Mike Bloomberg!

Colin Powell!

Chris Christie!

Mitch Daniels!

Nonsense. Obama is not the first gay president. He is the first female president.

Both men were beneficiaries of voter protests on Tuesday against the Washington status quo — one protest harmless, the other insidious. The benign vote went to Judd, who won 41 percent of the ballots against President Obama in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary. It was an embarrassment for the president but purely symbolic. The more worrisome protest vote benefited Mourdock, who bested six-term Sen. Richard Lugar in the Indiana Republican primary. That election has the potential to make the broken system in Washington more caustic and less functional.

Smoked out by his own vice president, Obama decided to come out of the closet on the issue to ABC News’s Robin Roberts, who rushed her scoop onto the air Wednesday afternoon during the closing minutes of “The Revolution,” ABC’s new talk show featuring a “stellar dream team of experts that will help complete transformations in all areas of life.”

To his credit, John McCain realized the Obama hatred was getting out of hand, and a few days later, when a woman at one of his events called Obama an “Arab,” McCain did one of the most honorable things in his political career. “No, ma’am,” he said, taking the microphone from the woman and enduring some boos from supporters. “He’s a decent, family-man citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”

As things stand, the spokesman does not have the supplies necessary to clean up the mess Biden made in his appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Biden gave his full support to same-sex marriage — a position conspicuously at odds with the public stance of his boss, President Obama, who is widely assumed to share Biden’s views but who says that his own thinking is “evolving.”

That’s a stark assessment but true. On one side is a man who has made it his life’s work to build a cross-aisle consensus for keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states. On the other side is a man who mocks his opponent for such efforts and who talks more about fighting Democrats than fighting America’s enemies.

Actually, Mr. Moon Colony was plenty outside the mainstream. But discipline? Yes, that might have helped.

It’s another recess week for our lazy leaders. Oh, sorry: “Constituent Work Week” is what they’re calling it these days, as if lawmakers were filling potholes and making calls to Social Security rather than raising campaign cash.

I’m not troubled by President Obama’s slow jam with Jimmy Fallon, who dubbed the commander in chief “preezy” during Obama’s appearance on late-night TV. No, preezy is making me queasy because his nonstop campaigning is looking, well, sleazy — and his ad suggesting that Mitt Romney wouldn’t have killed Osama bin Laden is just the beginning of it.

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody this month, Ryan, the author of the House Republican budget endorsed by Mitt Romney, said his program was crafted “using my Catholic faith” as inspiration. But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was not about to bless that claim.

We’ve got illegals in the back yard

The correct answer to both of those questions should be:

A) I don’t know

B) I don’t care

First they were routed over their objections to contraception. Then they had to defend Rush Limbaugh’s insults of Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke and Ted Nugent’s description of two top Democratic leaders as “varmints.” On top of that, the Republican National Committee chairman is on record drawing a parallel between women and caterpillars, and Democrats have been ambushing Republicans almost daily with topics as varied as mammograms and membership at Augusta.

“We’re representing the people of the United States,” President Obama said Sunday when asked about the agents and military personnel who, after a night of heavy drinking, reportedly procured prostitutes at a strip club called the Pleyclub. “And when we travel to another country I expect us to observe the highest standards.”

And this mind reader who helped government workers communicate with the dead was just the beginning of the scandal involving the General Services Administration’s $823,000 spending spree in Las Vegas.

“Check out this,” the flamboyant civil rights leader told me during breakfast at his organization’s annual meeting this week. He flipped through the program until he found a full-page ad with the logos of Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. “News Corporation Proudly Supports National Action Network’s 2012 Convention,” it said.

“There are others who are saying: ‘Well, this is just a gimmick. Just taxing millionaires and billionaires, just imposing the Buffett Rule, won’t do enough to close the deficit,’ ” Obama declared Wednesday. “Well, I agree.”

Three weeks ago, Rick Santorum chose this Civil War town to give a defiant speech about his need to stay in the presidential race, linking his struggle against Mitt Romney to “the things that the people in this battlefield just down the road fought for.”

Wilson, for those not acquainted with the name, is the Maryland woman who claimed to have a winning lottery ticket worth $218 million. She had agreed to buy lottery tickets with money pooled from her co-workers at McDonald’s, but then she claimed that the winning ticket was one she bought separately. As the New York Daily News has documented, she has since claimed she’s not sure she won, she hasn’t checked the ticket, the ticket is at her home, the ticket is hidden at McDonald’s, the ticket is secreted away somewhere else, and now she can’t find it.

Just before his speech Wednesday to the American Society of News Editors, word emerged that the Republican presidential front-runner would not allow photographers to get closer than 150 feet while he spoke.

Well, that’s a load of chicken droppings.

