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By Gregory Taggart, January 21, 2013 5:26 pm

But if it happens elsewhere in the United States, expect it to make the front pages worldwide.

Barack Obama and Manti Te’o share the front page of Brazil’s Exame.com.

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By Gregory Taggart, January 21, 2013 1:46 pm

Here’s the last good one, delivered by another guy from Illinois:

Note the Teleprompter (1.0).

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By Gregory Taggart, January 11, 2013 5:21 pm

The conduct of the republican [sic] party in this nomination is a remarkable indication of a small intellect, growing smaller.

Guess who wrote that and when?

The abuse continues:

[Rather than choose “statesmen and able men” as their candidate] They take up a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar [and whose speeches are] illiterate compositions . . . interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes.

Nope, that was not The New York Times pining for Jon Huntsman to be the presidential candidate of the Republican Party. Nor was it any of those who routinely bashed George W. Bush as dumb and inarticulate or Ronald Reagan as just plain dumb.

No, according to Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her book Team of Rivals, that was the Democratic New York Hearald taking aim at newly nominated Abraham Lincoln, and, she says, that paper was not alone in ridiculing him and the new Republican Party–the party that opposed slavery by the way.

So campers, if it seems to you that the Republican Party can never field a candidate who is not stupid and inarticulate–according to the Democrats–take heart and give it a little time. One hundred and fifty three years later, they’ll be making Oscar-nominated movies about the alleged dunces.

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By Gregory Taggart, December 3, 2012 11:30 am

Ann Althouse has the following post on her blog today:

I love Althouse’s question after the photo:

The media never got Romney, did they? WaPo is presenting “I’ll change your bedpan” as abject and pathetic. Are they only pretending not to understand or does it truly escape them?

Even better is the following comment that proposes a different headline for the photo:

Romney is a good man. Too bad he’s riding this roller coaster rather than the one President Obama’s on.

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By Gregory Taggart, November 5, 2012 12:39 pm

A corporation is a corporation is a corporation. And if NBC can promote or the National Geographic Channel can air Harvey Weinstein’s Seal Team Six two days before the election–to little or no criticism by critics of the Citizen United decision–then all the sturum and drang about the Supreme Court’s decision must have been much ado about nothing.

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By Gregory Taggart, November 3, 2012 10:41 am

So this morning, I followed a link on Twitter to a story in Politico and learned something about Mitt Romney (and therefore me) that I had never supposed. Apparently journalist and WSJ contributor Paul Levy doesn’t think much of Mitt Romney (and therefore me):

“It’s very simple: I think Romney [and therefore me] is a dangerous religious freak whose election [not mine] will cripple America,” said Levy, who has donated $225 to Obama this year.

In the early morning–I was still in bed, reading on my smartphone–that was bad enough. But then I realized that Levy’s was the only quote in the story wherein any of the people quoted gave a reason for their contribution. Worse still, that quote appeared in the 4th paragraph–just 14 short lines in even shorter paragraphs–into the story, with no similarly outrageous reference to President Obama being a closet Muslim to balance the tale. An in-kind campaign contribution to the Obama campaign if you will–in an article about journalists contributing actual dollars to campaigns. (I wonder if they can spell IRONY at Politico.)

Well, you can imagine how I felt. I immediately sought refuge among my friends on Facebook. Wrong move that. Quicker than a Mormon man jumping from one polygamous bed to the next, I stumbled upon the following gem on Joanna Brooks’s wall:

It seems that Lisa, apparently and entirely unaware of her audience, decided it would be nice to establish her street creds as one who can separate the wheat from the chaff. Speaking for those in Lisa’s version of chaff (I live in Utah Country), I’ll report that thresher she is not.

Anyway, I’m now awake, and even though I was awaken rudely, I am fine. I’m sure Paul and Lisa would want to know that.

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By Gregory Taggart, September 30, 2012 2:58 pm

Back in the summer of 1995, I was sitting on a grassy hill in the middle of UC-Berkeley’s campus with my daughter Caroline. It was new-student orientation week, and she and I were there to be oriented before she began school that fall. We had driven to Berkeley from Provo, Utah, our home for the previous four years and just 45 minutes down I-15 from Salt Lake City, the epicenter of Mormonism. Now if Mormonism teaches anything besides Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, and the Book of Mormon, it teaches about the importance of families. We have Family Home Evening. We have the song “Families Can Be Together Forever.” We have temples where families are sealed together for “time and all eternity.” We have “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” In short, Mormons like families. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that some of us may actually believe Mormons invented the family.

