145,000, psychiatrists' favor. Even throwing in a generous bit for lost wages in two extra years of school and student loan interest, I give it about two years to pay off. I guess the other 38 years of your career are just a bonus. I don't have time to look up the costs and payscales for PsyDs and PhDs, but trust me that the math won't look that different. And once you throw in the public vs. private divide this whole paragraph will be pointless anyways.

"Dr. Levin has found the transition [from talk therapy psychiatry to medication management psychiatry] difficult." Okay, I understand. Your career changed mid-life. You're doing something different than what you anticipated spending your career doing. That can be disappointing. It must be very depressing to sit in your cushy office with "matching leather chairs, and African masks and a moose head on the wall." Also, "the median annual compensation for psychiatrists was about $191,000" and I can pretty much bet that an experienced psychiatrist in New York City makes a hell of a lot more than that. So forgive me for being a bit doubtful when the psychiatrists moan that taking a pay cut to do talk therapy "was no longer economically viable." You're making a choice. That's a fine choice, and I don't have a problem with it. But just own it, you want the higher paycheck, you take the medication management career.

"Recent studies suggest that talk therapy may be as good as or better than drugs in the treatment of depression, but fewer than half of depressed patients now get such therapy compared with the vast majority 20 years ago." This is not because psychiatrists do not do talk therapy. This is because marginally effective psychiatric medication with not completely debilitating side effects now exists and because people want a quick fix and because insurance companies limit access to social workers and psychologists. Twenty years ago lengthy Freudian psychoanalysis was all we had to offer depressed patients, so that's what they got. Yes, Prozac, widely accepted as the first SSRI (though it was not quite, technically), was approved by the FDA in December 1987. Nostalgia for that era in mental health is like nostalgia for HIV/AIDS treatment of the early 90's.

I mean, it's an interesting story of this man's life, but it says so little about the actual state of mental health treatment and what it does say it says poorly. Really, New York Times? I expect better.

On eggs and crusts

As I type I am waiting on our lovely Kitchen Aid mixer to do its work on perhaps, in my opinion, the most exciting part of the weekend. I am making a French Silk Pie. It contains four eggs, each of which must individually beat into the filling for a full five minutes. Eggs are pretty much the most fun food to cook with, because they are in so many delicious foods, and they behave so differently than you might expect. I really love beating egg whites. In fact, I like it almost as much as I like petting whipped cream. I'm realizing I have some cooking quirks. But anyways, you can imagine that adding chocolate, sugar, and butter to the egg mix could only improve it, right?

This was my first attempt at making pie crust, and I have to admit it did not go quite as well as I hoped. But it will suffice.
As my family loves to remind me, Becky is usually the baker in our relationship. I am the primary beneficiary in this arrangement and do not wish to take this role away from her. However, I have also realized that I don't want to become completely incompetent at baked goods (nor do I want our future children to ever perceive me that way!). My mom baked and cooked pretty much everything from scratch, and although she bemoans the fact that neither my sister nor I have followed in her kitchen footsteps, some of her baked good values certainly did rub off. I don't want future pie crusts to come pre-made from the baking aisle at Pathmark, or to only spring from Grandma's kitchen or Uncle Sean's kitchen, or even to be Becky's speciality alone.

And so I resolved to learn how to make a pie crust. I think today's will be delicious despite its lumps and that slight crack down the middle. But I also foresee the necessity for many pies in our future so that I can perfect this art. Good thing the first one is so drool-worthy that Becky just asked if I would kill her if she took a spoon to it while it cools! I answered yes, so you'll have to check back to see whether Becky survives the two hour cooling wait. UPDATE: She lived! And it's delicious!
Also, in case anyone is wondering, I obsessed about the Greek hotel to the point that Becky gave me the go ahead to book it. Santorini here we come! Now to find some plane tickets and get that vacation request in...

