It's just this hard when I try to answer the question: Why do older Oklahomans need lawyers? The answers are important enough that they will be a discussion topic of this year's Senior Day at 9 a.m. March 25 in the House Chamber at the Capitol. The following is a preview of some of the answers for review: We can all agree that older Oklahomans need medical care. But even the best care is worthless if an older patient can't drive to the doctor for ongoing treatment because his or her car has been wrongfully seized in a debt dispute. Therefore, lawyers are part of the prescription for regular medical care for many of the 600,000 Oklahomans age 60 and older. Another example: if a doctor treats an elderly patient for a lung ailment, the doctor's treatment will be undone and he will see the patient again and again, if the patient is sent home to an unheated apartment. Lawyers know how to make landlords heat apartments so the medical treatment can stick. (By the way, a May 16, 2001, article in The New York Times reports on a program at Boston Medical Center providing a walk-in legal clinic in the hospital to help fight their patients' legal and administrative battles.) We also can agree that older Oklahomans - like all citizens - have rights to control their health care until they become incapacitated or these rights are transferred to another by legal document or process. "Old" is not a legal classification that results in automatic loss of these rights. Moreover, having an old parent does not automatically confer on children the right to make the parents' health care choices. It follows that an important role lawyers provide for aging Oklahomans is not only to create rights - transferring documents such as durable powers of attorney and guardianship orders, but also to monitor their use. In family situations, for example, lawyers must ensure that powers of attorney and guardianships are used to serve only the person transferring or losing rights. They are not to be used to help a family "manage" their mother or help a doctor or nursing home get permission for a pill or procedure they feel is in the best interest of a patient. Good news: Oklahoma now has a Public Guardianship Program, albeit unfunded, that will supply lawyers to perform this rights-monitoring process Oklahoma grandparents should be able to enjoy their grandchildren, not raise them. But owing to the social problems of divorce and drug use, grandparents are increasingly being called on to raise their grandchildren because of missing parents. Adding to the physical, emotional and financial burden they take on, grandparents face legal problems. All the decisions parents made without a second thought now require evidence of legal authority when made by grandparents.

Can lawyers help grandparents with guardianship issues?

After his cousin Joe dies , Layne Vassimer and his girlfriend Macy , along with their friends Stephen , Maurice , Iris and Katrina , decide to clean up Joe's house with the intention of selling it . When they see it for the first time , they discover the house completely covered in plates of iron armor . The group also finds crop circles in the nearby cornfield . When Iris , one of their friends , suddenly disappears they realize something is really wrong . During a blackout , the house is attacked by aliens , who had previously killed Joe and abducted Iris . The group figures out the aliens are allergic to iron , Joe had covered the house in it to keep them out . They attempt to fight the aliens off , but the house is eventually blown up with Layne , Macy , and Katrina the only survivors . In the end , they drive off , listening to the radio . They hear a news report stating that the blackout they experienced affects five western states and parts of Canada . They also hear that people everywhere are being attacked by '' strange creatures . ''

Where they the only or the first people to experience such a problem?

A government-sponsored coup last year made Bruce Iwasaki and Neal Dudovitz the kings of Los Angeles County's federally funded legal aid community. The two men emerged atop a changed landscape that resulted from a decade of begging for a share of shrinking public dollars doled out by an unsympathetic GOP-controlled Congress. That era was capped in 1998, when the Legal Services Corp. forced 275 legal aid providers nationwide to combine into 179. To comply with the orders from their main funding source, a new species of poverty lawyer emerged - a tech-savvy and button-down breed who swapped neighborhood walkin offices for toll-free phone lines, self-help kiosks and Internet access to legal advice. While some organizations made the dramatic change look effortless, for others, it did not come easy. And few programs provide more dramatic illustrations of the promise and pitfalls of government-funded legal services than Los Angeles County's two largest providers of federally funded services - Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and Pacoima-based Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County. From his offices in Koreatown, Iwasaki, a soft-spoken former O'Melveny & Myers attorney, quietly engineered a merger between a much smaller Legal Aid Society of Long Beach and his program, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. The merger was completed peacefully within a year of the federal order. Today, the programs operate seamlessly, offering new innovations - including toll-free multilingual phone advisers, expanded hours for domestic-violence clinics, and renewed immigration and consumer aid - built on the foundations of the old program. The organization is Los Angeles' largest government-funded group, with a budget of $11 million leveraged into $40 million in legal services to the poor.
Which organization is Los Angele's largest government-funded group?