From The Old Nag
I’m posting a letter to the New York Times from Richard Shapiro, rather than my own, because it is so much better – and less snarky -than mine.
from Paulick.com, Paulick Report Staff | 07.12.2012 | 8:34am
SHAPIRO LETTER TO NY TIMES: O’NEILL PORTRAYAL ‘WRONG AND MISGUIDED’
The following letter was sent to New York Times writer Joe Drape regarding Wednesday’s controversial story about Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner I’ll Have Another’s “history of ailments” prior to his scratch from the Belmont Stakes. The letter was written by Richard Shapiro, former chairman of the California Horse Racing Board. [click to continue…]
from Bloodhorse.com “I’ll Have Another’s Treatment ‘Routine Care’
By Ron Mitchell and Eric Mitchell
I’ll Have Another retirement ceremony. photo: Steve Heuertz
Three veterinarians who reviewed the treatment regiment of I’ll Have Another between the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes found nothing out of the ordinary and took exception to characterizations in a July 11 New York Times article that indicated the colt had been given powerful drugs to cover up unsoundness.
The winner of the Kentucky Derby Presented by Yum! Brands and the Preakness was scratched from the June 9 Belmont due to tendonitis that was discovered the day before the race. He was subsequently retired and sold to a Japanese farm for stud duty.
A review of I’ll Have Another’s veterinary records, which trainer Doug O’Neill was required to turn over to the New York State Racing and Wagering Board, showed treatments that are consistent and standard with most racehorses, according to three licensed veterinarians.
Download the I’ll Have Another Vet Records.
Interview with HumorOutcasts.com Featured Writer of the Month (last month), Donna Cavanagh
It’s time for for the polar ice caps to start melting and for glorious Northwest Passages to open up again everywhere, and for fracking and extracting and for all things industrial to bloom like tulips in Springtime. I just spent a week fending off heat stroke on the east coast – and I mean the east COAST, like literally on the coastline (Ocean CIty, NJ). Anything over 70 is misery for me, and by the time it hits 87, I’m in full heat-stroke mode. So, it was 99 on the coast, and I resorted to shorts and flipflops, blinding everyone else with my whiteness, like an albino moles who has just found the sun. The air felt like a pizza oven, still and scorching with nary an ocean breeze.
I kind of stopped worrying about global warming when I realized that the Powers That Be will never, ever do anything about it, until it’s too late. At which point, depending on which projections you believe, we will either be really fucked, or reallyreally fucked. Rationalization is a powerful thing. Even when your brains are cooking in an unprecedented heat wave, your utilities are out from the third 100-year storm this year and your back yard is disappearing fast into the rising sea, nothing’s really amiss because it’s been hot before, and it was cold last winter somewhere. Don’t mention science stuff as the water slowly covers your head. It’s not rising ocean levels, it’s just … cyclical … repeated, um … flooding, that’s it. It’s just flooding (I’ll give you your “recurring flooding” for “sea level rise” as long as you give us our “bigoted fairytale bullshit stories made up by confused desert goat farmers that cause people to disbelieve science even when their houses are underwater, as predicted by science, for “religion”).
I’m not sure what’s more depressing – the fact that in spite of everything, there are still those retards who will argue themselves red-faced that global warming doesn’t exist. Or, the fact that I live in a country where elderly folks are left to die of heat exposure in their own homes because no one called them or checked in on them to make sure they’re okay. I don’t want to romanticize the past, but it bums me out that we have palm sized technology that can tell us what to do at every minute of the day, and not enough empathy to pick up a phone or knock on a neighbor’s door.
There was a New Yorker article a couple of years ago that said that no one has ever offered up a plausible account of why thousands of scientists at thousands of universities worldwide would bother to engineer a climate hoax, nor why Mother Nature would keep playing along. The reason the conservatives keep braying about is clear: If scientists can be believed about climate change, then that means they might be telling the truth about evolution, which would then mean the Bible is not literally true….so, you see, climate change must be deemed false or else Americans would have literally no reason to keep voting for Republicans. Maybe scientists should start using reverse psychology – demanding more fossil fuel use, because that would help India and China grow, and that would help spread Hinduism and Communism.
