The circus is not over

Toddler floats eight miles
In B.C. river on toy truck,
when found, wants to continue.

The circus is not over yet. Too bad, I was beginning to truly enjoy not watching it. The little bits and pieces I’ve seen today simply indicate more of the inane questions that have already been answered several times over. The Republican obsession with Sotomayor’s trivial “wise Latina woman” remark appears to be the only thing they have going, and it is not going so well. Why the Republicans are doing what they are to delay her confirmation is somewhat of a mystery to me. It does seem pretty pointless as they all know she will be confirmed. Tomorrow she is said to be having another series of private interviews with Senators and presumably on Friday a date will be set for her confirmation. Sessions, the airheaded leader of the Republicans, wants to delay as long as possible. He says they need the time to read and analyze all of her opinions and publications and so on. This, of course, is nothing but a delaying tactic as her record is already extremely well known, and Sessions lacks the mental capacity to understand any of it anyway. What is going on is so obvious and such a complete and utter waste of time it makes me want to scream at the TV (a bad sign). I guess what is going on here is the last gasps of White racists who cannot tolerate the idea that anyone but White males is capable of being a Supreme Court Justice (or President or Attorney General or much of anything else).

We still do not seem to know precisely what Dick the Slimy’s private assassination group was all about. Today I heard that it not only was meant to target al Quaida members, but also supporters of al Quaida. There may be more to it than this but it remains a bit of a mystery. In any case, it is most interesting. How, for example, would one know for certain who supported al Quaida and who did not? I guess it would be up to Cheney to decide (think carefully on this). I wonder if it was so secret that even Bush didn’t know about it, something that would not surprise me either way.

It appears, at least at the moment, that we might actually get some kind of health care bill, and it looks like it will have a public option. Obama seems to have finally come to his senses and realizes that trying to get bipartisanship our of the remnants of the Brafia is a lost cause. But remember, if we do now get a new health care bill it will not because of any altruism or empathy on the part of Washington, but, rather, because our big companies finally had to realize that having to pay for their employees health care made them less competitive, so they finally succumbed. You might notice that we will not get an efficient, sensible, and cost-effective single payer system, the Insurance and Pharmaceuticals do not give up that easily. What will ultimately happen with our new system is hard to predict, but it could hardly be any worse that what we have now (unless you are either rich or a Congressperson or both).

Here at Sandhill we have developed a problem with cats. The basic problem is one of our own making. I should say my wife’s making, as she is the one who insisted we get four cats to begin with. If you own cats you no doubt understand the problem. We had three cats, two of which died of natural causes. That left one cat. So then we acquired two all gray cats, sisters. The one cat didn’t take very well to the two gray kittens but over time it worked out. Then this young black male cat appeared in the neighborhood. He was aggressive, tore a hole in our neighbors screen door in his attempt to get in, then decided he liked our house better and essentially just moved in (we have a cat door). I didn’t want him but my wife fell in love with him and he with her (he knows a sucker when he sees one). Even after we had him fixed he still bullied our oldest cat and one of the sisters. The other sister, the smallest of our cats by far, was not intimidated and now dominates him along with the others. This has been a problem for some time but in recent weeks has sort of simmered down. However, now there is another cat, Spencer by name, who supposedly belongs to one of our neighbors. He has decided he likes our house and our cat food better and now regularly comes here meowing to be fed. And he always seems to be famished. We are trying to keep him out of the house but I predict this will fail. He is all white with blue eyes and he stands at the door looking in at our other four cats no doubt wondering why he cannot come in. I feel sorry for him, he’s being treated rather like a leper, but we really don’t need a fifth cat tearing up our furniture (the other four have already done that job very well). So Spencer shows up on the porch, he gets fed, but then he goes away (he is apparently learning about his second class status). Now we are threatened with a sixth cat, a gray and white creature that is turning up virtually every day. We haven’t fed him but he sometimes discovers food on the porch that we forgot to bring inside. So, you see how it goes. I like cats okay, but I really wish we didn’t have any. I know people who routinely kill them. I could never do that. Taking them to the pound is not an option (unless I was tired of my marriage), killing them is out of the question, no one I know wants one (there are always kittens available here), so we just go on being adopted by cats we don’t really want but are too soft-hearted to turn away. We should never have allowed the cats in the house, but it is too late now. Well, we could be homeless, displaced, refugees, or even worse, Republicans (they have compassion for no one).

LKBIQ:
Women and cats do as they damned well please, and men and dogs had best learn to live with it.
Alan Holbrook

TILT:
There are over three hundred distinct breeds of goats.