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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.
John Fetterman: Too Manly for Pennsylvania. Paid for by the Oz for Senator campaign.
Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.
It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.
You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.
If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.
I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.
Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.
I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.
I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.
When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.
Let there be snark.
if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.
Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.
Why did Dr. Oz lose? well, according to the exit polls, it’s because Fetterman won.
When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.
Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.
So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.
Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.
No one could have predicted…
When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.
Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.
And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.
Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll
ppGaz
I wasn’t sure I’d support it, but my cats have made it clear that they’ll scratch me to within an inch of my life if I don’t.
Sign me up!
Mr Furious
If this doesn’t pass does that mean Ted Stevens will quit? That makes it a tough call for me…
Seriously, this is good.
Krista
A fine idea. I felt bad for all the critters left behind during Katrina. It would break my heart in two if I had to leave Dreyfus behind in circumstances like that. I feel bad enough leaving him in the car when I run into the grocery store…
Andrew
Do it!
And if you want to support pet charities, the Humane Society did a lot of on the ground work after Katrina, and your local shelter can always use money, and more importantly, your time.
Punchy
Halliburton builds the world’s largest animal shelter, Bush hires a dog track owner, a NRA member, and a glue factory CEO to oversee it, and they use the Army Corps of Engineers to design it in a 2 mile-wide flood plain. They decide to house the cats and birds in the same area, the pit-bulls by themselves in a round pen, and pet snakes and rats in harmony in a standard wire fence with 4-inch “holes”. Bush tours the area on a bike, crashes into the monkey pen, gets poo flung on him, curses the project, insults his Korean counterpart by asking “which canine he wanted for dinner”, and then pays The Carlyle Group $8.4 BILLION dollars to shut it down.
Sounds like a plan. Giddy-up.
Mr Furious
Nice rant, Punchy. You can have Dennis Miller’s old job (ie: actually funny, not a partisan hack).
Pb
I’ll support ‘No Pet Left Behind’ sometime after they pass ‘No Poor Person Left Behind’…
tBone
Look, let’s get real here, people: those pets in New Orleans had plenty of time to evacuate. Is it our fault they chose to ignore the warnings and stay behind? No.
Most of them are probably catnip addicts anyway, and they didn’t want to leave because they didn’t want to be too far away from their dealer. They’re getting no sympathy from me.
Lee
While I am a life long pet owner (currently 2 dogs and 2 cats), I’m not sure I can support this bill.
What happens when some shithead with an aggressive dog wants to load it up into the truck/bus and it freaks out and attacks one or more people. Or a dog sees a cat and thinks “SNACK TIME!”. How many people would get displaced if I wanted to rescue my 2 dogs and 2 cats?
A better idea would be to donate to the Human Society or some other organization that is specific for animal rescue.
srv
Those pet owners in NO should be in jail. If you leave a dog in a car, what happens? You expose a dog to a hurricane, and it’s OK?
But I feel confident that our disaster planners can figure out what to do with all these pets during a national disaster.
Krista
(shakes head sadly) Oh John. Poor, sweet John. Don’t you realize? You could put up a post saying that the sky is blue and you’d wind up with over 200 comments of people disagreeing with each other more and more vehemently.
Lee
“But I feel confident that our disaster planners cannot figure out what to do with all these pets during a national disaster.’
Fixed it for you :)
Mr Furious
Good points, Lee.
The Other Steve
I think I support it.
As long as it doesn’t cost me any more money, I think it’s a good idea.
ppGaz
Will black pets be treated the same as the other pets?
Pb
“You’re just jealous ’cause I’m black *and* white” — Bucky the cat
Punchy
Not this time, K. The disagreement isn’t with each other, but with the bill. I FULLY understand people’s trepidation in handing over the welfare of their animals to ANYONE in this Admin short of the WH vetenarian (who specializes in cats, dogs, and oddly, chimps). There is a case to be made about the execution of said bill/plan by these bunch of hacks, most certainly going to be led not by an animal care expert, but by some hedge fund millionare whose only qualification is that he knows what a cat looks like (“four legs and a beak”) and has Animal Planet on his cable package.
Shorter: if you can’t rescue HUMANS (who can speak), animals will be much tougher. But the idea has merit.
tBone
Yes. Unless they’re Arabian horses, in which case they’ll get moved to the front of the line.
