We’re Going To Need A Bigger Net

Image via Wikipedia

If by any chance you missed Hardball tonight, Think Progress has the video wherein Frank Gaffney maintains that President Obama speaks in code. See, when he says, “respect”, in regard to Muslims it really means “submission”.  He’s telling Muslim nations – in code – that we’ll submit to them. Yeah. That’s what Gaffney said. There’s a lot of mental illness going around on the right this season. 

Between Michelle Bachman, Newt, Michael Steele and the rest of the gang, I’m obligated to add a “Batshit Crazy” label for this blog.

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Dog Day Afternoon

Yesterday afternoon my sister and I set out for Brooklyn to interview with a dog, as mentioned below. I have to tell you all about the place that we went to do this. It was a lot more interesting than we could have imagined.

All we knew was that we were going to see a beautiful cream color 2 and a half year old Shar Pei that we’d found on Petfinder at a privately run shelter in Brooklyn. On Saturday afternoon the Windsor Terrace neighborhood where Sean Casey Animal Rescue is located was pretty quiet. Except in the immediate vicinity of the shelter.  Two regulation size storefronts seem to comprise both the shelter and Hamilton Dog House, which sells pet supplies. The pet supply store part also serves as housing for a few cats, birds and reptiles, including at least 3 free range Sulcata tortoises, the smallest of which has a shell at least a foot square. They wandered around the place at will and everyone was careful to step around them. And by everyone I mean a lot of people. The activity spilled out onto the street.  People and pets occupied the bench out front, were conversing on the sidewalk and an alleyway next to the building was being used for a training session. There was an impressive amount of staff, including volunteers and there were people buying supplies, adopting animals and I think there were some just stopping by. In the center of this controlled chaos was Sean Casey himself. At the time we had no idea that he and his shelter were kind of famous. Turns out they’ve sent three dogs to the Animal Planet show, Underdog to Wonderdog. I’d even seen one of the episodes, but I didn’t remember anything about it until after we got home and I saw the links on the shelter’s website.  We had no idea at the time we were having a brush with celebrity.

We did meet Violet, the dog we went to see and she was just as beautiful as her photo and I fell in love immediately, but she’s not the one we went home with. We were also introduced to Lola, a six year old Shar Pei. Given the totality of our situation, including Stevie’s condition, the quieter, older dog seemed the better choice.  It was my sister who came to that conclusion first, but I could see she was right. It was hard to leave either of them behind and if anyone, anywhere near Brooklyn is looking for a gorgeous blonde Shar Pei, Violet will make a wonderful addition to someone or some family’s life.

Sean Casey works fast, but thoroughly. Once we’d decided what we wanted to do we were given an application to fill out. Three personal and at least one veterinary references had to be given. And they called every one of them.

Lola bonded with us on the way home by showering us with kisses, putting the car in neutral twice while it was moving and somehow or other undoing my sister’s seatbelt. We didn’t get home until about eight last night. Lola met Mr.Yenta. He was sound asleep when we got in, but Lola didn’t feel that was any impediment to getting acquainted. Once he was fully awake he pronounced her the perfect dog for us. When it comes to the cats she seems to be willing to play with them, but since they don’t seem so inclined that’s OK too. We’re still learning about her. She’s well behaved but seems to know absolutely no commands. She does respond to “No!”, thank God, but sit, stay, lie down – nothing. She just looks at you like, “I’d like to help you out but I have no idea what you’re trying to say. So far, everything’s going well, for us, for Lola and the cats.

We had a hardly used dog bed. She likes it.

You can’t really see it well here, but she has a pink camouflage collar. We thought it was feminine and yet little edgy. There’s a matching leash, of course.

Outreach Fail

Image by feastoffools via Flickr

Outreach to Hispanic voters. Ur doin it wrong.

John McCain sounds angry and frustrated that, despite the risks he took in pushing immigration reform, Hispanic voters flocked to Democrat Barack Obama in last year's presidential contest. McCain's raw emotions burst forth recently as he heatedly told Hispanic business leaders that they should now look to Obama, not him, to take the lead on immigration.

The meeting in the Capitol's Strom Thurmond Room on March 11 was a Republican effort led by Sens. McCain of Arizona, John Thune of South Dakota, and Mel Martinez of Florida to reach out to Hispanics. But two people who attended the session say they were taken aback by McCain's anger.

While it may be true that McCain has been more reasonable than some other Republicans on the issue of immigration he’s not thinking this thing out too clearly. If he was, he might see that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for people to vote to empower the party that had just designated their entire ethnic group as the scapegoat of the year. And McCain wasn’t exactly Mr. Maverick during campaign season, was he?  In any case, this isn’t going to help much:

McCain's message was obvious, the source continued: After bucking his party on immigration, he had no sympathy for Hispanics who are dissatisfied with President Obama's pace on the issue. "He threw out [the words] 'You people -- you people made your choice. You made your choice during the election,' " the source said. "It was almost as if [he was saying] 'You're cut off!' We felt very uncomfortable when we walked away from the meeting because of that."

I’m no politician but just for starters I’m guessing it’s almost always a good idea to stay away from using the term, “you people” when addressing a particular demographic group. Read the whole thing. It’s really interesting.

