I am 54 pounds of AWESOME, flying at you with a tennis ball in my mouth

Because of my recent hiatus from blogging, I realize that it may have been some months since readers have seen a recent photo of Willow. In case anyone cares, I have sought to remedy this defect by supplying the above recent shot of young Miss Willow, age ten months.

Of course, Willow's also been very concerned about certain developments in the news. Specifically, Puppygate. Some of her Republican friends have even gone so far as to tell her, "You know, Willow, if you had a son, he would look a lot like the dog Obama ate." To which she has replied, "No, because that dog was just some kind of stupid Indonesian mutt, and I am a golden retriever." She then proceeds to stare back as if to say, "Yes, Prada and K-Mart both sell things called 'handbags,' but to pretend the two products are the same in any sense beyond the semantic is to miss the point. So, too, is calling a golden retriever just a dog." Her interlocutors have then usually backed down.

Yes, Puppygate marks yet another low in the silly season of American politics. For one thing, the scandal ought to have been old news: Dreams from My Father was in print well before the last election cycle. I suppose the dog story is supposed to support the narrative that Obama is somehow deeply foreign, a creature far more alien and weird than your average liberal Democrat politician. One of the stranger things that I've read in this vein is this Pajamas Media piece, which picks out a quote about the rhythms of the Indonesian marketplace in contrast with the Chicago housing projects to illustrate Obama's deeply anti-American sympathies. This is... odd... because while full context is missing from the PJ media piece, the Obama quote presented there is perhaps fairly read as lamenting the lack of a rich, vibrant civil society in the Chicago housing project . Indeed, the welfare state's displacement of such networks of thriving small businesses and custom has long been a major conservative and libertarian criticism of social welfare projects. It's unfortunate that Obama didn't connect the dots better and take this typical criticism of the welfare state to heart better. It is also especially odd that the PJ media writer Spengler here views a Chicago housing project as a stand-in for the rough and tumble of American capitalism.

But... meh. At least all of this will be displaced next week by some equally ridiculous non-news story.