Punchy
Just don’t mix the Sunni Arabians with the Shia Arabian horses. And don’t even bother with the Kurdish Arabians…they’ll flee to the north on their own…
rilkefan
Sometimes the sky is black with little white specks, sometimes it’s blue, sometimes I visit the East Coast and it’s white or gray…
Gotta vote for Save The Human Beings First myself, not that I think a human being has more intrinsic value than a cat.
rilkefan
E.g..
Al Maviva
NOLA had an estimated 600,000 pets left behind. While I understand that Punchy thinks that a Democrat can wave a magic wand and make anything happen, it’s not like rescuing and providing for 600,000 pets alongside the rescue of a million people is going to be anything other than a logistical nightmare. You can’t get a bag of dog chow and just throw it out there. You have to worry about point of rescue problems (“sorry ma’am, we’ll come back for you and the cat, your husband and the Labrador are all we have room for on this bird”), human health problems in shelters for those with allergies, feeding and medical care issues for the pets, not to mention sanitation issues involving thousands of humans and animals crammed into small spaces. Then there’s the issue of animal fights and animal bites. Y’all seem to think that Fed.gov is this big mommy that is all knowing and all powerful and can do anything if only you had the right people in leadership positions. It ain’t that way. It’s a big system of systems that can about do large scale rudimentary missions effectively, if they aren’t too complicated. This pet rescue notion has nightmarish potential. Can you imagine what the Superdome would have looked like with 100,000 people, and 60,000 pets wandering around, barking, hissing, chirping, fighting and crapping? I know, it’s easy for you Dems to solve. All it would take is for FEMA to keep 60,000 pet boxes of various sizes handy. And a few bags of Purina All-Purpose Cat/Dog/Iguana/Fish chow. And sufficient kitty litter for 32,000 cats. And veterinary supplies for the diabetic dogs, leukemic cats, and snakes with Depressive disorders. Pre-stored at or near the Superdome. And a similar amount at the Convention Center. In New Orleans. And Birmingham. And Miami. And St. Pete. And Savannah. And Charleston. And Galveston. And Norfolk. And every other place where there just might be a hurricane. Or a flood. Or a rash of tornadoes. Or an Earthquake. Or other natural or man-made disaster.
Dear God. The mind reels.
John, I hope to never read another word from you bitching about the intrusive federal nanny state and it’s cockamamie ideas. Once you assign a duty to the government to risk the lives of rescuers to save animals in natural or man-made disasters – and that’s what this will amount to, a duty to seat dogs on rescue helicopters and cats on buses out of town if the owners so choose – you have lost any standing to criticize any government program for irrationality.
Yeah, I know, I’m a complete dick and a horrible human being, aka a typical Republican, for feeling this way. But sorry, as much as I love my pets, they are still just animals. The pre-existing issues involve a huge logjam in getting basic care to people; health hazards in shelters, insufficient lift (and infrastructure) to rescue people quickly and then take care of them; and servicemembers and other public servants risking their lives to get people out of danger. Adding .6 animals for every 1.0 humans needing rescue and shelter likely means worse care for everybody. This invites disaster.
Punchy
Got a link to that? Didn’t think so. Bet you enjoy putting words in other people’s mouths. I said this Admin couldn’t do it. Never said a Dem could. Never said a Republican couldn’t. Said THIS BUSH ADMIN could not. Soapbox all you want, but building a ridiculous strawman from my Bush criticisms is both disingenuous and literarily infantile. I will concede, however, that the logistics that you describe are very real and issues with allergies is something few people take into account.
Hairy
Health hazards should be sleeping.
Al Maviva
Spare me, Punchy. It’s amusing watching you run from the implications of your above comment. Should I feign outrage? If you say that the Bush administration can’t accomplish the mission because they are a bunch of hacks and trust fund babies, then your implication is pretty clear – some Good Ol’ Dems could get it done.
Unless you were trying to say that the task is un-do-able by anybody, and the snide comments about the Bushwas were mere ad hominems.
And by the way… “literarily” infantile? I didn’t think “literarily” was a word. So I looked it up. Turns out, it’s perfectly cromulent. It means “having to do with literature.” How, exactly, was my argument “having to do with literature”? Now I’m perplexed.
