The Oklahoman with a truly grim Christmas morning read:

Other workers at the state Department of Human Services have been caught physically abusing children in shelters, taunting mentally disabled adults, stealing from the elderly or sexually harassing co-workers.

These people are the upstanding citizens we employ in the State of Oklahoma:

One worker was disciplined for instigating fights between teenage girls at a group home.

Workers at the state’s two centers for the mentally disabled have been disciplined for cruelly teasing residents, falling asleep on the job, showing up drunk to work and spending time on a state computer looking up porn.

Oh, and sexting:

One employee was having an affair with a co-worker and misusing the state computer to send her sexually explicit messages. He was caught when he emailed a sex message to a supervisor by mistake.

The story doesn’t include this photograph of Serenity Deal that’s included in the Tulsa World’s copy of the article:

The picture was taken after Deal was returned to foster care by her father after an overnight visit. Both the father and Serenity said the injuries came because he dropped her. DHS eventually placed Serenity with her father full time, leading to her death.

Forgive me for linking to Deadspin, but it’s a decent article on putting so much energy into keeping fans apart from one another and not enough keeping them away from the players.

Interestingly, Tulsa had a similar incident this year.

Amazing

Wake up and fight

Pat Forde at Yahoo:

When I was working for ESPN.com in 2008, we arranged an all-access piece with Tulsa for its game at Arkansas. Graham was the coach at Tulsa and the Golden Hurricane were undefeated and ranked 19th in the country at the time – largely because Gus Malzahn was orchestrating an explosive offense. I had full access to Tulsa starting about 24 hours before kickoff – team walk-through at the stadium, meetings at the hotel, on the sideline during the game, in the locker room both pregame and postgame.

Leading up to the game, Graham made multiple mentions of his faith. He led the team in the Lord’s Prayer before taking the field. And when a defensive back blew an assignment on the first series, Graham F-bombed him as viciously as any coach I’ve seen since Bob Knight.

OK, so he’s hardly the first coach to play both sides of the piety-profanity line. What happened postgame is where I lost respect for him. When Tulsa lost a game it should have won (30-23), I was stopped at the entrance to the locker room by a nervous graduate assistant.

“You can’t come in,” he said.

“Yes, I can,” I said. “We already worked this out. Win or lose, I’m in the locker room.”

“No,” the GA said. “Coach Graham doesn’t want you in here.”

The whole thing is a devastating must-read.

Only a year after making his dream to coach at BCS program come true, Todd Graham is bolting for another “dream,” coaching Arizona State. Kicker? He broke the news to his team and staff via text message:

“I have resigned my position at Pitt in the best interest of my family to pursue the head coaching position at Arizona State,” Graham said. “Coaching there has always been a dream of ours and we have family there. The timing of the circumstances have prohibited from telling you this directly. I now am on my way to Tempe to continue those discussions. God Bless. Coach Graham.”

I’m sure having to confront recruits and assistants he lured to Pitt and tell them he was leaving after a year is the more realistic reason for why he sent the text message.

Campus Crime Watch report:

While on routine patrol, an officer observed a vehicle parked in a fire lane and issued a citation. The student returned and got into the car and drove aggressively behind the officer. The student revved his engine and excessively accelerated from a stop sign squealing tires. Due to the erratic driving, the officer was not able to make contact with the student, however the vehicle information was documented and the vehicle was confirmed to be a students. A copy of this report has been sent to the Office of Student Affairs.

If TheNextWeb wants to look on the bright side of this post by Jon Gruber it’s the fact that they got page views from me they never would have gotten if I didn’t want to gape at their “shit-ass site.”

For fairness’s sake, I loaded the site and it only sent 191 requests and 194.11KB of data taking one minute to load. The first two are pretty comparable for any site that bogs itself down with loads of crap (Huffington Post for instance) but the load time is pretty terrible.

For comparison, this site sent 17 requests and 85.22 KB of data taking 1.13 seconds to load.

Great editorial demanding Randy Edsall be fired before he does anymore damage:

Here’s the real reason Edsall should be fired: He doesn’t get it.

He didn’t get it a year ago, when he didn’t have the class to tell his Connecticut players in person that he was leaving. He didn’t get it when he started spouting off about rules as if he had invented the idea of discipline.

