I was surprised. I am appalled. My wife and I decided to go for a walk around the neighborhood and what I saw was extremely disturbing. Workers from Lowe’s were installing windows in one of my neighbors homes and did not take any precautions what so ever to comply with lead safe renovation.

On April 22nd, the EPA’s new lead safe renovator laws went into effect requiring contractors who work on homes built prior to 1978 take precautions to safeguard homeowners against lead poisoning. To be certified, contractors must complete a day long course on lead safe renovation and use lead safe practices to contain lead dust.

Lead was a common paint additive prior to 1978 and high levels of lead contamination have caused people to become ill and for children to develop cognitive disabilities. Especially at high risk are children and women who may be pregnant. The federal government requires lead safe renovation on all homes with lead paint levels of 0.5% or more to go through strict containment procedures. For 49 of the 50 states, there is a readily available test on the market that will tell renovators if lead levels are high enough to require that lead safe renovator practices must be used. Wisconsin lawmakers decided to make compliance even more difficult and Wisconsin is the only state in the country to require lead safe renovations where lead levels are higher than 0.06%. The technology is not yet available to make a commercially available and economically affordable test that will record lead levels that low. This means that legitimate, law abiding contractors must either purchase a $40,000 machine to test lead levels or they must assume lead is present and take precautions accordingly.

Lowe’s is not one of those law abiding contractors.

Last month I warned of this in my column. I wrote that there will be some contractors who simply ignore the laws rather than deal with the approximately $100 per window cost that contractors will have to bear. It was my assessment at that time that it would be the small, unlicensed Mom and Pop operations that happen to own a truck and a ladder and masquerade as legitimate contractors who would ignore the laws. It was those unlicensed businesses, I contended, that would continue to sell windows at the same market price as they always had, while legitimate contractors who had taken the courses, acquired the certifications, purchased the equipment, and used lead safe renovation techniques would be at a disadvantage.

Well I was right — sort of. I say sort of because the first contractor I saw violate this law was Lowe’s.

I did not expect to see a “Lowe’s Installation in Progress” sign in front of one of my neighbors home with workers slamming in windows without any roping off of the job site or any plastic containment barriers.

Having taken the courses and incurred the expenses to become a Lead Safe Renovator, I was appalled to see installers ignoring all safety requirements in a home with two small children. Lead poisoning is not a funny little game. It is a serious problem requiring painful chelation therapy for anyone who has been adversely affected by high lead levels. Even then, the damage done by lead poisoning may not be reversible. It is unconscionable for a contractor to cut corners to safe a few dollars when children are standing nearby watching the installation and playing in the work zone. To see a renovator who so blatantly ignores these rules when children and women of child bearing age are nearby is mind-blowingly irresponsible.

But never, never in a million years, would I have expected one of my favorite home improvement stores to be utilizing such unsafe practices and putting homeowners, children and even possibly babies inutero at danger. I am saddened to see that Lowe’s would use such irresponsible practices to make a buck.

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Until recently, I can’t say that I have felt any sense of solidarity for immigrant protesters over the past few years. In fact, they’ve sickened me. Taking advantage of our rights to peaceful protest as American citizens while sporting Mexican flags was the reason for my disdain. After all, if you don’t love our country, there’s no one forcing you to stay. If you love another country more than ours, go back and fly your flag there.

But that is changing.

For the first time ever, I saw footage of pro-immigrant protesters carrying the American flag at Mitchell Park this past weekend. To me that meant something. It meant they want to stand with us instead of simply taking advantage of all that is good with America while bearing none of the responsibility.

What a breath of fresh air. What a weight off of all of our collective shoulders. I know many people feel the same as I do. They don’t object to people from other countries coming to America but they sure as hell don’t want to put up with having to see others whine that their American rights are being trampled as they fly the flag of another country. I mean really, if you want to live by the rules and laws of another country then you really ought to go back from where you came.

Now I realize that some will say that this isn’t the way a good liberal things. My response to those folks — get your head screwed on right and if you don’t love this country, if you cannot embrace it warts and all, if you don’t feel the same patriotism that I feel when I see the flag, or a copy of our constitution or bill of rights, then really, just leave. Get out. Liberalism never has meant an abandonment of American principles or an abandonment of patriotism or American loyalty. Liberalism is a respect for our Bill of Rights. Liberalism is a respect for our flag and all that it represents. Liberalism is what has made America great.

Our flag represents all that is right with our country. It represents where we have come from. It represents where we will go.

When someone flies our flag it tells me that they share our values. It tells me that they are part of a collective “us”.

So I feel heartened. I feel proud. I feel as though these immigrant groups should have been standing with me all along and only recently have they embraced our country as their own. As long as they embrace our country as their own, they should be afforded the rights of Americans, and yes, that includes the right to protest peacefully.

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Sometimes I hear things that are so ridiculous that they bear addressing. Such was a poorly written and poorly thought out column I read this morning. The column lambasted liberals and Democrats for playing divisive politics and not working with Republicans. He claimed that while Democrats wanted a cohesive and cordial bipartisan relationship with Republicans, they offered the opposite.

