The city brought this one on themselves. There's no reason that they couldn't have accommodated the man's religious beliefs instead of giving him a choice between following his conscience and losing his job, or doing what he believes is wrong in order to keep it. The settlement was the result of the city's intransigence in dealing with it. This isn't the PD of the 1950s where everyone has to be clean shaven, dress in a cheap suit and fedora in order to look like J. Edgar Hoover clones. And it wouldn't come as a suprise to find that there was an element of anti-Semitism in the refusal to accommodate him, either.

mustangdave wrote: "Both the wild horse and bison are indigenous to North America. "
Actually the last indigenous NA horses died out between 11,000 and 13,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene era. The wild horses we now have were introduced by the Spanish Conquistadors.

lemahj suggests that feral cats are a "clear and present danger" to children and adults. When was the last time we read in the paper about anyone being attacked and savaged by a feral cat or a pack of feral cats? The danger from feral (and non-feral) pets comes from dogs; not cats.
And as far as harm to the "indigionous [sic] bird population", feral cats are more likely to subsist on lizards, mice and other rodents which are easier to catch and which we'd like to be rid of near our homes.

Simplistic sound-bite solutions are always an easy sell to voters who don't do any in-depth study of the issues and facts. The reality is that if we were to give our full blessing to drilling in every spot in the country thought to have petroleum reserves, it would still be ten to fifteen years before they began to produce anything, and the difference they would make in terms of pump prices is only about a dime per gallon.

The real solutions are far more complex and numerous. They include better and more accessible public transportation, more use of bicycles, scooters and small motorcycles in urban settings, reducing commuting distances for workers, development of a variety of alternative energy sources for each region as appropriate, changes in our driving habits, a huge move away from large personal vehicles for the majority of us who don't really need a 4WD SUV or large pickup truck, and a variety of economic incentives to encourage these changes.

Anyone who thinks that everything would be fine if we could just get our hands on more petroleum needs to start thinking long-term and look beyond the local gas pump. The Earth does not have a core made of petroleum, and the question isn't "if" we're eventually going to run out of readily-available petroleum, but "when".

The cost of running a prison system has gotten out of hand, and I would suggest that the answer is to stop using prisons as the punishment of choice and use them, instead, as a punishment of last resort when lesser punishments such as intensive community supervision have failed. Additionally, we're imposing far longer sentences than any other western democracy, and using shorter terms of imprisonment would free up a lot of room in existing facilities. In other words, much of the problem is that we have too many people in prison for too long. It may satisfy our need for revenge, but that doesn't make it good social policy and it's not in our long-term interests to be able to boast of the worst prison system in the free world.