@ehBeth,
Glad all dear wildclickers are enjoying their weekend
Quiet here. Mostly sitting with Bootsie. Tomorrow the vet. sigh
@Stradee,
Bootsie not doing well?
always a sigh
((((((((( love to you ))))))))
thinking of our own Wordworker right now. I'm listening to a feature on the blues on the CBC right now - hosted by Keb Mo - one of her co-writers
Sounds as if a good time was had by all, ehBeth.
Danon, the core of the heat is now on top of you, after moving down the east coast, through the mid-Atlantic states.
@ehBeth,
Bootsie's lil body is shutting down...blindness, kidneys (said the vet although all her tests returned positive) and tomorrow she's scheduled for more fluids
Quality of life is my biggest concern for her now.
Waiting one more day...
thank you beth ((((((((((hugs))))))))))
@sumac,
Good morning sumac - early riser. Yep, the heat is on down here. Except for inside our home where we will stay.
Hi everyone - hoping you all have better weather at your places.
Sounds like ehBeth had a good day - great............
Hoping for the best for Bootsie.............
Just read your post, Stradee - still hoping for the best.
Yes, my thoughts are with Bootsie too. It is sometimes too much to bear, but we must.
August 1, 2010
Disgusting but Not Illegal
Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., who has become one of the First Amendment’s most adamant defenders, led the Supreme Court earlier this year in refusing to create a new exception to the free speech clause. With only one dissent, the court struck down a law that banned depictions of animal cruelty. The House has come back with a replacement bill that is an improvement over its predecessor but still misses the constitutional point Justice Roberts made.
Historically, the Supreme Court has recognized only a small handful of exceptions to free speech. As Justice Roberts explained in his opinion in April, the court has long held that government can ban obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement and speech integral to criminal conduct, a category that includes child pornography. When Congress tried to add depiction of animal cruelty to this list, the court balked.
Justice Roberts said the court cannot create a new exception to free speech by simply balancing the value of the speech against its harm to society. The First Amendment “reflects a judgment by the American people that the benefits of its restrictions on the Government outweigh the costs,” he wrote. “Our Constitution forecloses any attempt to revise that judgment simply on the basis that some speech is not worth it.”
Almost no one would say depictions of animals being crushed or mutilated are worthwhile. The concept is so repulsive that animal rights advocates persuaded a very busy House to pass a new bill outlawing them.
Unlike the first one, the new bill excludes videos of hunting, trapping or fishing, or of normal agricultural practices. It bans any images of actual conduct in which animals are intentionally crushed, burned, drowned, suffocated or impaled in a manner that would violate federal or state animal cruelty laws. Most important, it simply declares that all such images are obscene.
Obscenity, however, is limited in American law to certain prurient sexual content. Cruelty to animals does not fit that category, and Congress cannot simply create a new category of obscenity. A better analogy would have been to child pornography, in which the act of taking pictures of children is itself illegal. But Justice Roberts said animal cruelty is not in that category either.
The First Amendment is a remarkably fragile institution that does not need more exceptions carved from its meaning. But attempts to do that arise all the time. A California case coming before the court in the next term attempts to ban the sale of violent video games to minors, though there is no recognized exception to the First Amendment for violence, either. These games, and animal cruelty videos, may be repugnant to many, but America’s legal tradition keeps them from being illegal.
@sumac,
Thank you so much Beth, Dan and sue
Bootsie passed quietly today at the vets...my little girl was ready to go Home.
So very sad and heartbreaking
Our joy turned upside down...
@Stradee,
That's so sad about Bootsie --- I'll be thinking of you tonight.
@danon5,
Also very sorry to hear about Stradee's pet dying..... Many thoughts are with you.
@Stradee,
oh dear friend
(((((((((( stradee ))))))))))
much love to you
We've heard so much about the wonderful Bootsie over the years. We've all been part of her pack.
@Stradee,
A heartfelt farewell to a wonderful companion.
Thanks all for making another tree go asmiling.
Great going group.
@danon5,
Appreciation and love know no bounds....
You all are in my heart and prayers always
Shirl
All clicked and going outside to get some work done on this overcast day.
@sumac,
Overcast? Where's the Rain?
More dancing to do.......... And, chanting............. And, drumming...........((I did put the [r] in there didn't I?)) Ah, good.
All clicked for another day.
@danon5,
ommmmmmmmm
step
step
not working...
Very hot weather...paint can wait another day.
Cooler blasting, kittens napping, dinner and nynite.