Sad Cat News

We got the pathology report on Stevie. Not good. Not good at all. It’s cancer, it will recur and probably pretty soon. With radiation he has a few months to a year. Without, just a few months. The doctor doesn’t even recommend chemo. He wants us to see a veterinary oncologist, but he’s basically talking quality of life at this point and not so much quantity. I’m not inclined to torture him with treatments that aren’t going to cure him or extend decent quality of life for long. He’s had a good one except for a couple of rough patches.

He got dumped in our neighborhood when he was just a tiny kitten and wound up in our garage. My son and a friend found him there. It took a while but we – mostly Mr. Yenta, the cat whisperer among us – convinced him that he’d be better off living inside with us. They’ve been best friends ever since. They have a lot of personality traits in common. Mr. Yenta doesn’t know about this development yet. When he’s back and I tell him it’s going to be quite a blow.

When he was a couple of years old he developed a polyp in his ear that had to come out, and that was a painful surgery to recover from. But he did and he rose pretty quickly through our ranks to become the senior cat. That came with a lot of perks and he enjoyed them. Just recently, through attrition, he became the senior pet. The last dog who was here before him passed away last fall. In fact, we are without a dog at all for the first time in memory right now. At thirteen, Stevie’s not really a very old cat, but he’s certainly not young either. Some of them live a lot longer than Stevie is likely to, but a lot don’t make it past fifteen. Things could have gone a lot differently for an abandoned gray tabby, not to mention that he could have been found by a different type of teenage boy, so he’s really done OK in life.

On the dog front, we have an appointment, made before we got this news, to interview with a dog at a shelter in Brooklyn this afternoon. Now the timing doesn’t seem so good, but we’ll keep the appointment. The dog is going to be cat tested while we’re there to see and we’ll just be a little more hypercritical about it than usual. Usually I just assume that everyone will manage to work out an acceptable pecking order and that’s what’s always happened, but we really have to be a little more protective of Stevie’s comfort than that under the circumstances. The doggie appointment is a whole new experience. I don’t recall ever going looking for any pet before. My experience is that the house will fill up with animals almost on its own if you allow it, but no dog has turned up this time. I’ll update later if possible.

Hats Off to Iowa

Image via Wikipedia

If there was an award for Most Valuable State, I think Iowa should get it for last year and this one. They pretty much gave us our president. This president. The one that people like. So many people said they decided to vote for Barack Obama in their primaries after he won Iowa. I was one of those. It was only after Iowa that I thought, hey, this might just be possible. That turned out well, so there’s reason to have high hopes that the overturning of the ban on gay marriage will hold up as well.

Iowa has a habit of doing cool things, so this isn’t really new. They’re just not all flashy and braggy about it. But Iowa has a long history of being a cool state.

Iowa has enforced its constitution in a series of landmark court decisions, including those that struck down slavery (in 1839) and segregation (cases in 1868 and 1873), and upheld women’s rights by becoming the first state in the nation to allow a woman to practice law, in 1869.

Iowa Representative Steve King worries that Iowa will become a “Gay marriage Mecca”. There are a lot of worse things to be. In this economy being a Mecca for almost anything is a good thing. Enjoy it while it lasts. Eventually most states will have it, but right now there are opportunities for wedding chapels, catering halls, formal wear and all the other stuff that goes with weddings.

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Throwing Rover from the Gravy Train

Image by CREAMASTER via Flickr

The fact that pets are feeling the recession, and especially the foreclosure crisis isn’t new news. When people lose their homes, whether through foreclosure or eviction, sometimes they’re forced into housing that won’t accommodate pets. It’s a particularly sad part of a terrible situation. But it seems from this article in the New York Times, there are some newly not quite so rich New Yorkers who might be giving up their pets a little precipitously.

It’s happening to dogs all over Manhattan. Jennifer Bristol, director of operations at the private shelter Animal Haven downtown, said that she was seeing more surrenders of pure-bred dogs that typically cost owners more than $1,000. In one recent week, she received a Pekingese, a bulldog and a Shih-Tzu, all by owners who “definitely had means,” she said.

You have to wonder how these people think that the permanently non-wealthy afford to have pets at all. I’m not saying it’s always easy. Stevie’s surgery definitely set this household back. Over the thirteen years he’s lived with us he’s had two big medical expenses and that’s two more than either of the other cats. He’s really been pretty economical once you amortize. You can also buy pet health insurance which will defray part of those expenses and it’s a whole lot cheaper than human insurance. Of course pets have to be fed, but I bet that there are much better deals on pet food than you get at the specialty shops. It might be hard to believe, but people had dogs before there was doggy daycare. You can walk your own dog if necessary. Dogs don’t really care about dressing for success by and large and will even settle for inexpensive leashes and collars with barely a whimper.

It’s not that I want to judge people who are making what may be a very painful decision – I’m just saying that it sounds like there are some who are kind of panicking at the first sign of not having a ton of money. It’s those people I’d like to remind that it’s your dog who’s mostly likely to love you when you’re down and out.

We Bow to Cadie, Our AI Overlordess

Cadie (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity) lives and blogs and vlogs and she does so much more than that. Might as well explore everything you can about her because it seems she’ll be running a lot of things from now on. Might as well get used to it.