Speaking of nutty right-wingers, Pat Robertson says God will smite a town for voting against intelligent design.

Bill O'Reilly thinks San Francisco shouldn't be a part of America. But he doesn't stop there:

"If Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead."

What a douche.

Thanks for all the kind words of support about Dublin. Some of the emails have been really amazing.

One of the funniest shout outs came from the reader who said the posting reminded them of this Onion story.

Americans love their dogs. We spend more on pets than on candy or toys. Philanthropists have funded research into cloning pets, and recent genetic successes have created a nascent industry.

This isn't about America in the aggregate, it's about me. More to the point, my dog. Her name was Dublin. We put her down this morning. She was diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of cancer, operated on, had a kidney removed (along with the tumor) and struggled for the past two weeks. We waited with desperation for her to pee the first few days after the surgery, in the hope that her one remaining kidney would work. About 3 days after the operation she walked out into our bushes and squatted. It was night and we realized we might not be able to see her urinate so I shoved my hand under her and felt the warm, golden liquid. I was ecstatic. Never before had being peed on by a dog brought me such unmitigated happiness.

But the next few days put to rest our fledgling hope. Even though she continued to pee test results showed that her lone kidney wasn't working as hoped. She hadn't eaten since the surgery and was losing weight and what little strength she had. The only time she got up from her bed was to vomit. Each day brought less and less hope that she'd make a real recovery.

She was my dog, but really she was my wife's dog. She got Dublin from a pound in Southern California just before she left for college. Her first dog on her own, a sign, to my wife at least, of her growing independence and connected to her sense of the possible. Many years later I met my wife in a dog park. Of all the gifts our dogs gave us, this was undoubtedly the greatest.

So now we have one dog. A strange sensation for two people who spent so many years going to dog parks and learning to watch two dogs simultaneously go in opposite directions. The four of us went to Chrissy Field, an expanse of beach on the San Francisco Bay that is a favorite for all City dogs, and watched the fog roll over the bridge and waves crest against the sand where Dublin once chased giant black birds with an abandon that is reserved for the innocent and the free. This was our last act as a family of four before we took her to her in. Before we held her as the vet injected one shot, and then another, and she went to sleep forever.

Often people without pets are amazed. "How can you spend so much money on medical bills?" they ask. "How can you spend so much on toys...on food...on everything?" As I sit at home self-medicating (i.e. getting drunk) in the misbegotten hope that the virgin chasm will somehow ignore me for a moment or two, I realize that our love affair with animals is as much about us as it is about them.