"We’ve often disregarded the feelings of those we don’t relate to. Sometimes this has been other humans..."

"... but humans aren’t the only ones who think and feel. There are animals that cherish their offspring, feel lonely if their life partner dies, and jump for joy. If you burn an insect with a cigarette, it feels pain. If insects were automatons, ants wouldn’t be able to build fungus farms or form boats; bees wouldn’t be able to communicate complicated directions to hive mates; and cockroaches wouldn’t have learned not to eat certain baits that kill them....  So, I quit giving a milquetoast answer to the question of where I draw the line. Now I say: 'We know insects think and feel, so if we ever have an option to avoid harming them, let’s go for it.' If there are insects in your home, Peta has developed a handy guide to non-chemical, non-lethal methods of asking them to please go somewhere else to think things over."

Writes Ingrid Newkirk, in "He hid, hoping against hope I’d leave: how a cockroach changed my mind about killing insects" (The Guardian).

Also at the link to the handy guide:

"Her bodice looks like the outside of the rib. Over the shoulder looks like it does come from the shoulder."

How fitting!

"There are no expensive cuts here, no real steaks," he said. "The best you've got is the flank steak on top of her head."...

"It's the cheaper end cuts - not including her. You got about $100 of meat there," said Mark Cacioppo, 30, of Queens....

"It ain't refrigerated. It's probably stinking bad. She's in the lights: It's cooking," said Peter Cacioppo....

"What's next: the family cat made into a hat?" asked Ingrid Newkirk, head of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

PETA always uses that rhetorical move. Instead of that animal you don't care about, picture the family pet.

Anyway, Lady Gaga went on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" — too bad YouTube hasn't yet perfected the internet equivalent of Smell-O-Vision — and explained herself...



... with delightful incoherence. She doesn't want to be "just another bitch in a dress." She claims it has to do with her opposition to Don't Ask Don't Tell, which flummoxes the poor vegan Ellen.

I love the part where she proclaims herself "The most judgment-free person on the face of the earth." Ha. When did "judgment" acquire a 100% negative meaning.

Did Mitt Romney torture his dog?

This cruelty to animals story has legs... and a tail... and loose bowels.... This is the clearest example ever of smearing a candidate with shit. You know the story. Romney transported his dog in some sort of container that was affixed to the top of his station wagon, and the dog got diarrhea that the family became aware of when one of the kids saw it dribbling down the window.

“If you wouldn’t strap your child to the roof of your car, you have no business doing that to the family dog! I don’t know who would find that acceptable,” [said PETA President Ingrid Newkirk]....

While PETA doesn’t take a position on any candidate, Ingrid offered up the theory that Mitt may have “what neurologists call an ‘absence of the mirror neuron,’ a physiological condition in the brain which means they cannot feel basic compassion.”

Isn't it quite standard to plant the idea that Republicans lack feeling? I was just reading this review of a biography of Condoleezza Rice ("Twice as Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power," by Marcus Mabry). The reviewer, Jonathan Freedland, tells us the reader feels "oddly estranged" from Rice, not through any fault of the author's, but because of the "chilly steel he finds" in her heart:

His search for vulnerabilities or doubt reveals only a cold, unwavering self-discipline. One of the book’s most telling moments comes when the 17-year-old Rice realizes, after surrendering her childhood to the goal of becoming a concert pianist, that she is not, after all, good enough. Her teacher ruled that while “technically competent ... she was too detached emotionally to be a great pianist.” She needed “disciplined abandon”: she had the discipline all right, she just couldn’t let herself go. Yet even this major blow barely troubles her. She simply decides to pursue another goal....

The former arms inspector David Kay calls her the worst national security adviser since the office was created, and the verdict seems harsh but not wholly unwarranted.

Rice’s defense would rest on her extraordinary presentational skills, her fluency and poise under inquisitorial fire. So what if she is more a synthesizer of others’ ideas than an original thinker, runs this logic; she has a sure political touch. Except even that is in doubt. Caught shopping for shoes in New York as the corpses floated in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Rice explained that “I didn’t think about my role as a visible African-American national figure. I just didn’t think about it.” Given what we know of her upbringing, that isn’t psychologically surprising — but it showed a political tin ear.

So heartless and cold, these Republicans... who will, of course, take every opportunity to say that Democrats are so mushily sentimental they can't even think.

UPDATE: From Ann Romney's blog:

Surprise, surprise, the media didn't get the dog story right. Our dog Seamus rode in an ENCLOSED kennel, not in the open air. And he loved it. Every time he saw it, he jumped up on the tailgate, walked in, and lay down. It was just like the kennel he curled up in at home.

The dog wasn't in an exposed cage.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Is this wrong?