Hit job

First off, welcome to the first post on my new (to me) platform on WordPress.com. I started Critical Condition almost four years ago on Posterous, which appealed due to its “drop-dead easy” approach. Well, they lived up to the first part of it this week. After selling out to Twitter last year, they discontinued their blog service as of yesterday. Fortunately they provided a way for me to export my several years of blog posts and import them into WordPress. So here I am. Though you likely know it already if you’re reading this, my semi-random musings can now be found here at http://InfoTechRN.com (end technical prolegomenon)

There are several things going on these days that merit the title of this post, not all of which I can elaborate on today. I’ll confine this entry to the radical animal activist campaign, thinly disguised as investigative journalism, with which the NBC Today show soiled itself this morning. I will leave it to the reader to do his own review of the severe agenda, and misleading use of donations from pet lovers, of the Humane Society of the United States. (Just do a search on HSUS scam if you are not already familiar with this outfit’s thuggish tactics.) For a supposedly reputable news organization like NBC (wait, I contradict myself there) to feed us canned HSUS propaganda to denigrate an organization, the American Kennel Club, that actually is committed to the strengthening of bonds between people and their dogs—their piece today was thoroughly disgusting.

Granted, I don’t think the AKC spokeswoman who was interviewed made the best case for her organization. I know there are bad breeders out there, and likely as not they hide behind the AKC shield. It is very likely the AKC’s inspection efforts need upgraded, since they have only nine inspectors to cover the country, and there are hundreds of thousands of breeders who surely never get inspected. Sadly, ramping up that work would cause AKC’s fees to those registering pure-bred dogs to rise markedly, in order to cover the costs involved.

I am not sure that is the right path. AKC just needs to acknowledge that while they do what they can with regard to inspection, it does not have the resources to catch every malevolent breeder. Obviously the HSUS found one of them, and today their activist accomplices at NBC milked it for all it’s worth. Which is, not much.