So there I was sitting on that hill with my daughter in the middle of possibly the most liberal college campus in the United States, across the Bay from possibly the most liberal city in the U.S. and the second largest city in maybe the most liberal state in the Union–sorry Massachusetts. And what did I see? Hundreds of mothers and fathers sitting on the same grassy hill with their sons and daughters, eating box lunches before the afternoon’s activities. Their children, like my daughter, were about to separate from their family and move on. Then it hit me: Most, if not all, of those parents were not from Utah. Few were Mormon. Yet, like me, they were excited for their children’s future even as they were anxious for their safety. Like me, they were going to miss their children. Like mine, their family was about to be changed forever. I laughed because I realized that I had spent so much time in the Utah Bubble that I had almost come to think that Mormons had the corner on families. Seeing all those mothers and fathers on that grassy hill brought me back to reality.

Now Utah doesn’t have a corner on bubbles either. I’m mean count ’em: There’s the Beltway Bubble, the Liberal Bubble, the Media Bubble, the Conservative Bubble. Bubbles here, bubbles there, bubbles everywhere. The world is a virtual Lawrence Welk Show.

With that in mind, I’d like to step outside my Conservative Bubble for a moment to point you towards a blog post by Nina Camic, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She tells the story of her stint as an au pair to the daughter of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. Upon hearing about his recent death, she wrote:

A pause for reflection.

I came to live in the States as an adult (if you can call 18 adult) because of the goodness of a person who died today. I was an au pair to his little girl. I learned through him and his wife how to transition from Warsaw to New York again. I came with barely a flight bag full of clothes and possessions and joined a household that had a staff of helpers and an extended family of cousins, aunts, nephews — all intensely close, bonded in ways that history sometimes bonds people because of unusual circumstances. That I was treated kindly is such an understatement that I can’t even quite say it. The father of my charge will always in my mind be the person who liked nothing better than to drive away from the city, to the country home, fire up the grill and throw some meats for an evening supper with just his little girl, his wife and the au pair from Poland. After dinner, he and I would clean up in the kitchen and if I learned how to wipe down every last inch of counterspace it was because he taught me well. He was too kind for words and his little girl was just like him, making my au pair duties about the easiest that could be.

So, my thoughts are very much with the kids he leaves behind. Kids… How oddly stated! Kids. We were that once.

Yup, we were all kids once, and we’re all grown-ups now, men and women. Most of us, most of the time, are even good grown-ups. In the last days of this never-ending and way overheated presidential election, it’s worth remembering that even the former publisher and CEO of The New York Times–that bête noire of conservatives everywhere–was a kid once and was, apparently, a very good, kind, and generous man.

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By Gregory Taggart, September 22, 2012 10:32 am

So Mormon author (and sometimes critic of Mormonism) Joanna Brooks is all a-Twitter about the need for a big-tent Mormonism.

Just don’t give Mitt Romney the address to the tent.

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By Gregory Taggart, September 14, 2012 11:58 am

White House press secretary Jay Carney assures us that all these protests are because of a stupid YouTube video.

Yeah, right. That’s why protestors in Egypt were chanting, “Obama, Obama there are still a billion Osamas.”

That’s why some in the Muslim world were chanting the same thing back in May:

That’s why protests are happening all over the world and appear so coordinated. No, this is all because of a YouTube video. Yeah, right.

Maybe the protestors are tired of Team Obama spiking the ball. You can almost hear the jihadists thinking, “Okay, you got our guy. Enough already!”

On second thought, it’s probably Romney’s fault.

UPDATE: Regarding that movie. I haven’t seen it, but I’ll grant that it’s offensive and some in the streets of Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere are greatly offended by it. Still, I have sincere doubts that we can attribute all these protests and protestors to that movie.

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By Gregory Taggart, August 31, 2012 1:51 pm

Okay, so it turns out that Romney is leaving Tampa and heading to Louisiana to tour the hurricane-ravaged area with Gov. Jindal–a move that caused President Obama to suddenly change his plans.

The trip is a late addition to the president’s schedule, released just hours after GOP rival Mitt Romney announced he was scrambling his Friday campaign plans to visit victims of the storm.

Obama was slated to host campaign rallies in Ohio on Monday. A rally in Cleveland has been canceled.

When I heard of President Obama’s last minute change of plans, apparently in response to Romney’s visit to Bayou Country, the first words that came mind were “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” The thought had nothing to do with the President’s race, nothing to do with his color. The thought only came to mind because of the obvious connection between hurricanes, disaster, Louisiana, and the President’s relative inaction–after all, Romney obviously beat him to the Pelican State.

And then the connection between “Brownie” and the President’s race and color hit me, which prompts me to ask: Am I racist for thinking my initial thought? Am I racist for posting this after having the second thought? What if President Obama ends up doing a lousy job responding to the aftermath of Hurricane Isaac; is Bush’s infamous compliment off limits?

I pretty sure what Lawrence O’Donnell would think. I’m more interested in what you think.