So, the author's vet will fix the cat if she can't afford to pay the bill or just won't. And then the vet will give the cat to someone else.

Now, imagine that the same cat is returned to the vet a month later needing $5,000 worth of medical intervention and those second owners can't or won't foot that bill.

Will the vet? Again? And will that vet find yet another owner?

And then what if those third owners return the cat to the vet needing $10,000 worth or surgery and are unable to foot that bill.

I promise you that that cat is going down.

I simply adore your cerebral cortex.

Regarding money, for years I drove through neighborhoods of McMansions and wondered, "Where do these people get their money?"

It turns out that they didn't "get their money."

I recently read that half of all middle-class people, when their liabilities are deducted from their assets, are at zero or less. So, without their jobs, they're instantly poor. I think the recession will worsen and worsen and it wouldn't surprise me to see long lines for soup kitchens again, as well as country McMansions filled with hay, for no one will want to buy them, and farmers might as well use them as barns. And the editor of Fortune magazine recently wrote about the end of the American empire. I agree.

With all due respect to the dead of 9-11 and their survivors, in 1944, 30,000 people died everyday. That's 9-11 times 10 times 365, or 3,650 World Trade Towers falling. But we had to huff and puff our generation's tragedy, both nationally and individually. What was especially disconcerting on 9-12 were the people who had to share that their neighbor's cousin's girlfriend died the day before, as if they could then claim two credits of tragedy. We'd be in fine shape today if this "Christian nation" had applied the "turn the other cheek" response or if Bush voters hadn't cursed us with a poseur who urged us to go shopping, while he had the Chinese fund his daddy-do-you-love-me-now-war. Strongmen come and go, but debt comes and stays and stays and stays.

Tragedy can be funny, as Heather notes so well, and as the Germans showed us in their cabarets in the 30s. And like Berlin in the 30s, where the disenfranchised took to rooftops with rifles, our disenfranchised take their guns into schools. In America in the 30s, some rich folks on the East Coast had a ball. They hanged animal carcasses around their ballroom and splattered themselves with blood and had a swell time pretending that they weren't princesses. When you're a princess, it's fun to be a pauper! Today, Paris and Nicole have some of that old tyme fun.

I do have some hope, but if we're to downsize and be happy without a biannual $30,000 bathroom redo, we'll suffer to get there and we might just be too soft to do so.

"This is the most undeserving piece of trash Salon has ever put on its front page," when you could write, "This is the most undeserving piece of trash Salon has ever put on its front page and ever will put on its front page or any other page and is verily the most undeserving piece of trash that any publication anywhere will ever publish."

And put your hands on your hips when you give us the say so.

thanks for using your podium to remind us of neocon pundit cowardice.

No more excuses.

If you're a Republican and you're posting at Salon (or anywhere else on the Internet), you should be posting from Iraq.

Otherwise, you're the veriest coward.

you employ "Hussein" just like a dittohead and you also say you're a progressive, but you're one who will vote for McCain (or so you said), if you can't vote for Hillary. As Mr. Greenwald notes, a vote for McCain is a vote for torture. You should rename yourself the "ProudTortureGirl." Except, don't pay someone, via taxes, for someone to torture. C'mon, don't be a girl. Be a woman and at least muster the decency to do the dirty deed yourself. Hold people down and force water down their throats and do it while wearing an American flag pin on your lapel, for that's what a vote for McCain means. And afterwards, after the orgasm of torture, you can smoke the Constitution.

What Mr. Breathed noted in the cartoon can also be noted in this thread: folks will do anything to avoid discussing race.

reminds me of the killer pacifists and the toxin-dumping environmentalists.

And you're not racist? Wow. Then you're the only one. What's it like to be pure?

Say, what's McCain's middle name? Didn't know, did ya? Ya had to Google it.

I also like the way that Linda Ronstadt and Rickie Lee Jones performed recently. Both were fat and frumpy and didn't seem to care. Both stood on stage armed only with their voices. Neither had their skin cut and stretched back and neither wore corsets and led with their crotches. I prefer their feminism.

...SusanGSMcGee wrote at the beginning of this thread. The passivity on display at airports is what is deeply disturbing. It reminds me of babushkas in Russia waiting silently for hours for toilet paper and even those who awaited trains for Auschwitz, believing that God would provide and protect them, or in our case, that Big Brother, D.C. will provide and protect us.

...about not buying books.

As far as trusting oneself, when it comes to parenting, we mostly know what our parents knew, which came from their parents, etc. Now, if parents, generation after generation, kept only the best parenting tactics and tossed the rest, we'd all be terrific parents today. Go to any Wal-Mart or any Macy's and you'll see that ain't so.