To book or not to book

So, I'm sitting here trying to work on planning the honeymoon. Although we both grew up smack in the middle of the American heartland (except without sounding like a Republican campaign ad) and we were introduced by a fellow Midwestern friend, we met and got to know each other in London. And then after we graduated from college we returned to London for six months together and really cemented our relationship. So London has a lot of importance to us. But we also love travelling, so it wouldn't really feel like a honeymoon if we didn't go somewhere new and exciting. And we love the beach, so that also seems like a natural honeymoon choice. And so, our intention for the honeymoon is to primarily go to Greece, but to also spend a few days in London on one side or the other.

We are a bit spoiled living [basically] in New York City, home to three international airports, and tend to expect that relatively affordable flights will be available to nearly anywhere. Unfortunately, we are finding that flights to and from Athens are actually somewhat horrifyingly expensive. As of a week or two ago we had agreed to wait a few weeks and see if prices come down at all as airlines open up inventory, seeing as how not everyone books their travel four months ahead. For fairly obvious reasons we prefer to book plane tickets before we start booking hotels or excursions or anything of that sort.

Today however, because I am neurotic, I happened to check the availability of a hotel in Greece that I have been superly excited about staying in since I read about it. Previously the hotel was available for all of our proposed honeymoon except three nights, which were easily avoidable in our potential itinerary. It is now only available for three nights within our proposed honeymoon. I am freaking out and want to book it! Although Becky is not here with me, I have her voice of reason in my head telling me that there must be other affordable and perfectly wonderful hotels available for those dates on that island. But the panicked voice telling me that I want this one and it's getting away from me is yelling much louder! Hopefully Becky will be home soon to add volume to the voice of reason...or give me permission to book it...

What would you do??

Thing 1 & Thing 2

We spent last weekend in Massachusetts visiting my sister and brother-in-law and adorable nephews. The little cuties have not been sleeping well and their parents have been busy and thus the stress level appears to be high. Jen was on-call, which means that she had to go in to work on both Saturday and Sunday, and Sean had some projects around the house that needed to be done. Enter babysitting aunties!

The boys are superly crazy about books right now, which is in sharp contrast to my clients who use books as a form of punishment. Matthew and Thomas will ask you to read book after book after book and then start it all over again. It's so cute! In addition to playing at home we took the nephews on tons of adventures. These included Target, Famous Footwear, and Stop and Shop. Oooh, fun, right? But toddlers (and their handlers) both seem to do well with changes of scenery. Stores include all kinds of opportunities to ride in carts, "chuch?" (touch) everything, and lots of fun new things to climb on. Here they are with Auntie Becky:
And riding in the twin cart with Auntie Carrie:

And Matty practicing for his Famous Footwear audition:
As usual Sean cooked tons of delicious food for us (deep dish pesto pizza? yes please!) and we finished off the weekend with family swim at the YMCA.

We both love spending time up there and watching the little munchkins grow, but doing the drive so many times in the past two years is getting tiring. Speaking of which, I cannot believe that it is so close to being two years! Jen's big birthday party celebration plans are in full swing for next month. I'm sure we'll be regaling you with reminiscing when the time comes, so you can look forward to that!

Sniffle

I think there should be some natural law that dictates that no more than one person in a household can be ill at any given time. I know, I know, you're going to tell me that that is, in fact, the exact opposite of how your average virus works. And then you will probably try to tell me that it only gets worse when you have kids, etc.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I really shouldn't even be whining because admittedly, neither of us is THAT sick. Carrie's been feeling pretty crappy the last couple days, and this afternoon at work I started to develop that lovely "oh no, here comes a doozy of a cold" feeling, coupled with a little good old-fashioned nausea and feverish feeling. But admittedly, that last bit could just be because the thermostat was acting up at work--happens pretty regularly.

So really, in the grand scheme of things, we're not doing so badly--no one's dying of the flu or norovirus or any of those fun bugs. (Please join me in taking a moment to knock on some wood?) But both of us feeling like crap means that no one has the energy to do things like make dinner, wash the dishes, etc. And the fact that I didn't get home from work until 7:45 tonight doesn't really help matters. But really, isn't it only fair that there be someone else to take care of us?

