The Obama-eats-dog story is needed to nullify the Shame-of-Seamus tale.

I understand why Obama opponents are frying this story to a crisp, e.g., James Taranto:

One time Barack Obama went to an Indian restaurant and ordered the lassi. Was he ever disappointed when the waiter brought him a yogurt drink!

And Instapundit... just go over there and scroll. It's brimming with Obama-eats-dog nuggets. Like this link to "Dogs Against Obama" — which corresponds to the much promoted "Dogs Against Romney."

My preference would be for everyone to stop talking about the dog stories, but that's not how speech works. No one notices that some speakers are refraining from speaking. In a free-speech marketplace of ideas, you've got to provide more speech. You might say, well, let's be high-minded about this and say things like: Let's avoid distractions and discuss things that really matter, like the economy. But that won't drive the Seamus story away. You've got to offer an equivalent product in the marketplace of ideas, and Obama-eats-dog is that product.

ADDED: The Obama-eats-dog meme makes jokes — especially visual humor — incredibly easy. Everybody's suddenly a photoshop comic genius with stuff like this:



You can scream for mercy now, but the cat is out of the bag the dog is out of the strapped-to-the-top-of-the-car kennel.

"Because I criticized the President, it’s news?"

"Last I checked, he’s President, not King! This is America! Freedom of Speech. what’s the bfd?"

***

I know I've made a lot of Obama tags over the years, but looking for the right one for this post made me realize I have a serious Obama tag proliferation problem on this blog. Few other characters have even one additional tags beyond their name. For example, Hillary Clinton only has 2 extra tags, one dedicated to her work as Secretary of State and another one called "Hillary snaps." But look at my list of Obama tags:

"Many Indonesians who are still too poor to eat beef, except on special occasions, can now afford dog or cat."

Said one animal protection researcher quoted in "Indonesians’ Taste for Dog Meat Is Growing, Even as Others Shun It" (NYT).

“From a strictly practical, agricultural point of view, growing dogs and cats for meat requires far less space and feed resources than growing cows, and is therefore cheaper,” [Brad] Anthony said. “The economics of it all is likely the primary motivator for production and consumption.”...

[D]ogs are not classified as livestock, the way cows, pigs and chickens are. Because of this, the slaughter, distribution, sale and consumption of dogs are not regulated.... In Jakarta, Juniatur Silitonga... says he slaughters about 20 dogs in an average week....

“It’s cheaper than beef,” he said. “Eating dog meat is a tradition among local tribes, and they are mostly Christian, but Muslims also eat dog meat soup for medicinal reasons.”

There is a belief that meat from a black dog cures asthma.

ADDED: In the comments — those swamps of vitriol and condescension — they're making a beeline for Obama-eats-dog material. Here's my Obama eats dog tag to beef up — dog up — your witticisms.

But what I really want to talk about is poverty and human health. If dogs and cats are cheap and easy to breed and keep, why shouldn't poor people be accorded respect as they embrace this form of food production? The article doesn't really approach this problem, but immediately distracts us with 2 completely different problems: 1. Cruel methods of slaughter, and 2. Rabies.

These are utterly easy to see as problems. There's no debate about ethics, so it's a fine distraction from the harder question I want to talk about.

And aren't these problems solvable? Can't poor people be educated about and convinced to use the most humane method of slaughter? We affluent people — most of us — don't deny ourselves meat because of the suffering of animals. We just expect that the suffering to be decently minimized.

As for rabies, nobody wants rabies! Let's work on that problem everywhere. According to the article, unregulated commerce makes it hard to rabies, which is "a persistent problem in Bali and elsewhere." If this is a reason to deny a meat source to poor people, please explain to me why affluent people are encouraged to travel to Bali. Here's a NYT article from 2015: "Rabies Deaths Higher Than Previously Thought":

Rabies kills 59,000 people a year, or about 160 a day — more than had previously been assumed — according to a study published last week.

That is a terrible problem. Worry about that, not whether some poor people are taking advantage of the profusion of dogs and cats to get some meat in their diet.

Obama tags on this blog that have collected a surprising number of posts.

You can see all my Obama tags below the fold. I'll just list some I particularly like for various reasons — odd specificity, surprising usefulness, whatever:

Obama the mood elevator (74)
Obama the boyfriend (58)
Obama and manliness (24)
Obama's psyche (68)
Obama is everywhere (15)
Obama and irony (14)
Obama and pop culture (87)
Obama the father (19)
Obama the teacher (28)
Obama and the fly (13) (Let's see Trump catch a fly with his bare hand.)
Obama eats dog (12)
Obama attacked from the left (11)
Obama gets mad (3)
Obama is bland ( 63)
Obama's tired (5)
Obama is like Bush (78)
Obama is like Carter (15)
Obama is like Nixon (35)
Obama is like Reagan (4)
Obama is like Sarah Palin (4)
Obama's umbrella (5)
Obama says something strange (1)

"Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?"

