An unexpected visit

After going out early to check on Dookie, who seemed much the same as yesterday, I took my cracking headache back to bed – and then overslept. So all I managed to do was slightly reduce the matted hair behind Kayla’s ears before going down to Rio to meet HH’s Texan client at the airport before his flight back to the States. I wasn’t best pleased, but I’m the driver, so didn’t have much choice. Dookie had to come too and is now installed in the kitchen, while the cat is shut in our bathroom. Keeping them apart will be a challenge
 
I was going to post a shot of a squirrel, but tonight’s surprise has changed that (I’ve added an extra photo of a squirrel to yesterday’s blip). Rather alarmingly, I came out of the kitchen to find the cat in the sitting room, having jumped through the window into the bedroom and then made her way downstairs – far too close to Dookie for her safety. I took her back upstairs, then heard the strangest noise in the bedroom. It was a baby bird, though how it got in and how it escaped the cat, heaven knows. Anyway, to my surprise, it allowed me to catch it, and once we were outside, it perched quietly on my finger rather than flying off. I had time to go back inside, fetch the camera and take four or five photos before it finally flew off.
 
Intensely depressing news in the paper and on TV. As President and ever since, Lula has always been adept at manipulating his puppets – and always pleaded innocence and ignorance of any wrong-doing, as one after the other faced corruption charges. Since leaving the presidency, he has continued to operate from behind the scenes and recently succeeded in having the Finance Minister, and then the Justice Minister, replaced with his creatures. Now he and the whole government have abandoned the shadows and are pulling out all the stops to confirm his appointment as minister and free him from the further investigation by the lower court and possible imprisonment. The newly appointed Justice Minister aims to curb the authority of the lower court judge and the Federal Police, threatening to remove any police officers on the slightest suspicion that they might have leaked information.
 
Such open interference with the work of the police and the course of law ought to be impossible. But much depends on the Supreme Court, packed with government appointees. A court which, a year or so ago, after the appointment of two more government sympathizers, managed to overturn a final Supreme Court decision and reduce the sentence of Lula’s ex-Chief of Staff, in the Mensalão vote-buying scandal (see here) is capable of anything. Hopefully, the fact that Lula insulted it in one of the recorded phone conversations may count against him.