Fortunately, at least for dinner, the local Chinese restaurant was on standby to help out. Tonight, for the first time, I was that girl who orders Chinese on the bus on the way home. And it was pretty magical. The delivery guy showed up at our door with dinner about 5 minutes after I got home. Carrie was feeling pretty crummy, and I have lovely ideals of taking care of my wife by making homemade chicken soup and all of that. But tonight, when I was exhausted and feeling sick too, love looked a little less like grandma's secret chicken soup recipe and a little more like pork fried rice.

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que

On the far western side of Manhattan, far north of where many white New Yorkers ever venture, there is a little enclave of deliciousness. Its name is Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. You may remember it for its extremely long wait times. I'm happy to report that if you arrive before your movie, rather than after it, the wait is much more bearable. Yes, last Friday night we decided to make a second attempt. Because we like to declare dinners out for a reason we declared that it was in honor of the Valentine's we didn't really celebrate and the anniversary that is not our anniversary anymore. It would probably be just as accurate to say that we really wanted BBQ ribs and cornbread. Dinosaur has also been on our infamous NYC to-do list for several years and we are perpetually [talking about] making efforts to accomplish these things.

For appetizers we ordered the sampler (spicy shrimp, chicken wings, fried green tomatoes, and deviled eggs) and a brisket slider. When the sampler arrived Becky stared at it for a good long time. Because the shrimp had legs. Can I just say...ew? It turned out that she wasn't actually as disturbed by this as I was, but she wasn't quite sure what to do with them. She muscled through and reports that they were tasty. The bodies, not the legs.
For dinner we shared the Sweetheart Deal for Two, which consisted of a full rack of ribs and four sides. We went with French fries, cole slaw, macaroni and cheese, and salted potatoes. It was all delicious, both at dinner and at home as leftovers the next day. If you're in New York and not a vegetarian I highly recommend taking the trip uptown. (And for the record, there's actually a lot of Manhattan past 125th street!) If you are a vegetarian...well, maybe you should stay downtown.

What's in a name? That which we call...

This is my post in honor of blogging for Modern Families week at Goodkin.

As we were planning our wedding last year we settled on most of the big decisions pretty easily. A lot of the decisions, like where to hold the ceremony, how formal it should be, whether we would both wear white dresses, whether to invite children, just seemed obvious to both of us. We had already agreed on colors and patterns to decorate our home, and the decision to reuse those choices came easily. Overall, we found most traditional wedding planning and customs to adapt easily to a same-sex wedding. It’s surprisingly easy to read bridal magazines and wedding planning sites without even encountering mention of a groom, and when he does show up rarely do his jobs require him to be male or dressed in a tuxedo or called a groom.

One of the decisions we found the hardest to make was the one about last names. In the last name business we found little guidance from tradition. The night before the Massachusetts marriage license application (at which we needed to declare our new names, in order to benefit from the free name change granted by legal marriage) we spent hours debating back and forth, practicing writing and signing all combinations of possible names, and generally obsessing about the right choice. We had previously agreed that we would not share our debate with friends or family until after we had made a decision, because we wanted to feel confident that it was our decision. In the end we made one of the most nontraditional decisions of the whole wedding/marriage/anticipated life. We decided to merge our names. We kept part of mine and part of hers, and we ditched part of mine and part of hers. We would each have the same name, which would convey the connection to each of our extended families, and any future additions to our family would also be able to share that name. Our new name identifies us quickly and easily as a real legitimate family in a way that no other marker could.

When I told my mom she initially reacted with surprise. I can’t even remember now if she had expected us to keep our names or to hyphenate, but she did not expect the merge. My mom at times in the past has been a recreational genealogist, and thus one of her initial arguments against our decision was that creating a new name would make us difficult to trace for future genealogists.

Creating our family our way will probably cause many headaches for future genealogists. We hope that Partner 1 and Partner 2 on the marriage certificate will eventually pave the way for Parent 1 and Parent 2 on countless forms (unless conservatives have their way, in which case we'll have to flip a coin on who gets to be the "father"). We're stretching our own imaginations, and asking those future genealogists to come along for the ride. I commented on this to my mother, and eventually we agreed that it is a new world out here on the family frontier.