That's the fifth most "liked" quote on the topic of "sin" at goodreads. It's from Chuck Palahniuk, Diary (which is a novel, not a diary). The forth most liked also involves poor old Adam. It's by Mark Twain:

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

But I've heard snake is tough, tougher than dog (and less crunchy than grasshopper).

Sorry for the gratuitous Obama-eats-dog/snake punchline. It was not my motivation to look up quotes. I was actually searching for a quote about boredom, something like the only sin is being boring. Interestingly, the most-liked goodreads quotes on the topic of "boredom" are boring. Seriously, how many ways are there to say If you're bored, it's because you are boring? And now I've lost track of what somebody said that made me what that sin-of-boringness quote, which might not even exist.

“Life is for living and working at. If you find anything or anybody a bore, the fault is in yourself.”
― Elizabeth I

Am I boring you? You must be boring.

IN THE COMMENTS: Sweetbriar and Jody both point me to the answer: Christopher Hitchens, in his memoir, "Hitch-22." Page 13. His mother used to say:  "The one unforgivable sin is to be boring."

And I think what got me looking in the first place was a comment by Patrick over in the "Predictable Althouse Is Predictable" post:

Honestly, when I first came to this blog, back in the day, I assumed that you, a law professor especially at Madison, would be a typical lefty law professor. In fact, I likely put off reading the blog for awhile because I assumed it would be the same old boring lefty stuff. This is a very interesting blog, and your political opinions or votes are part of that, but really, there's a lot more to it. Vote for Ron Paul for all I care, or Dennis Kucinich. Just don't be boring about it!

The internet is less about cuteness than it used to be.

When's the last time anybody prodded anybody to look at cuteoverload.com or I Can Has Cheezburger?

In the business of trendspotting, it's hard to notice what we're not doing. Am I the first to notice the end of cuteness?

Here. Test yourself: Are you charmed to know that Gary Matthews, a 48-year-old "retired technology worker," "thinks he is a dog," and "wears a dog collar, eats dog food from a bowl — his favorite is Pedigree – and loves milk bones and dog cookies"?

Or do you think: Why are ABC and National Geographic giving air to mental disorders/lame entertainers? Is it to distract us from Obama's lies? And what's with "retiring" at age 48? Is that part of the economic downward spiral?

Althouse has spotted the end of the cuteness trend.
	True.
	In fact, the trend continues. (Show your proof in the comments.)
	There never was such a trend. And thanks, Althouse, for including an option for cranks like me.
pollcode.com free polls

All those tags.

The other day, I was blogging about tags, and somebody asked what are all the tags. I considered adding a sidebar gadget that would show all the tags, but I saw that there were over 3,000 of them. For what its worth, I've copied and pasted the list of tags, which you can see after the jump.

The number in parens is the number of times I've used the tag. The list is in alphabetical order, with the top of the list being tags that were originally written with quotation marks. This is something the software no longer lets me do, so some of those tags reappear without quotation marks, and thus the numbers in parens for the tags with quotation marks are not accurate.

If you want to find the posts that have a particular tag, copy and paste the word(s) into the search box at the top left of this page, and when you find a post that has that tag, click on that tag. In other words, forgive me for not taking the time to make this list all hot links.

Radical Locavore.

A Bizarro cartoon, arrived at via the Wikipedia article "Self-cannibalism," which I found seconds after speculating out loud "I wonder if anyone has ever gotten so hungry they've eaten parts of their own body?," which arose out of a conversation with Meade, who was talking about military training for survival behind enemy lines. For example:

Trainees are taught that when stranded in the field, they should eat what they can find, which can include turtles, snakes, insects and other things normally considered unappetizing. The training helps them overcome their food aversions.

... [A] running joke is that "food is a crutch" because survival school teaches soldiers how to overcome physical stress like hunger by using mental strength.

A Special Forces captain swallows a worm to the delight of his fellow trainees. Asked what it tasted like, the captain said, "Dirt. And kind of like a worm. Kind of fishy. Kind of fishy. "

You can imagine why we were talking about that. Just reabsorbing and digesting the classic Obama text: "I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)."

I was saying: Isn't it interesting that he spoke of the texture, but not the taste? I was going to riff in the direction of portraying Obama as coolly Spock-like — missing one of the 5 senses, but then I veered toward literary analysis. It's a neatly compressed comic line: tough... tougher... crunchy. He sticks with the textures because it's funny to struggle through the tough sequence — tough, tougher — and then get — not what comes next grammatically: toughest — but crunchy! because — ha ha — we all know, whether we eat them or not, that insects are crunchy. In those few words,