Politics

The Weekend Politics Thread Gives Every Dog Its Day

♪ I love my dog
As much as I love you
You may fade
My dog will always come through ♪
— Who could question something on which Sublime, the Bottle Rockets1 and DMX all agree?

With the Dog Days2 of August not over, your always Sirius3 Weekend Politics Thread host invokes his doctorate of doing little to dedicated this WPT header to domesticated canids. Honoring the 35-years-gone fairness doctrine also dictates balancing last week’s fulminations on felines with an equal-time disquisition on dogs.

Last, the just concluded Sunday-to-Saturday septet saw several surprisingly salutary stories:

  • Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema signed on to a U.S. budget package that delivers on most of the promises of the Build Back Better agenda.
  • American veterans who developed cancer and respiratory diseases after breathing in toxins from burn pits received their long-delayed health benefits despite congressional Republic working themselves into a snit over the aforementioned budget package.
  • Forty-plus-year al Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri received his just deserts at the business end of a CIA blade drone.4
  • Kansans turned out and turned up to preserve abortion rights and show the path to winning Democratic majorities in the U.S. House and Senate come November.
  • Australia’s Labor-led government passed climate change action legislation that purports to undo decades of Liberal-National eco-terrorism by 2030.
  • Former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipillone received, and will comply with, a U.S. Department of Justice subpoena to testify before a criminal grand jury.
  • DOJ also filed multiple federal felony indictments against the under color of official right murderers of Breonna Taylor.
  • U.S. employers hired more than 525,000 people during July 2022, bringing total countrywide employment above the pre-pandemic count for the first time.
  • Alex Jones received civil defamation judgments totaling almost $50 million for compensatory and punitive damages while also opening himself to perjury, fraud, and seditious conspiracy charges. He faces two other defamation sentencing trials later this year.

Some good news deserves more good news. Will rescuing 4,000 beagles from their living nightmares and certain early deaths suffice?

About three weeks ago, federal agents, the Humane Society of the United States, and Virginia animal welfare officials succeeded in shutting down a breeding mill of horrors named Envigo RMS. A delicately worded press release summarizes the company’s offensive offenses this way:

In May, the United States filed suit against Envigo RMS, alleging that the company was failing to provide humane care and treatment to the thousands of beagles at the company’s Cumberland facility. Specifically, the complaint alleged that Envigo RMS was failing to meet the [Animal Welfare Act’] minimum standards for handling, housing, feeding, watering, sanitation and adequate veterinary care, among other requirements. Based on past violations identified during inspections by the Department of Agriculture and evidence of extensive, ongoing AWA violations obtained during a multiday criminal search warrant executed at the Cumberland facility beginning on May 18, the Justice Department moved for a temporary restraining order that the federal court granted on May 21 to ensure the health and welfare of the beagles at the Cumberland facility.

Uvular now urges Politicados who braved that pull quote to emergency wash their mind’s eye with a slideshow of cute puppy pics.5

The people who operated Envigo have yet to stand trial or accept plea deals. One hopes they spend any jail time in much better conditions than they afforded their former furry captives.

Another WPT header might seize this narrative moment to spin out into a disjointed jeremiad on inhumane carceral practices, the lamentable irony of New Yorkers founding the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals before organizing to end child labor in sweatshops, and why cats get all the pixels ‘round these parts.

Instead, Uvular invites readers to breath easy in the rays of window-filtered sunlight that so recently shone through. Pet a pooch. Post a comment. Hydrate. Repeat.