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Cowboy President About To Send Wild Horses to the Slaughter House

In the latest blog on Huffington Post, best selling author Deanne Stillman discusses the Republican revocation on the ban on slaughtering wild horses.

This is an issue not touched upon by the media.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

For the second time this year, the party led by a guy with a cowboy hat is about to send horses to the slaughterhouse - in spite of huge public opposition that cuts across all lines. The first time, Republican Senator Conrad Burns from Montana reversed 34 years of federal protection for the wild horse with a stealth rider attached to the 05 federal appropriations bill, legalizing sale of mustangs in government pipelines to the lowest bidder.

Because of the Burns rider, 41 wild horses were immediately sent to the rendering plant, with thousands more on the way. After a hard-fought battle that went on for months, the rider was recently undone with the passage of an anti-horse slaughter amendment attached to a different piece of legislation, the 05 Agricultural Appropriations bill, by Republican Senator John Ensign from Nevada and West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd. The 68-29 vote was overwhelmingly in favor of stopping the slaughter of horses in American plants - from which their meat was often shipped to France, the country Republicans ran against in the last election.
But now Republicans are once again trying to wipe out the horse they rode in on. Some members of the Agricultural Appropriations Subcommittee (which includes Burns, now linked with Jack Abramoff and named one of the 13 most corrupt Congressmen) are planning to strip the anti-horse slaughter language from the bill, by 4 pm on October 25th, before it leaves a committee conference and heads for Bush's desk. This would relieve the beleaguered Texan from having to deal with legislation that enrages his Big Beef cronies, while simultaneously revoking the reprieve for thousands of mustangs on equine Death Row, many of them stolen by the feds in semi-legal takings on public lands this summer and in past years - and open up the pipelines for continued round-ups until the day comes that the range is completely bereft of our heritage.

Strangely, Texas prides itself on mustang mojo. Yet Bush's homeland has two of the three remaining
horse slaughter plants in the US. And they are all about to get very busy, just as they were decades ago, when hundreds of thousands of horses roamed the Texas range. Today there are NONE, thanks to Dallas cowboys who cleared them out to make room for burgers on the hoof. Not content with taking over the second biggest state in the Union, the cattle lobby now wants the rest of the West - and it's as close as ever to getting it.

To head these horse thieves off at the pass, visit this site NOW and call the listed members of the appropriations subcommittee IMMEDIATELY, especially your representatives, and more especially, those who voted for the amendment; let them know that the Ensign-Byrd amendment must stand - especially since it already passed by a huge margin. With Bushco about to go down, they should not be permitted to take horses with them. For more about how our ranch hand President is riding the American mustang off the stage, please check my recent blogs on this site - here and here - and also my Slate piece for a deeper analysis, as well as Senator Byrd's impassioned anti-slaughter statement. By the way, I love cowboys as much as the next red-blooded American gal, but a cowboy who hates his horse has got to go.

UPDATE: The latest action info, as per the International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros:

Please call all the CONFEREES below even if they are not in the state that you reside and ask them to support the above amendment to stop the slaughter of horses in our country. Ask for the staff assistant who is working on the Agricultural bill.

Death & Othering

This weekend's earthquake in Pakistan/India, has claimed (as of Sunday) between 20,000-30,000 lives.

Now reach down deep inside and ask yourself how do you feel when you hear about that number. Be honest.

Does it make you feel sad?

Which makes you feel sadder, that news, or the recent news of deaths in Hurricane Katrina or Rita? Which do you get an emotional twinge:

Injured people covered by shawls lay in the street, waiting for medical care. Residents carried bodies on wooden planks. The corpses of four children, aged between 4 and 6, lay under a sheet of corrugated iron. Relatives said they were trying to find sheets to wrap the bodies.

"We don't have anything to bury them with," said a cousin, Saqib Swati.

Or the much reported picture of the dead woman at the Superdome with a sheet wrapped over her?

Why is it that earthquake won't be discussed in graphic detail around watercoolers around the country tomorrow morning?

The number is huge. The destruction is devastating.

Yet you still are not feeling the same empathy.

What if the 30,000 dead would have been somewhere in California?

How would you feel then?

Once again, because we like to "other" societies who are "different" than us.  But for Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake might have gotten an even smaller news item, perhaps not even on the front page.

Why do we put up barriers so that news like this doesn't really affect us?

Ask yourself what is in our psyche that this news shouldn't touch us?

Now think of all the other times disasters, in your lifetime have happened, when you read tragedies on this massive scale, that you glance over. Now think of all the time and empathy you have ever given to any personal story on a small scale.

What stops us from identifying from people outside our nation's borders, our culture?

Is this societal or political?

Perhaps would she be asking ourselves these questions. Is it our family upbringings that make us not care? Or is this inherent in our societal structures?

Right now, because of the Internet, the global world is in our backyard, yet perhaps we need a new generation of people to start treating it like our backyard.

Perhaps, our next generation will feel for others they can identify with.

Notes from a blackout

Okay, I have had time to relax after today's blackout in Los Angeles, which it turns out to be a DWP worker's error. Well, I guess that's good news. Sort of. LA was definitely on edge today, because of Katrina and that Al Qaeda video from Sunday.

The building I work in had some security and fire issues the week before -- but it was odd that about noon an announcement came on and said the electricity was done -- but we should all remain where we were. Okay, this is the part where I get worried...

A More Serious Note...

I posted this on my Bravo blog. These are my thoughts on the events of last week. Please also see author Deanne Stillman's post on The Huffington Post.

A More Serious Note

Last week was a very stressful, trying and difficult week and no I am not talking about campaigning for Sperm Donor. The events of this past week of Hurricane Katrina and the devastation it brought to the city of New Orleans, the states of Louisiana and Mississippi and the surrounding communities are to put it mildly, life altering.

It was very difficult for me to stay focused on the task at hand – nor feel the slightest bit guilty about asking friends to vote and focus their energies on me when so much tragedy has occurred around. Not addressing Hurricane Katrina would be like ignoring the elephant in the room. The daily images from CNN plus the overwhelming reports from the front created a rush of emotions and thoughts that up to this week that I, nor others had ever seriously contemplated.

But the events of Katrina have placed life changing thoughts in my mind and as we shall see in the coming months and years, that the climatic events of this past week will change the United States (and how it reacts to its own problems and our neighbors) in unimaginable ways.

The first point I wanted to address was the identification factor. Obviously, anyone reading this blog, on  their computer, internet connection and cable subscription, might have problems of placing themselves into the shoes of the tragic, poor victims of the disaster. It is this problem, the “othering” of society, that distances ourselves from people’s tragedies. We would imagine, if we were in their shoes, we would have not stayed, because we did have cars, we do have family and feel that such tragedies couldn’t happen to “us.” And if you can’t identify with those that lived below the poverty line, think of those that were pretty much like you, the college students who longer have a school to go back, the middle class two income families who have no home, no jobs, no town.

Just imagine every physical item you own is completely gone. Destroyed, unusable – or taken. The only thing you have is your empty wallet, (no cash machines) and the watch you wear. You have no where to live – and your job, the whole industry you work in is gone – and may not be back for a nine months, perhaps never. Imagine waking up and being able to survive and support a family for a year with no discernible income. Now multiply that by tens of thousands, if not more and you figure out what kind of problem we have. Yes, this problem has consequences that play out to our entire nation.