I have a feeling that our whole lives together are going to be a mix of repeating familiar traditions that are surprisingly non-gender-specific and occasionally needing to sit down and come up with creative solutions that may challenge us and the other people in our social worlds. In later conversations with my mother I have gotten the impression that she came around to our new name. Her initial reaction was more surprise, needing a moment to ponder and understand, than disapproval. So I can only hope that future genealogists can manage as well as my mother, with that decision and all the others we will have to make in the years to come.

Trying to be Functional

Carrie and I have many skills, but unfortunately, keeping things neat and organized is not high on the list of either of our abilities. I mean, we're not completely inept at it, but we do struggle to keep things organized. We also both have packrat inclinations, which means that not only is our stuff not organized, but we just have altogether too much stuff.

We also got married recently. You may have heard. And we were very, very fortunate and blessed to have many friends and family members who felt inspired to buy us wedding gifts. And we are extraordinarily grateful to our loved ones for their generosity. But this did leave us a bit of a conundrum: where to put everything.

The last few weekends have been an ongoing effort at reorganizing our kitchen to better use the limited space we have and also get some of our presents out so that we will use them regularly. When we first began this venture, I thought we would finish in one weekend. I have a history of taking on overly-ambitious projects and vastly underestimating the amount of time or energy required. And by "history" I mean "this happens every time I try to do anything". Anyway, we didn't finish in one weekend, but we did persevere, and our kitchen is a much happier place because of it. Here are some before and after photos for your amusement.

Disclaimer: We had decided that we were going to tackle this project a few weeks before we actually got started, which means we stopped trying to put things away nicely altogether. I swear, we weren't normally living quite this messily--it's just that once you've decided to reorganize the cabinet, why WOULDN'T you store the colander in a way that predicts a certain avalanche should anyone ever be foolhardy enough to open the cupboard door all the way?

Note to our moms: maybe you just shouldn't look at the "before" pictures. Then you can live in happy disillusionment that our apartment is always as clean as it is when you come to visit.

That unhappy cupboard above, with a little of help, was transformed into this:

Its neighbor, which looked like this:

is now full of pretty new pans and looks like this:

And our pantry cupboard, shown here:

is now a much more organized place.

And that, right there, is all the cupboard space we have. If you live in Manhattan or otherwise have a tiny kitchen, you are probably in awe of this much space. But if you have a reasonable sized kitchen and spend much time in it, you will understand our plight. This is why our pantry is full of dishes instead of food. We've therefore had to get a bit creative with shelving for storage, and all of it was thoroughly overhauled too.

We cleared off the small appliances on these shelves in order to make room for the food items that previously lived in the pantry:

So now (with the addition of another super-fun gift: pop top containers) those shelves look like this:

But then the small appliances needed a place to go, so these shelves

were rearranged to look like this:

Um, everyone has a wine rack full of cat toys in the "after" pictures of their kitchen reorganization, right? Right. Also, I think it might be time for the new Advent calendar to get put away.

Also, we had several new cookbooks that didn't fit in the existing space we had for them, so we put a new bookshelf in the kitchen/living room area, which now houses cookbooks and a few other randoms:

It ended up being a lot of work, but I'm so happy to have an organized kitchen. And hopefully soon I'll remember where everything is and stop looking in the pantry for snack food! As you may have noted in the pictures, there is definitely less "stuff" in the after pictures. In the process of reorganizing, we finally took the time to review everything we had out, decide what we wanted to keep but didn't need immediately accessible, and figure out what we didn't need and could donate. Next project: actually donating stuff so that we don't just have donation boxes taking up space in our apartment. The project also did end up costing about $20, all of which was at The Container Store, and all of which was definitely worth it. We got organizers for the cookie sheets/cutting boards, pan lids, and sandwich bags/foil/etc. and we also got a shelf so our dishes weren't all stacked on top of one another. I was quite proud of myself for practicing restraint and not buying the entire store, since they had about 11,000 other things that looked like good ideas for getting us organized.

Next step: keeping it organized in the long term. Anyone have any tips? 