The oppressive heatwave, the sudden downpours, the record snow/hail drops, high winds, restless volcanoes, increasing earthquakes, devastating droughts, magnetic pole moving at a record pace, new diseases from animals, scorched crops, Metro derailments, buckling highways. major X-grade solar flares, brown grass and trees, frantic farmers, dying seniors and babies and pets, plasma rays hitting the earth, early snowpack melts, beetles waking from hibernation early to strip trees, creepy tropical winters, spreading wildfires, flooding from giant deluges, confused crops, powerful freak wind storms. All this stuff is effecting people, and even Republican people can no longer support global climate change as just a hoax invented by the Weather Channel in a cynical plot to gin up ratings. Despite Rick Perry’s failed rain dances, and as evidenced by JanBrewer’s face, the earth is burning. And the reality is, thousands of category-one-million tornadoes are really truly mowing down large swaths of Real America. And it’s finally all conspiring to make American citizens a bit dubious about the alleged “fictional nature” of climate change. Polling shows that belief in global warming jumped from 65% in 2009 to 52% in 2011…today, two thirds of Americans believe that global warming exists! Sustained deadly catastrophe was what it took, disasters of biblical proportions convinced Americans that science might be right. Disasters of biblical proportions convince Americans that the bible is fiction.
You see, Nature isn’t a Democracy. Truth is the truth no matter how much it’s denied. Simple fact CO2 is a greenhouse gas. This has been known for well over a century. God knows it. So He sayeth”
“Depart from me, you wretched accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gaveth me no food, I was thirsty and you gaveth me no drink, the heat index topped 117 in the shade for three straight months and you let me suffer heat stroke because you had denied global climate change and took a no-new-taxes pledge. Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these, you did not do for me.”
So, the tides go in, the tides go out, the tides inundate low-lying seaside communities and obliterate protective barrier islands. You can’t explain it. It does seem as if we are at the cross-roads: should we pray more, or deny it more vehemently?
In this computer picture, we see that dinosaurs were indeed around in the 1980’s, and that Ronald Reagan has kicked Jesus off the velociraptor because he is now King. Ronnie is using the dinosaur to streak through America, shooting automatic weapons and RPGs at gay people, other minorities and college liberals. He has an American flag as a saddle blanket because he is King and he can. The raptor is carrying the American flag pole in his briny fingers and has no idea what is happening.
THIS is the reason other countries should fear us.
Awesome painting via Sharp Writer/Deviant Art
A depressisng story from Philly.com by Will Bunch
Aside from his bad policy ideas, are there reasons not to vote for Mitt Romney for president? That’s a good question. For some critics, the answer may be intertwined with this question:
Was Romney’s family cruel to animals – specifically, one of Ann Romney’s dancing horses that competed in the sport of dressage? That conversation got going this weekend after the publicity over a brief court battle involving the candidate’s wife’s former horse, named Super Hit:
Ann Romney found herself briefly the subject of a lawsuit at whose core, according to court documents, was a heavily-medicated horse. Romney and her trainers sold the horse, Super Hit, in 2008 for $125,000. And Super Hit had what a prominent veterinarian described as a staggering quantity of drugs in its system at the time of its examination before being sold, according to a toxicology report that’s part of the lawsuit over the horse’s condition.
The lawsuit, which was mentioned in a New York Times story last month, was filed in 2010 by a woman in San Diego who had bought Super Hit from Romney and her trainers, Jan and Amy Ebeling. The woman, Catherine Norris, sued Romney for fraud after the horse allegedly proved physically incapable of performing as a dressage horse.
This was the most alarming part of the story:
Soule, who has been the United States Equestrian Team veterinarian since 1978, writes, “In my 38 years of practice, I have never come across a drug screen such as this where the horse has been administered so many different medications at the same time.” The horse had a defect in its foot, and Norris’s lawyers alleged that the Ebelings had drugged the horse in order to hide its condition.
I think this issue should get more attention for one reason and one reason alone: It’s appalling. The suit, which was settled, named Ann Romney and her trainers but not Mitt Romney, so it’s probably unfair to say it has anything to do with his worthiness for the Oval Office. I mean, it’s not like he drove 1,000 miles with a dog on the roof of his car. Wait, what?
Well, regardless, Romney’s disdain for poor human beings— and his opponent Barack Obama’s killing of innocent human beings with flying death robots — should matter more to voters in November than how they treat dogs and horses, right? Besides, we just had a president, George W. Bush, who blew up frogs when he was a kid. How did that turn out?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoSCb78oUL4
Fascinated by Mitt Romney’s chimerical trip to Wawa? My pal Ryan Petzar breaks it down, for no apparent reason, and with timecode. [click to continue…]