A badly written bill is going to be heard, again, in State Assembly Committee on Business and Professions.  Assembly Bill 1634 will be reviewed on 24 April.  This bill has the ability to kill dog competitions within the state.  It is written to allow puppy-mills to flourish while forcing the dedicated hobby-breeders to sterilize their animals, effectively ending their bloodlines within the state.  This does nothing to end pet dumping.  The people who use dogs and cats as a way to make money (i/e the backyard breeders and puppy-mills) will simply pay the extra fee and keep going.  It will just be the cost of doing business.  The hobby-breeder, often a retiree, will have to decide whether keeping a couple intact animals for the fun of showing is worth the extra expense.   Hobby-breeders spend more on their animals than they ever make in the occasional litter (one litter every four or five years is about average). 

AB1634 has been amended twice and it still stinks.  Please visit http://home.earthlink.net/~... and check out what you can do tonight.   

Now Imus is out after making some nasty remarks about college women on a Rutgers basketball team.  He publicly apologized, as he should.  There's another apology I'd like to hear.  The Duke lacrosse players, young college men, were falsely accused of rape, assault, and making racially threatening remarks.  They were reviled nationally by Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson, among others.   Will the goodly reverends be as public in their apologies to these college men?  Will they admit they made a mistake in jumping on the finger-pointing circus without a shred of proof?  In the deafening silence, which I will bet we'll hear on this subject from these men of good faith, I will wonder what has become of the American hopes for a colorblind society.