Eating Sum Dim Sum

I am happy to report that Hop Shing Restaurant, or as it is affectionately known on Yelp, 9 Chatham Square, is in fact not closed. I know this because we enjoyed dim sum* there this Saturday. The restaurant came highly recommended from Becky's coworker, who billed it as the best pork buns in Chinatown. With that kind of praise it is no wonder that we went quickly; I have been in love with the pork bun since the day I found out what dim sum was.
After triple checking that it was not Chinese New Year (we had a bad experience with a several hour wait at dim sum on Chinese New Year a few years ago) we headed out. Along for the ride was our friend Kara, of Superbowl live blogging fame. We were seated within minutes of arrival. Kara started in with stories of her recent shenanigans while Becky watched the carts emerging from the kitchen like a hawk. Apparently she had been warned that pork buns often go quickly and may sell out in early afternoon. We loaded up on all sorts of dumplings with an assortment of delicious doughy outsides. A few even had the pillowy soft dough of the much sought after pork buns, but still no pork buns came. Fear filled us. Finally we realized that several delicious items seemed to be emerging from a bakery counter at the front of the restaurant, while Becky's eyes were peeled on the kitchen. Although we were already stuffed to the brim we inquired and learned that yes, our heart's desire was in fact available by request from the bakery. Aah, pure delicious holy grail of dim sum.
You're probably wondering why it took us so long to ask. Partially that would be because we are all polite and introverted and therefore assume that it would be best to just wait. But partially that would be because this apparently is a relatively authentic dim sum experience, and therefore few of the patrons or staff spoke much English. In fact, when we finally took the leap and asked, we had to be passed through several wait staff before someone understood our inquiry well enough to get us pork buns. Throughout the meal we were stared at by our fellow diners, most prominently an elderly Chinese woman. For lack of a better explanation we assumed this was due to our white American-ness. Until we got the camera out that is. All further staring we attributed to our strange habit of photographing our food.

The most interesting food that we purchased (and photographed) was what seemed to be a dim sum breakfast sandwich. The outside was the aforementioned pillowy soft dough, and the inside was some combination of eggs and sausage. Good try, but not really my cup of tea.
The best part though? Somehow the mountains of food that we ate came out to only $15. No, not per person, total. I have a feeling that this may be due to a miscalculation of the bill. But since the prices are a Chinese mystery we figured that we had caused enough trouble, paid our bill, and went on our merry way. Yum!

*Becky reminded me that some readers may not be famililar with dim sum. For reference, the kind people at about.com offer a wordy but informative summary.

This is What Democracy Looks Like

I know most of you don't live in Wisconsin, but the political conversation happening in WI right now could have a huge impact across the country and across politics for the foreseeable future. Honestly, the best summation of this situation that I've seen anywhere is this clip from Rachel Maddow:

But for those of you who don't have the patience for a 14-minute video, here's my brief summary of what's going on. Yes, I have a bias. I lived in Wisconsin for the first 22 years of my life. I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And I am an unabashed liberal. I also no longer live in Wisconsin, so I can't give you any first person-insight into what's happening right now, though I am certainly hearing a lot from family and friends who've been at the capitol these past few days.

In his first six weeks as governor, Scott Walker created an extra $140 million in new spending, largely going to corporations and the wealthy.

To be clear, at the time that he took office, Wisconsin was anticipated to have a budget SURPLUS at the end of this year, but he created new expenditures without balancing them.

He then turned around and declared that the state of Wisconsin is broke, and the only way to fix it is for public employees to foot the bill. His proposed emergency budget bill would include all public union employees in the state being forced to pay 5.8% of their salary toward a pension plan (note: unlike a 401(k), employees wouldn't have the option to contribute less) and to more than double the amount that they currently pay toward health insurance. For someone earning $40,000/year, this amounts to an 8.4% paycut.

After making this proposal, he declared that because the state is broke, there is no room for negotiation on this, or any other aspect of his bill. And because Republicans hold a majority in both houses of the state legislature, he seemed sure that passage of this bill would be swift (allowing only 3 days for debate) and easy. In announcing this proposal, he also declared that the National Guard would be on standby to deal with any unrest. I thought this was the Midwest, not the Middle East?