Read the rest, it’s brutal and made me so, so happy.

Two packages shipped to me were delivered to the University of Tulsa’s mail room this morning at 9:46, since then they have been held against their–and my–will. While I have been notified I can claim one package tomorrow morning, the other one still remains in the purgatory mail services subjects deliveries to on a regular basis.

If you live in any on-campus housing, whether its a dorm, greek housing, or apartment, all packages are required to be routed through mail services. Once mail services takes delivery of your package, they have to process it and send you can email, only then can you claim your package from them. This process usually only takes a few hours, but on certain occasions the process can spill over into the next day, if not longer. For instance, one of the packages currently in mail services went undelivered from last Wednesday until today because mail services was closed for Thanksgiving. In other words, one package has been held hostage for half a day, the other has sat around in purgatory for five days.

The draconian and stupid policy that bars packages from being delivered directly to on-campus apartments (while pizzas, chinese food, newspapers, and unsolicited phone books get delivered) stems from the previous package delivery anarchy. Before two years ago, deliveries sometimes came to the apartments, some times they didn’t. Some times the delivery person left a note, some times they didn’t. If they left a note, or if you had a tracking code, you invariably showed up at mail services to claim your package only to be told they hadn’t processed it yet and you’d have to check back. The lack of control created headaches for everyone, so instead of coming up with a sensible policy the University went all in, creating the current mess. Now apartment residents, who could easily take deliveries at their residence and reduce the backlog in mail services, are forced to sit around waiting.

So what’s a sensible alternative? Instead of routing all packages through mail services, the University should treat package deliveries to the apartment the same way they treat regular mail. Unlike the dorms on campus, the apartments have their mail delivered directly by USPS, with any packages too big for the mailboxes being delivered to mail services for processing. Deliveries by UPS and FedEx should be handled in a similar vein. Both companies should attempt one delivery to an on-campus apartment before surrendering the package to mail services. If the resident isn’t home to take possession of the package, mail services accepts the package and the student has to wait for the email. The policy would not only increase delivery speed to on-campus apartments, but would reduce the volume of mail mail services needs to process, especially when they return from vacation or an unexpected closing (like last February’s snow storm that shut down the University for a week).

“My pants don’t fit. Look at this bear!” And yes you can actually buy it.

This video pretty much encapsulates the conflicting issues I have with all the Occupy/99% videos to come out over the last few weeks. It ends with cops ambushing a protester from behind and threatening to tase him when he hasn’t shown any violence or willingness to resist (that we can see).

Yet, the protest itself is idiotic. I get the movement hates big corporations and wants them driven out of existence, but can’t we admit Walmart has done a lot of good for the people Occupiers profess to help? Some mom and pop businesses do indeed close when Walmart comes to town, but Walmart and all the other big box retailers haven’t destroyed the small business environment. Plus, Walmart’s low prices not only help lower class families save money, but it also allows people to spend money elsewhere in town.

Reason.tv has a good video on the “war on Walmart” that’s worth checking out.

Let this be a lesson for everyone: Twilight is bad for your health.

Someone alert Don Quixote! Crawford in an interview with the Canadian paper The Intelligencer:

“Toronto could handle another NHL team — probably two more,” said Crawford. “But there are three NHL teams within 90 minutes of Hartford, plus basketball, football and baseball. Winnipeg proved they were a viable market with quite a few sellouts for their AHL team.

“Here, it would be a tough call. The AHL team (the Connecticut Whale) is averaging about 4,000 and their tickets are 10 bucks. For the NHL to come back, you’d need 15,000 people playing 80 to 100 bucks.

The kicker? Crawford manages rinks in the area and helped organize last year’s outdoor Whalers Hockey Fest. Something tells me Crawford’s off the Christmas card list this year.

1970 marked the 350th anniversary of the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock and like usual the residents of Plymouth, Massachusetts were planning the annual Pilgrim’s Progress festival. The festival included a parade and feast, complete with residents in period clothes. The whole affair was a celebration of American progress. Empire, if you will.