But what about the facts?

There was nothing cohesive or cordial about the joke that the Republicans played. Over a year of stringing democrats along in the interest of “bipartisanship” the Democrats finally realized it was all just a scam. By getting nothing done for so long, dems looked ineffective and it wasn’t until the cloture vote on health care reform that (by the way the Republicans used several times when Clinton was in office) the dems got anything done. The big problem was that the Dems didn’t realize from the get go that the Republicans had no interest in working with them — the GOP was and is more interest in power than actually having to govern. One-upsmanship is their motto and it’s petty and irresponsible.

But boo-hoo, the tea party folks, who apparently make up a whole 18% of the population, say — why hasn’t Obama been able to do in one year what took George Bush and his tea party allies eight years to screw up? Although Bush was able to create the Great Recession turning unparralleled prosperity into economic despair in 8 years, how is it that Obama can’t turn economic despair into prosperity in just one year? Huh. What do you suppose causes that?

As for name calling, give it a rest. It was the conservatives that started calling Obama names like Hitler, throwing out accusations of socialism and communism and even using photoshop to make him look like an African witch doctor, bone in hair and all. And using a soviet sickle substituted for letters in our President’s name? Please. Yeah, it’s all the liberals fault right?

As for wealth redisribution, it is the poor and middle class who have had their wealth redistributed away from them. The rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer and that happened under the watchful eye of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

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Tomorrow is the big day — April 22nd, the day that the new EPA rules on lead safe renovating go into effect. This will be a challenge for many contractors country-wide but Wisconsin renovators will have an even tougher go of it because legislators, who clearly know nothing about renovating, have decided to make it even tougher for contractors to do things right and make a decent living.

The US Environmental Protection Agency is making it really difficult on renovators. There is a special exhaustive process that must be taken by contractors to ensure that an area they work on is not contaminated by lead dust. The problem is that many of the problems that have happened in the past were done by contractors — the problems of the past were caused by homeowners (who are exempted from the new law) and landlords looking for a quick fix.

Now lead poisoning is a real problem and the EPA recognizes that. They set a standard so that any home built prior to 1978 must be tested for lead paint. If the area to be renovated has more than 0.5% of lead paint in it, lead safe renovator practices must be applied. Compliance requires each contractor to spend about a thousand dollars per crew on education and basic supplies, but each job they sell will now cost a contractor several hundred dollars in supplies just to do their job to the letter of the law. There is an exception in 49 of the 50 states however — if a standardized test which you can buy at most hardware stores for just $20 shows the area is negative for lead paint, the lead safe renovation time and cost do not apply. Many homes, even homes built prior to 1978 will test negative as not ALL homes built prior to 1978 contain lead paint.

Here’s the rub — Wisconsin decided to get tough on contractors. The Wisconsin state requirement is that anyone with more than 0.06% of lead in the area to be renovated must apply all lead safe renovator processes to each job. The average cost to the contractor is about $100 per window. The problem is, that homes CANNOT test out of this unless a costly lab process is done to assess whether lead of those small amounts is present. For instance, an x-ray machine that can test for these amounts is over $40,000 each. You can contract with a lab to have it done, but they will test the job on their schedule and when they can come out to a customers home.

How is a legitimate contractor going to price out a job in Wisconsin? They don’t know if they have to charge to cover their costs of lead safe renovating or not. Contractors will take one of two approaches. One, they will simply assume that lead of those levels is present and apply the process for lead safe renovating to all jobs prior to 1978. The alternative is that many contractors, in order to stay competitive with the many people in the industry who lack the proper licenses in the first place, will simply not use lead safe renovating processes.

Wisconsin legislators should do the common sense thing and suspend the stricter laws that Wisconsin renovators must comply with until such time that a commercially available test that can measure lead amounts as small as 0.06% are available on the market. If they do not, more contractors than not will be ignoring the new lead safe renovator requirements.

Wisconsin has chosen to institute two new fees for contractors already struggling to make a living. One requires you to first pass a nearly $300 all day course before the government takes their fee, and the other one appears to be just a fee for fees sake.

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Oh brother — I’ve heard it all.

Now the State Senate has passed legislation to outlaw schools from having indian mascots.

I understand that we ought not be insensitive but some of these mascots have been around for many decades. It’s not like all these schools have names that are ethnic slurs. Someone, please, enlighten me as to why we need this new law.

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Dear Tea Party Activist,

I get it, you’re angry. What I’d like to know is how you managed to get so much media attention. After all, according to a poll by the New York Times, this ‘massive up-swelling of political activism’ of yours is just 18% of the population. Compared to the 53% of the population that supported President Obama during the election, only 7% of you think he’s doing well.

Now I’m not a mathematician, but it strikes me that the attention should be on the guy who won 53% of popular support not the 18% who are angry.

Another thing that I’m really not horribly perplexed about but the national media appears to be completely flummoxed about is that you claim you don’t want to be a new political party. Now I get that. Every person I’ve talked to describes themselves as a conservative but doesn’t want to be called a Republican. However, all of the tea party people I have met call President Obama a socialist, some even call him a fascist, and at the same time, they almost all vote for exclusively Republicans. In fact, only 32.9% of Americans are Republicans.