Okay, 8.4% is a big paycut. Huge. But the unions might even be willing to accept that, were it not for the rest of his proposal. You see, the rest of the proposal would demolish every right that unions have fought for over the past century. Under his plan, unions would lose ALL of their collective bargaining rights, with the exception of base salary. Issues of benefits, working conditions, overtime, etc. would no longer be on the table. And raises beyond the consumer price index would require a referendum, and we can all imagine how that's going to go. And none of this impacts the current budget. This is union-busting, pure and simple. Scott Walker is trying to make real a Republican wet dream to wipe out the major organizational base of their opponent.

Oh, but I lied up above. I said it would impact all public employees, but that's not true. You see, state troopers, police officers, and firefighters would be exempt from these changes. Why, because they're more important than teachers, nurses, prison guards, and other state employees? No, because the Milwaukee firefighters and police unions, along with the troopers' union, were the only unions in WI to support Walker in the gubernatorial election. Yes, it's just that blatant.

Needless to say, unions are irate. Over the past week, tens of thousands of people have been gathering at the capitol each day to protest and to make their voices heard during committee hearings. But the Republicans have continued to claim that there is no room for negotiation and therefore have largely refused to negotiate the terms of this bill. So yesterday, the Senate Democrats made a bold move: they left the state.

The Wisconsin State Senate has 33 seats, of which 19 are currently held by Republicans and 14 are held by Democrats. Senate rules require that a quorum of at least 20 Senators be present in order for a vote to occur. Republicans had repeatedly refused to negotiate the bill, knowing that they had the votes in the bag. So the Democrates left. And they didn't just leave the capitol, or the city--they left the state and are now beyond the reach of the State Troopers, who were otherwise being sent out to find them. The Democrats' hope is that by delaying the vote, Republicans will have to come back with a better bill; meanwhile, more people will get a chance to have their voices heard.

Was this move smart? I don't know. It's certainly not going to win any friends from moderates, and it's giving the right all sorts of ammunition. But I'm not sure the Dems had much choice--this seemed to be the only way they could have any say at all in this debate. And I will say this--it was brave. This was not a move for the squeamish. There was no room for waffling. It was all or nothing--one Senator caving to pressure means the vote can go on. This is solidarity. For realz.

And lest you think that only the Democrats are pulling unusual and perhaps less-than-honorable tactics, the State Assembly was scheduled to convene at 5:00 tonight to discuss the bill. But Assembly Republicans started the meeting early and began a voice vote before Democrats could reach the floor. This meant that the bill could no longer be changed and no new amendments could be introduced. After much, much argument, the Republicans finally relented and reversed the decision. They'll reconvene on Tuesday.

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If you made it through all of that, congratulations. But here's what I couldn't find a way to say in all of that synopsis: I AM ANGRY. So, so angry about all of this. And frustrated. And distraught. This is my home. This bill affects family members, friends, and the communities in which I grew up and went to college. If this passes, it will have a huge lasting impact on the state of Wisconsin. And that is my immediate concern. This is my home. These are my people. And I really, really wish that I could be in Madison right now, raising my voice with thousands of other people who care deeply about the future of the state.

Wisconsin has a long, proud progressive heritage that goes beyond the Republican/Democrat divide. But the current government took its victory as a mandate to implement whatever changes they wanted. And they thought we wouldn't fight back. But we are proud, and we are scrappy. Those of you on the coasts may disdain Wisconsin as part of "flyover territory," but I betcha don't know that we have one of the best educational systems in the country, we were the first state to allow public workers to unionize, and we were the first state to outlaw discrimination against gays. And I don't know what the end result is going to be in all of this, but I do know this: Wisconsin progressives are a powerful force, and even if you knock us down, we will get back up over, and over, and over again. This fight is far from over. Bring it, Tea Party.

Oh, and by the way, to all of the WI legislators in favor of this bill: please go visit all your K-12 teachers and thank them for helping you get the education to get to this point in your career. And then explain to them why you want to cut their pay and steal their voice. But don't be surprised if you don't get a warm and fuzzy welcome.