Frank James, a Wampanoag Indian, decided to change the agenda for that year’s Thanksgiving. James and other Indians, including the Narragansets and Passamaquoddies, planned to demonstrate in a “dignified and responsible manner” about the repression and poverty endured by American Indians. ¹

Yet the protest wasn’t going to attract much attention without some theatrics. To help bring more attention to the protest, James invited the American Indian Movement (AIM)–a Minneapolis-based Native rights group that had protested on Mt. Rushmore the same year–to join the protest. By the time the protest started at the foot of Massasoit’s statue, over 200 Indians had assembled. James decried the pilgrims that “stole our corn,” and added, “all that love and brotherhood stuff between Indians and white settlers is a lie!” ² Russell Means, a charismatic leader of AIM, implored the white men to listen

Listen. Listen to us, white men. Plymouth Rock is red. Red with our blood. The white man came here for religious freedom and he has denied it to us. Today you will see the Indian reclaim the Mayflower in a symbolic gesture  to reclaim our rights in this country. ³

Sure enough the group retook the replica Mayflower II moored in the harbor. Once on the ship the group lowered the flag of St. George and symbolically raised an upside down American flag. In a “new kind of Boston Tea Party,” only with real Indians, the group dumped pilgrim mannequins into the harbor. ⁴ After being cleared off the ship by local police officers, the group crashed the feast, overturning tables full of food, and dumped sand on Plymouth Rock. The protests concluded that night with another group sneaking back into the area and painting the Rock red.

One little boy, while watching the Pilgrim procession during the festivities that day, turned to his mother and asked, “Where did all the Indians go?” “They’re not part of this,” the mother replied ⁵

Celebrate Thanksgiving and count your blessings, but remember the cost at which your blessing came.

So asks everybody’s favorite religious idiot Pat Robertson.

Telemarketers are, no surprise, duping caller IDs to get people to pick up the phone. While the article says the issue is mostly confined to landlines, my cell phone gets regular calls from telemarketers, scam artists, and others.

See also: How to get Thomas Home Security to stop calling you.

When I quickly wrote this post the other day I noted that, in addition to the 84 year-old woman pepper-sprayed by Seattle’s finest, they also pepper-sprayed a priest and a three-month pregnant woman. The woman later announced she miscarried due to the injuries she suffered during the protests, which included the pepper-spraying as well as being hit in the stomach on two occasions.

Unfortunately Seattle’s alternative newspaper The Stranger reports that the claims are “increasingly dubious.” According to The Stranger, the woman in question, Jennifer Fox, turned down multiple requests to provide medical records backing up her claims stating she was “too busy” arranging a memorial service for the baby.

If Fox’s story turns out to be false it’s beyond unfortunate. Whether Fox was hoping for attention or just trying to avoid pepper spray, her potential lie undermines the serious issue of excessive police force in relation to the occupy movement.

Seattle pepper-sprayed, among others, an 84 year-old woman, a woman who claims to be two months pregnant, and a priest. Also of note: Obama’s Department of Homeland Security and the FBI apparently had a role in coordinating responses to the protests in 18 cities. Suggestions included showing a massive police force during the evictions (based on whatever legal justification the cities’ could drag up), and conducting the raids when the media was least likely to be present. Hence New York City’s early morning actions. Mike Riggs at Reason with a good response to the whole thing:

The mayors on that conference call are Democrats; the FBI and the DHS are led by Democrats; Obama is a Democrat. The State is not your friend, OWS, it is your master.

Teddy Roosevelt describing the “fun” that was had with a group of beggars during a trip to Italy in December of 1869:

We tossed the cakes to them and I fed them like chickens with small pieces of cake and like chickens they ate it. Mr. Stevens kept guard with a whip with which he pretended to whip a small boy. We made them open their mouths and tossed cake into it. For a ‘Coup de Grace’ we threw a lot of them in a place and a writhing heap of human beings.  We drove on very soon in the moonlight, It was beautiful.…We made the crowds that we gave cake to give three cheers for the U.S.A. before we gave them cake….

From Theodore Roosevelt, Diaries of Boyhood and Youth, page 123.

My dad had two leaf blowers when I was growing up. One was you’re standard electric leaf blower you usually find populating garages across suburbia. The other was one of those gas-powered walk behind blowers that made an exceptional amount of noise and probably infuriated the neighbors. Having been conscripted to help in the leaf removal effort each fall I always appreciated the electric blower, but always wanted to shoot the gas-powered one because it’s ability to make noise was only equaled by its ability to kick up dirt. So I’m not wholly opposed to leaf blowers like some people, rather I’m opposed to stupid leaf blowing. The former is something the University of Tulsa loves to regularly engage in.