Now this “movement” that we’re all being told by the media is serious and something we should all take notice of, started right after President Barack Obama took office. Yeah, I get it. You’re angry that you lost. You’re angry that the guy you wanted didn’t win. A lot of people weren’t happy when former President George W. Bush didn’t win but the media didn’t say that they were part of a massive movement. They were part of a minority and were with the party that didn’t win, just as you are now.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that since 73% of you are self described “conservatives”, that you didn’t vote for the President in the first place. After all, it’s pretty clear to most folks that “conservative” is the same as “republican” these days. Cry foul all you want, but the rest of us aren’t dumb.

So what’s your goal here? It’s pretty clear where you are politically. Heck, 63% of you look to Fox News to give you your political insights and one of your favorites is inflammatory teavangelist Glenn Beck. And yes, it’s pretty clear the vast majority of us now that Fox News is a Republican mouthpiece.

One other thing that throws me for a loop is how anyone claims that racism isn’t part of your movement. The fact is the major policy initiative of Barack Obama was also the same policy initiative that Bill Clinton tried, but failed, to pass and that is health care reform. Popular signs at your rallys have compared Obama to Hitler and some tea party folk have even called for the President to be assassinated. A tea party fundraiser letter showed a photoshopped image of President Obama as a pimp and one of the tea party attack images during the health care debate was of the President as a witch doctor with bones in his hair and the Soviet hammer and sickle used to spell out ObamaCare. Now I can’t help but notice that 89% of you are white and you defend your more aggressive attacks against Obama (who supported the same type of policies that Clinton did) by saying that the fact that President Obama is black “has nothing to do with your discontent”. At the same time, 52% of you think that “too much is being made of the problems of black Americans”.

I hate to break it to the 18% of you who are part of this “uprising”, but we really weren’t born yesterday.

Now I know that you’re marketing yourselves as a broad spectrum of the American people but the vast majority of people I have seen in these tea party rally photos are white men. In fact, 59% of you are men.

The one connection I’m not getting here is the whole evangelical christian connection. 39% of you describe yourself as evangelical christians. There seems to be a correlation. Ok, well maybe one other thing — 58% of you are gun owners. What’s the deal there?

Now on how the economy is faring, that’s your big issue right? I’m having a tough time understanding why there was no tea party movement when Republican Ronald Reagan was driving up the deficit to record numbers. When Democrat Bill Clinton was in office the Reagan deficit was turned into a surplus through some really tough cuts in government spending but you didn’t rally behind him. Then when Republican G.W. Bush was President the deficit rose again to record number and there was no tea party screams of socialism or calls for impeachment from you tea party folk.

So how is this economy affecting you?

Well it turns out that over 20% of you are making over $100,000 a year. Not bad coin. Remind me again, how are the Obama policies hurting you? It turns out that 62% of you think that Medicare and Social Security are just fine entitlements. Could that be that 75% of you are over 45 years old and 32% of you are already retired?

For the 6% of you who are unemployed, I get it. You want change. You would like to have hope. You are hurting now and you don’t feel the government is being of any help. Now I’m going to share a personal story. A good friend of mine, a self-described conservative who argues for all things Republican whenever he can, just went for two years without a job. Fortunately, and I’m happy for him, he found a job and recently celebrated receiving a pay check. But for the majority of those two years he was the beneficiary of unemployment compensation, and yes, that’s a liberal program. He and his family were also the beneficiaries of a liberal health care program here in Wisconsin called Badgercare. Still, he argued against all things liberal while cashing his checks he got for doing nothing, and caring for his family’s healthcare needs through a government run free program.

I’d ask you how he reconciles that but since so many of you are making six figure incomes and still believe the world is coming to an end, I don’t reckon’ I’ll get an answer I’ll be able to reconcile as coherent.

Apparently the south is angrier than the rest of the country since 36% of you are from the south. I understand that the south is a place where discontent is almost cultural. After all, it was the south that ceceded from the union back in the mid-19th century and it was in the south that civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was slain as well as where Democratic President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I’m just hopeful that President Obama doesn’t take any chances with security since it turns out that 58% of you have a gun in the house.

But back to finances — 52% of you say your own taxes are fair. So what’s the gripe? Now 93% of you think the economy is in bad shape. Well that’s no shock. Most of us in the general public think the economy isn’t great but I’d put money on the belief that most of the rest of us think that things are getting better. I can say things are getting better with my business and since my Republican friend just got a job, I would say things are getting better for him too. But are things really all that bad if 20% of you are making over $100,000 per year? Really now — are you concerned that you’ll have to take one less cruise this year? Maybe you’ll have to cut short that two week vacation to Cozumel?

Well I guess I’d have to admit that the more I think about it, and even as I write this, the wackier it seems to me that there is even 18% of the population who is bent out of shape enough to protest.

One thing that is becoming abundantly clear is that it’s really not a popular uprising of new people concerned about the democratic process. What it really is, is a bunch of people who didn’t get their way in the last election who are looking for an outlet to claim that they’re victims.

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