Those who say we’re being regulated into a state of European socialism might wish to consult with some of the federal poultry inspectors who assembled Monday morning outside the Agriculture Department. They were protesting a proposal to allow chicken slaughterhouses to inspect themselves — eliminating those pesky federal monitors who have the annoying habit of taking diseased birds out of the food supply.

My dog, a 2-year-old golden retriever/poodle mix named Z.Z., had her cable news debut this week, on MS­NBC’s “The Last Word.” Host Lawrence O’Donnell had us on to discuss Z.Z.’s membership in Dogs Against Romney.

It is typical of Mitt Romney’s luck that, on the morning after he all but secured the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign became embroiled in a controversy over a 1950s plastic toy.

If you’re thinking of answering this in the affirmative, you might want to pause long enough to learn what transpired on the third floor of the Capitol on Thursday. There, four prominent Republican lawmakers announced their proposal to abolish Medicare — “sunset” was their pseudo-verb — even for those currently on the program or nearing retirement.

And he’s not just any conservative, mind you. He’s a capital-C Conservative, British Prime Minister David Cameron. On his official visit to Washington, the Briton could not say enough good things about his American host.

“We have a strategy that will allow us to responsibly wind down this war,” he said Tuesday, resisting the calls for a quick exit that were prompted by the slaying of Afghan civilians by a rogue U.S. soldier on Sunday. “Already we’re scheduled to remove 23,000 troops by the end of this summer, following the 10,000 that we withdrew last year.”

Seventeen of these liberal superheroes — all key figures on the professional left — took the stage at the Service Employees International Union headquarters on Monday to announce that their organizations — MoveOn.org, Public Citizen, Occupy Wall Street, Common Cause, Americans United for Change and other usual suspects — are banding together to fight the flood of unlimited corporate money into politics.

The Wall Street Journal judged that “voters failed to deliver a decisive victory” to Romney.

Fox News reported that the “Super Tuesday results ensure the protracted and unpredictable GOP primary contest will press onward.”

The Republican National Committee sent out talking points instructing party faithful to take up the issue. House Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) urged his caucus to do the same. And, on Wednesday, the House energy committee obliged: The Republican majority called in a bunch of oilmen for a hearing dedicated largely to blaming President Obama for high gas prices.

As a candidate, Obama pledged that lobbyists “will not run my White House.” But on Monday, the president brought in one of this town’s most prominent lobbyists to run his White House — or at least a nice piece of it.

March is federally recognized as Women’s History Month, and Republicans have been celebrating the occasion in a most unusual style: with a burst of interest in women’s private parts.

He had survived a brutal campaign in 2010 to win his first full term. But after a year of deadlock and partisanship in the Senate, he was wondering whether it had been worth the struggle. “It was right after we managed to end our session with a two-month extension of the payroll tax,” Bennet told me Wednesday. “I got to a point where I was referring to this place as the Land of Flickering Lights, because the standard of success was we kept the lights on for another two months.”

— Mitt Romney, Feb. 26

“Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually.”

— Mitt Romney, Feb. 24

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]]> http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=518d4fa21c1bdfc27d2577b6b5765a0d http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mitt-romneys-acceptance-speech-in-mostly-his-own-words/2012/02/28/gIQAfHk0gR_story.html?wprss=rss_dana-milbank http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mitt-romneys-acceptance-speech-in-mostly-his-own-words/2012/02/28/gIQAfHk0gR_story.html?wprss=rss_dana-milbank http://www.washingtonpost.com/Fragment/SysConfig/WebPortal/twpweb/rss/mobile/blog-entry.jpp?id=1000.3.3174730913 http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mitt-romneys-acceptance-speech-in-mostly-his-own-words/2012/02/28/gIQAfHk0gR_story.html?wprss=rss_dana-milbank http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mitt-romneys-acceptance-speech-in-mostly-his-own-words/2012/02/28/gIQAfHk0gR_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mitt-romneys-acceptance-speech-in-mostly-his-own-words/2012/02/28/gIQAfHk0gR_search.html 1000.3.3174730913 9441e772-624e-11e1-beb4-e7eb4319b8bc Mitt Romney Wal-Mart Stores Inc payroll tax Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:53:14 EST Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:42:04 EST 20120229174204 The Washington Post /2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2012/02/28/Editorial-Opinion/Stories/op-milbank0229.xml article_story dana-milbank.dwc:query_main EOM::CompoundStory The Washington Post “We’re not going to agree on every single issue,” President Obama told governors at a black-tie dinner Sunday night, but “I’m confident that we’re going to be able to find more and more common ground going forward.”

She’s the Georgetown University law student who was blocked by chairman Darrell Issa from testifying about contraception before his House government-reform committee this month. The result was an embarrassment of a panel in which five men testified against an administration plan to expand birth control coverage.

The Republican presidential candidate told a group of supporters Sunday night that this year’s election was like the time between 1940 and 1941 when Americans didn’t act against Adolf Hitler because they thought he was “a nice guy” and not “near as bad as what we think.”