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All-Encompassingly has a great post with a video I made with them about the Obama’s dog Bo.  Obama wrote in the 1990s about eating dog meat in Indonesia as a cultural norm and adventurous part of his childhood. I await interest in the story to reach the levels that “Seamus atop Romney’s car” achieved.

In the meantime, we’re encouraging all those that love dogs to pray for Bo.

Volume I:

Volume II:

Volume III:

Volume IV:

I’m a casual news junkie, and yet I am repeatedly confronted with statements from “media personalities” that don’t seem to be very good at their job.

John Avlon writes about Rep. Allen West’s “communists in congress” comment.  He laments the lack of civility and how this is horrible to associate members of the Democratic Party with Communism, which is responsible for the death of millions of people.

I personally have no idea why West said what he did, but Avlon’s dismay at the lack of condemnation causes him to draw the following comparison.

And just for a moment imagine if a liberal member of Congress made an equal and opposite accusation, saying that all the members of the tea party caucus were Nazis. It would be rightly greeted with wall-to-wall outrage.

I assume John Avlon simply collects a check from CNN for word count.

From the headlines and network analysis, you would get the impression that Mitt Romney didn’t have a very good night.  In reality, he won a majority of the contests, placing 1st in 6 of 10 states, 2nd in 3 and 3rd only in 1.

The narrative is that he somehow isn’t connecting with people, even though he now has more delegates than all the other candidates combined. And then some.  I think it is safe to say that Romney doesn’t have a “connection” problem, he has an “expectations” problem.  Expectations seem to have become Romney’s biggest challenge.

Some might argue that his inability to seal the nomination somehow represents a problem, irregardless of the fact that the current occupant of the White House was mired in a contested primary for months before becoming the nominee.

So when you take a step back and objectively look at what happened last night, Romney won the state that all eyes were on.  The rest of the races were essentially a wash.  Romney won everything he was expected to, with the exception of swapping North Dakota for Alaska, and Santorum won everything he was expected to.  And Gingrich of course won his home state of Georgia which really opens the path to the nomination for him because…..he has more delegates than Ron Paul or something.

A pattern has really emerged this cycle.  Romney is so far and away more polished, prepared, organized and funded than other candidates, that it isn’t that he can’t quite seal the deal with the voters, but instead he can’t seal the deal with the media that expects near perfection from him.  If he wins a state like Washington or Arizona by a huge margin, it is simple victory, unworthy of much attention.  If he barely wins his home state like Michigan, it is a near catastrophic miss.  And if he barely wins a swing state like Ohio, he apparently has fundamental problems with his campaign.

In every scenario presented, Romney wins, and yet, the reluctance to give him his due is palpable.  It is as though there is a new normal wherein Romney must pad with a sizable margin or else risk discredit for the victory.

If Romney wins the White House this November, expect the following possible headlines from these same political analysts and pundits distressed at how to explain Romney’s victory:

Thin Margin of Victory Raises Questions Over Mandate to Govern
Romney Won, But Unfavorables Still an Issue
Mitt’s Triumph Overshadowed by Narrow Win
Romney Wins, but do Voters Trust Him?

The media loves a horse race I suppose.

Allahpundit says it all.

My point this week, though, and Ace’s point at his site, has been that this episodeisn’t business as usual. This isn’t some standard “Palin’s using rhetorical dog whistles for her Christian base!” attack. This is a congresswoman bleeding out of her head on the sidewalk with six bodies lying around her, one of them a little girl, and Palin being blamed for it instantly. And yet according to Keith Ellison, the proper response here should have been to validate that accusation by implication by saying, gee, yeah, I guess I should have toned it down. I’m not known for being a Palin fan (as, er, any actual Palin fan could tell you) and even I can’t contain my indignation at the charge. And yet she’s supposed to just mellow out and take it because political reporters who won’t flatly correct the record for their readers think it’s bad “optics” to do otherwise? Unbelievable.

UPDATE: Ace makes equally awesome points in his wrap up linked to in the above.

We are now debating — quite seriously, or we’re supposed to be quite serious about debating this — whether Sarah Palin can use martial imagery in her speech, even though everyone in politics does this, including the very media now assuring us this is all a terrible thing. And we are supposed to have this very serious debate while our opponents in the debate are simply making things up, or, more accurately: We are supposed to indulge our opponents’ retreat to a fantasy world they’ve constructed, and not disrupt their fantasy too much, because, who knows, Paul Krugman might snap if we do.

A humorous look at a serious situation.  I don’t know how I would even hold a conversation with someone that thought Israel at fault in the “Flotilla Incident.”

Perhaps CNN thought it was irrelevant to mention the Islamic religious affiliation of those planning to bomb a synagogue and shoot down a US military airplane.

The CNN article doesn’t once mention any sort of religious affiliation, desire to avenge muslim deaths, nor the desire to, “do jihad.”  I suppose it was not an important detail.

Just throwing it out there.  She keeps on getting soundbites and headlines because she represents “a bold new face of republicanism.” However, I’m guessing that after a few months, perhaps a year or two, we’ll see her slip to becoming an independent, or even a democrat.

I feel silly adding to the attention that is already out there, but she has become the opposite of the Rush Limbaugh phenomenon.  Instead of Limbaugh representing the “worst” in the minds of democrats, McCain embodies the “best” in the GOP in their minds, and is given ample screen time and headlines.

Apparently she is 24, attended Columbia, earning a degree in Art History.  I feel much the same as Matt Lewis:

What can I say about her that hasn’t already been said? My position can best be summed up by Matthew Yglesias, who wrote: “To the best of my knowledge we’re talking about a young woman who’s never accomplished anything or held a job.”

So we’ve been told that Obama has assembled some of the best “brain power” we’ve seen in a long time.

Apparently the new Secretary of Education might have forgotten to terminate abusive teachers in the Chicago Public Schools he was responsible for.  At least it’s not as embarrassing as unpaid taxes.

CBS 2 informed former Chicago Public School CEO Arne Duncan of our investigative findings shortly before he was promoted to U.S. Secretary of Education.

“If someone hits a student, they are going to be fired. It’s very, very simple,” Duncan said.

…..

But that’s not what happened under Duncan’s watch. Of the 568 verified cases, only 24 led to termination. Records show one teacher who quote “battered students for several years” was simply given a “warning” by the Board of Education.

Hat tip: Dr. Richard Kimball

I absolutely love reading his columns.  His latest column is a succinct package about the state of the election and why he is voting for McCain.

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who’s been cramming on these issues for the last year, who’s never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of “a world that stands as one”), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as “the tragedy of 9/11,” a term more appropriate for a bus accident?