I wandered over to the Daily Howler today to see what he's dishing out, and lo and behold, he talks about March of the Penguins, and how the Emperor Penguin is a terrific counterexample to the notion of Intelligent Design.

Sure, ID deserves heavy criticism, but to my bird-sensitive ears, his paragraph seemed marinated in contempt for this remarkable animal. I guess that's what it takes to get me going, so I wrote this short missive telling him to lay off my penguin homies (below the flip):

Glancing through the morning headlines I saw this today:

Debate preview: Bush might have an edge in St. Louis

Yeah, we've all gotten used to the pro-Bush tinge to any election-related headline, to the point where I felt the same way looking at this one. "Of course," I thought, "another way for the media to keep the notion that this is still a horse-race and to play up the feeling that Bush is still competitive and hasn't had a horrible week." Which is true.

But another thought is that this raises the expectations for how Bush should do tonight. After all, the "town hall" is like "home field" for him in a way, isn't it? This is where he should do better.

Although I certainly sympathize with the siege mentality that many Kossacks show here, and that I often feel the same way, I think it's always important to think through a little more subtext in some of these headlines and stories, and take a longer view of the narrative they weave. Sometimes it's not all bad news.