Month: August 2010

Hydrophobia Chronicles: When It Comes to Rabid Raccoons, It’s Kill or Be Killed

Buck Banks

Racoon Has A Question

More prosaic reporting on interactions between mad animals and sometimes demented humans from ProMED Digest, the newsletter of the International Society of Infectious Diseases.

A woman attacked by a rabid raccoon in Prospect took matters into her own hands, literally. The raccoon jumped out from a backyard on Woodcrest Drive and bit the woman Monday morning.

“I turned around and grabbed him. Then he bit me in the hand. Almost took my thumb off, I mean bit right through the thumbnail. And then I managed to get a hold of him with my left hand, all the while screeching for my husband to come out. And I just shoved the raccoon to the ground and held him there,” said the woman.

The victim said she saw the animal chasing her dogs around the backyard. She got the dogs inside, but that’s when the raccoon attacked. She grabbed the attacking raccoon and choked it to death to keep it from biting her anymore. Her husband, hit the animal with a hammer to slow it down even more.

“What disturbs me is I smashed his mouth off, I smashed his teeth in; he still wanted to continue in the attack mode,” said the husband. “I was actually terrified at the resilience of this animal.” His wife had to be hospitalized for her injuries. “I knew she was hurt by the way she was hollering and screaming. I never heard my wife quite that loud or in that pitch,” he said.

The raccoon tested positive for rabies, so both the victim and her husband are undergoing rabies treatments.

It’s not the only attack by a raccoon in Prospect. According to police, a different raccoon injured a dog before taking off. The attack happened during daylight hours. Raccoons are nocturnal animals. The dog had to be euthanized, because it hadn’t had a rabies shot.

State Police issued a warning to residents in Prospect to be on the lookout for raccoons and skunks out during the daytime.

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Verbatim

Buck Banks

I don’t have to say I’m going to caucus with the Democrats or the Republicans.

— Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (I), in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, dodging the question of which of the two major political parties he would caucus with if elected to the U.S. Senate.

Verbatim

Pensito Editors

Permits should not be granted to build even one more mosque in the United States of America, let alone the monstrosity planned for ground zero. This is for one simple reason: each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government.

– Bryan Fischer, a blogger for the right-wing hate group, American Family Association, which has raised millions of dollars over the years by stoking hatred of gays among its Christian-extremist donor pool — but with acceptance of gay rights rising in the polls and the multi-million dollar budgets of AFA’s anti-gay competitor groups shrinking to the point that employees are being laid off, Fischer’s attack on Muslims may signal that AFA will add Islamic hatred to its fundraising appeals.

Obligatory Crowd Inflation Numbers Begin After Tea Party Rally

Trish

78,000 — 96,000

— CBS News estimates of crowd size at Mormon Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally in Washington on Aug. 28, based on work commissioned by CBS from AirPhotosLive. The company uses photos taken from tethered balloons shot at the peak of the crowd, which are then broken into 2-D and 3-D grids, and the individuals counted.

Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands

— Figure quoted by NBC Nightly News

More than 100,000

— ABCNews.com

Crowd Attending Beck Rally Estimated at Over 500,000

— FOX News headline

As low as 300,000 and as big as 650,000

— Glenn Beck on FOX News Sunday

“We’re not going to let anyone get away with saying there were less than a million here today – because we were witnesses.”

— Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.)

Verbatim

Trish

This is obviously scaring white people. What they have done is essentially try to put off-limits any parts of the city where these main tea partiers believe you might be able to encounter, dare I say, black people.

–– Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson on MSNBC, describing a post by tea bagger Bruce Majors, which Majors said was intended as informational to participants in Glenn Beck’s “Million Moron” rally. The post listed subway lines and neighborhoods to avoid (diverse ones), and warned that most cab drivers are Arab or African. It also included a map showing the “safe” areas, which were mainly around the Washington Mall. City leaders countered that millions of tourists visit happily every year, and that Majors is out of touch with the times, since many of the areas he said to avoid are the hippest and trendiest.

Glenn Beck Is Not Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Jon Ponder

In the Jim Crow era, it was white supremacist pseudo-Christians like today’s GOP-tea partiers and racist Mormons like Glenn Beck who stood in the school house doors and unleashed attack dogs against those, like Martin Luther King Jr., who fought for civil rights and racial equality.

What these neo-Confederates are doing today, by convening on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, is nothing less than a desecration of the memory of those who fought and died to fulfill that dream.

Sign a petition to voice your opposition to Beck’s event at Brave New Films.

Martin Luther King is the Farthest Thing from Glenn Beck’s Mind

Trish

It was not my intention to select 8-28 because of the Martin Luther King tie. It is the day he made that speech. I had no idea until I announced it.

— Glenn Beck, talk radio and FOX News personality, stating the obvious. No one doubts that the date of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was outside Beck’s frame of reference when he planned his “Restoring Honor” tea bagger rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, site of King’s world-changing speech.