Just in the course of the last week I’ve had to put up with the sound of those hideous gas-powered backpack leaf blowers almost every day. This isn’t because the university is removing the fallen leaves, rather it’s because they’re just moving them around. The first instance of this occurred last Thursday when I watched a physical plant employee venture into the courtyard outside my building and start blowing the leaves off the sidewalks. After thirty minutes the employee was content with his work and packed up and left. The leaves promptly returned to where they had come thanks to the moderate wind that have been blowing throughout the day. Yesterday was more of the same, someone showed up, blew the leaves on the grass and then left to do another part of the complex. Today, more of the same. Again, these leaves aren’t being picked up, they’re simply being temporarily moved around. It’s not even like the University planned to mulch them with a mower–the same employee who showed up yesterday mowed before he blew the leaves onto the grass.

If it weren’t for the University’s practice of edging the dead grass in the winter, I’d place their leaf blowing practices at the top of the list of idiotic things I’ve witnessed during my five years on the campus. The practice does, however, get the top spot when it comes to most annoying.

Howard Baldwin, not satisfied with an average of 4,700 per home game this year, is back chasing rainbows and attempting to implant delusions of grander and sugar plum fairies into the minds of Connecticut hockey fans. Want a new arena complex and the NHL by 2017? Howard will do it! If you believe that I still haven’t been unable to unload my ocean front property in Arizona. Call me, it’s heavily reduced.

So what are the issues this time? The biggest is the price tag: $105 million in public dollars. I’m a hockey fan but even I won’t endorse spending money on a new stadium given the record of publicly-financed stadiums. Next? Baldwin wants the NHL to return in six years. Winnipeg opened the MTS Centre in 2004 and saw the NHL return this year–a seven year time span. Howard wants the NHL back in six years and we only have nice pictures of what the new XL Center will look like. With fifteen years of failed attempts at a new arena, do you really think we’ll do it in six?

Like we didn’t see it coming.

How did the child die? The sand she was digging in collapsed in on her. Why did she die? Because she was unsupervised, not because the city uses sand in the park.

Randy Edsall, the man who ditched the UConn football team in Phoenix following their beating by the University of Oklahoma to become head coach at Maryland, is getting a nice serving of humble pie.

In other news, Todd Graham is 4-5 at Pitt this season. Or as they call it in the Big East, competitive.

From a report on a five day operation that arrested over 300 “smurfs:” ¹

No one can explain why meth is so much bigger a problem here than the western half of the state. Agents from over there were blown away by what they saw here.

Shouldn’t we try to figure out an answer to that problem? Then maybe we’d be able to treat the disease and not the symptoms. Or we can just continue making pseudoephedrine-based drugs increasingly hard for the average person to get and hope the methheads just go away.

Getting repeated calls from a number close to (253) 246-8552 or from a spam telemarketing company billing themselves as Thomas Home Security? Adding your number to the Do Not Call list and telling them not to call doing no good? Try this exchange out:

Me: Hello? Who is this and why do you keep calling me?

Him: I’m with Thomas Home Security and I was wondering if you’d be interested in our home security protection plans?

Me: I’d be interested in a house. Do you guys protect cars or will my car alert be sufficient enough because I’ve got everything I own in here and I’d hate for it to disappear.

Him: I’m sorry sir I seem to have got you at a bad time. Good Bye.

Your mileage may vary, but they’ve so far quit calling me.

Surely I can’t be the only one who thinks the answer to the problem isn’t increased enforcement but lower taxes.

A local news report on the “SWAT Olympics” that are being held in Tulsa this week:

Because criminals are more violent and better armed now, SWAT team members are called on more and more to protect innocent citizens. It’s critical their skills are top notch and these challenges are designed to put them to the test.

The funny this is there’s no mention of all the wrong door raids SWAT teams regularly engage in or the fact that the increasingly militarized teams are being called on to serve minor drug warrants in which the threat of violence is barely, if at all, present.

Or to put it another way: A perfectly good town sullied by the University which inhabits it.