PeterJ
I mostly agree with Al Maviva.
Obviously the end times are near.
PeterJ
If just one person allergic to animals died because he or she had to share a bus with a cat then this act would be a failure. Simple as that.
srv
What happened to all the pets in Fallujah?
Andrew
Hey Al, care to write two or three thousand words on why one might want to read the text of the bill in question before spouting off like a Fristian cat-killing asshole?
ppGaz
Your application for BJ commentary is approved!
Your membership card will arrive shortly.
Welcome aboard!
Andrew
A number of people are suspected of staying behind to care for their pets and dying in the storm. The primary goal of this legislation is to reduce this behavior. IT’S WHY THEY WROTE THE DAMN LAW.
Punchy
Why you paint shit DEMOCRAT and REPUBLICAN, black and white, wrong and right (respectively), is oddly both amusing and sad. No in between. Gray is not a color you live by. By trashing the Bush Administration, I’m now apparently dogging all Republicans. And by thusly dogging all Republicans, I’m therefore saying that Democrats are the best and greatest and could hold together the San Andreas Fault with their bare hands to prevent earthquakes.
I’ll say this one more time, and then I’m done, as I deplore the threads that become flame wars. The Bush Admin has demonstrated, through the people in charge of FEMA, the people in charge of editing NASA publications, the Bolton affair, etc, that they don’t care about qualifications. They don’t appoint people to positions based on experience. Katrina exposed this, and if they couldn’t rescue–hell, couldn’t/wouldn’t even provide food-drops for–thousands of stranded Americans, they ain’t doing it for pets.
Could other, more competent (read: leaders who understand that experience, not fealty, is how you appoint people to positions in charge of saving lives) Republicans have done it better? Absolutely. Could Democrats? Probably. Go insinuate anything you want from that.
As for literature, it’s defined this way:
I thought your writings were excellent, and of ideas of universal interest.
The Other Steve
The War on Strawmen has begun.
PeterJ
Andrew said:
That’s their choice.
If people stayed behind cause there wouldn’t leave their Plasma TV:s does that mean that there should be a law that demands Plasma TV:s to be rescued?
If just one person dies because the people who could have saved him are busy rescuing a poodle than this act would be a failure.
PeterJ
I really should read what I write before posting…
If people stayed behind cause they wouldn’t
Perry Como
Awesome. Those of us that are extremely allergic to cats will be forced into a potentially life threatening situation. But don’t light that cigarette!
tBone
Sorry. We tried to argue on your behalf, we really did, but the cats have decided you have to go. And we don’t want to get on their bad side.
Jaybird
Would this fall under Congress’s power under the “General Welfare” clause?
Perhaps “Interstate Commerce”?
Andrew
The bill is not about the freaking Coast Guard pulling housecats off of roofs. The bill is about FEMA encouraging pre-disaster evacuation and shelter planning by local officials to account for pets along assistance funding, so as to minimize the chances that people stay behind and put human lives at risk. The Senate version includes minimal provisions for actual rescue, in the same category as removing debris, technical assistance to local government, and protecting property. But no one ever seems to bother reading the source information.
Punchy
I’m highly in favor of this law. Those things are freakin’ heavy, and not so waterproof. No one’s allergic to plasma, are they?
Steve
Except people don’t do that. Nor are there health and safety problems that arise when a bunch of plasma TVs are abandoned in a disaster area.
Nor does the bill require the ridiculous act of saving a poodle instead of a person, or anything close to that, but hey, why not just make shit up.
PeterJ
Steve said:
I wrote if. Not saying that people are staying for their TV:s, but if this act is only to make sure that people who refuse to leave their home without their pets will leave then I guess there should be a act for plasma tv:s IF people refused to leave without them…
If there’s a problem with all those dead pets, shouldn’t there also be a act for saving all the rats that might otherwise contaminate the area…
Ok, if an old lady needs help with her big dog and if someone dies because of that, then the act would be a failure.
Finally if I wanted to make shit up, I would probably go for the ‘Save the Blastocyst in the Petrie Dish Act’.
Perry Como
That’s actually at the top of the legislative agenda in September.
rilkefan
E.g. again.
ppGaz
I think you got his zygote.