All clicked and interesting accounting of the other oil spill.
August 4, 2010
What the River Dragged In
By DOUG STANTON
Traverse City, Mich.
IT’S strange having your own oil spill.
What we have, of course, is a blip compared to the one in the Gulf of Mexico, which this week formally broke all records for offshore spills. But after watching the gulf catastrophe unfold from afar, the news that oil was gushing from a pipeline just three hours south of here into a small creek that flows into the Kalamazoo River and, eventually, into Lake Michigan, came as a surprise.
Until last week, I wasn’t aware that a pipeline even existed, though I must have driven over or past it hundreds of times. The leak is now under control, but a good storm could still blow some of the estimated one million gallons of spilled oil into the lake, and maybe even north along its sandy coast, past numerous resort towns and into the Grand Traverse Bay, to a place called Clinch Park, where I’ve been swimming most mornings from June to October since I was kid.
It’s hard enough to try to capture oil floating in an ocean. But oil moving downstream in a swift river? Forget about it. As the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus said, you can’t step into the same river twice.
But despite the danger to the lake, many people here, busy enjoying their summer vacations, haven’t paid much attention to the spill. After all, Lake Michigan has lived through worse. It may be near the center of the continent, but it’s not immune to the outside world, as we’ve learned over and over.
First there were the invasive Asian carp, swimming around the Chicago River a mere six miles from the mouth of the lake. These voracious eaters get excited by the sound of boat motors and can leap by the hundreds into the air all at once, in some hellish version of a water ballet. An oil spill seems almost benign in comparison.
We’ve also had to contend with an invasion of gobies — small, bug-eyed fish you’re supposed to kill if you catch. They disrupt the food chain that normally supports native lake trout, perch and bass. They entered the lake in the ballast water of international shipping traffic, along with zebra mussels, which filter micro-organisms — also food for native fish — out of the water.
As a result of the zebra mussel infestation, the lake, several summers ago, was often as clear as a Bahamian bay. When I swam, I could see 50 feet in any direction. This extra sunlight fed more algae at deeper depths, which created algal blooms that floated up on the beach in smelly heaps. Now that the mussels have died off, the lake has returned to something like normal.
So for now, I swim. Winters are so long in northern Michigan, nearly nine months of gray skies and deep snow, that summer comes as a fresh burst. Amnesia sets in — you forget that winter will ever return. Friends from other parts of the country descend. The days ripen perfectly, the air no warmer or colder than your skin so that the edges of your body seem to extend beyond you, up and down the tree-lined streets.
Traverse City sits halfway between the North Pole and the Equator, and our summer days are long. The light seems to take forever to vanish from the sky and, when it does, it goes out like someone folding a white sheet in the dark. A flare on the horizon. Then a rustle: Goodnight.
I swim in the midst of bad news to stay sane. I crawl over the sand bottom in six feet of water, which is cold and green, and nothing has changed in my life — I’m a kid again. No zebra mussels, no carp, no oil spill headed my way. No politicians, no bloggers. Every day I step refreshed and clean from the water, and go up to the bookstore, Horizon’s, and order a coffee and stand on the street in flip-flops in the chill air, feeling the hot cup in my hand, the fine texture of its paper, feeling as if I’ve just come awake from a dream.
And what I carry around in my head is this, the image of the water, of looking around 20 feet in any direction, and beyond my periphery the lake darkening to the color of light in a storm. Sometimes I see fish slicing around my field of vision — silver missiles headed to deeper water.
The work day is about to begin; traffic pours past on the four-lane parkway. I wonder what the people driving by think of me, when I’m swimming out there along the buoys; and in a time when there is too much news to think about, I hope they think nothing at all.
When the oil spill in Michigan began, I heard about a memorial service for Paul Miller, a 22-year-old Marine corporal from the nearby village of Lake Ann, who was killed on July 19 in Afghanistan. Later in the week, I stood in the funeral home, not far from the beach where I swim, and stared at Corporal Miller’s flag-draped coffin.
I thought this: that the world’s troubles can be nearer to us than we think, flowing in our direction, flowing toward home.
And while it’s true that we used to live in Lake Ann, and our son may have played summer baseball with Corporal Miller years earlier, I don’t remember meeting him. Maybe I passed him on the street, a tyke headed over to the ice cream shop with his parents, where we were standing in line, too, with our children, all of us oblivious to the news to come, the depth and coldness of the water ahead.
Doug Stanton, founder of the National Writers Series, a book festival, is the author of “Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan.”
