And a good turnout will also help to ensure that no other lame-brained state pol in California will think this is anything more than the manipulations of animal-rights extremists who believe “a breeder is a breeder is a breeder” and all are bad.

Easy answers rarely are either, and AB 1634 is a classic example.

Save the date of Wednesday, June 18, 2008 when the final battle on AB 1634 will take place in a hearing of the Senate Local Government Committee at the State Capitol in Sacramento.

PetPAC needs your help now more than ever. We need your financial support today to help us fight the massive last minute efforts funded by our opponents.

“We’re gearing back up,” said Judie Mancuso of the pro-AB 1634 California Taxpayers for Safe and Healthy Pets. Mancuso says that her group is hoping to revive the issue of mandatory spay/neuter before time runs out. She says the group hired a powerful lobbying firm to try and run the bill across the goal line in the Legislature. They have also paid for billboards in Sacramento to influence legislators. (Capitol Notes, 5/28/08)

In addition to our lobbying and public relations campaign to stop AB 1634, PetPAC will be holding a rally at the Capitol on June 18.

Let me be very clear, our mission is to defeat mandatory sterilization for pets in California. Mancuso and her PETA friends are spending heavily to pass AB 1634, we need your financial support today as we have significant expenses in the coming weeks in order to fund our campaign.

Please join us in Sacramento on Wednesday, June 18. We will be providing additional details in the days ahead. Thank you for supporting PetPAC.

Sincerely,

Bill Hemby
PetPAC Chairman

Other posters are bearing out what I posted about the unsavory reputation Dogster is gaining as a front group.

The internet is going to make obsolete more than newspapers.
And why is it my job to tell Dogster and the ilk how to earn money without selling their souls?

They can go back to school, learn a trade, sex trade worker, hang, starve, beg in the streets, options are endless.

Well now, let’s not be hasty. I haven’t seen a lot of evidence in three-plus decades of voting that sense has much to do who or what wins.

Unlike many magazines, in which advertisers get friendly content with their ads, newspapers do not offer this. Advertising and editorial are separate. Buying ad space doesn’t get you new coverage at a newspaper, nor does it protect you from bad new coverage.

If you can figure out a model for a Web site to earn money without advertising, well, you just let us know.

Shilling, to me, means writing something you know not to be true to promote a product. We don’t do that. What we do is sell an advertiser space to promote their product, with no endorsement pro or con from us.

Itchmo forums has some of the story .
And archives of ALL of it are being kept safe.
As well as the “inside ” stories told in private by those former Dogsters who have morals.

Newspapers are dying on the vine _because_ of the sell out factor so using their failing model and buying into the lack of ethics is probably not a good idea.

There are plenty of ways to make a living that do NOT involve shilling for the pet food companies.

In our contracts we spell out for our sponsors that they are buying the banner at the top of the page. They are not buying us, not buying content, not buying us laying off them if they do something awful.

They buy space, or, in the case of Pfizer, the right to have their logo on our Web search page, since their sponsorship made the development of the database possible.

It’s the “newspaper model,” with a wall between editorial and advertising. We haven’t made any agreements with a pet-food sponsor, but I can’t say we never will here. But that doesn’t mean we won’t continue to report on things as we always have been.

I can’t say what’s going on over at Dogster because I don’t know. And, really, I don’t much care because we have our own work to do here.