There is apparently no more important story or issue right now at the Politico than Ted Widmer's question about our national anthem: "Is It Time to Ditch the Star-Spangled Banner?" It is currently the lead item at the web site, complete with a huge picture of the American flag. The "beheading by ISIL of a British aid worker" and Wisconsin's court-granted ability to implement voter-ID in the fall elections are both apparently less important.

Widmer's reasons to stop using the Star-Spangled Banner come down to the fact that Francis Scott Key was a slaveowner and that the song's third verse refers to escaped American slaves who were fighting on the British side (a commenter has asserted that it really refers to Hessians and British slaves; my guess is that it's all of the above). He somehow forgets that the British didn't outlaw slavery until 1833, 19 years after the 1814 Fort McHenry battle.

Remember all those books that the publishing houses rejected during the eight years before Dear Leader took office because they might get used by "the Left" to hurt George W. Bush? No you don't, because it didn't happen.

But now, things are different. Fellow soldiers of released 5-year Taliban captive Bowe Bergdahl are trying to publish a book on their side of the "he was a deserter" controversy. A divison of publishing giant Simon & Schuster has rejected their submission. That isn't necessarily unusual, but the contents of a rejection letter from one of the publisher's representatives certainly is.

I'm sure that many will pass off what Reuters and Yahoo News have just been caught doing as some kind of an innocent mistake, and perhaps it was. But isn't odd how often those "mistakes" so often end up giving President Obama and the left more credit than they deserve?

Yesterday, a Reuters story at Yahoo News was headlined "President Obama Visits the Border." That's a pretty remarkable headline, given Obama's quite widely known refusal — except perhaps by low-information Yahoo readers — to visit the Texas-Mexico border or to visit facilities where Unaccompanied Alien Children are being detained by the Border Patrol. The headline, before it was corrected to "President Obama Visits Austin," along with evidence that Google News was still carrying the original headline until just a short time ago, follow the jump.

News reports indicate that Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci, who was Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island from 1975 to 1984 and 1991 to 2002, is again running to be mayor of the Ocean State's capital city. The opening sentence at the Associated Press's Thursday morning story calls him a "twice-convicted felon who led Providence as mayor for 21 years," who is going "to run as an independent."

Local web news outlet GoLocalProv reports that "Cianci has filed papers Wednesday declaring his candidacy for Mayor of Providence - as an Independent." Cianci's Wikipedia entry indicates that he was a Republican from 1974 until December of 1982, and has been an independent for the past three decades. All of this makes it mystifying how a Google search on the former two-time mayor's name, as seen after the jump, could tag him as a Republican:

A number of liberals and liberal outfits have taken notice of the "knockout game" trend. Their mission is to downplay or debunk it.

In a November 22 item published in its November 23 print edition on Page A19, Cara Buckley at the New York Times, below a picture of a Guardian Angels member posting a warning in Brooklyn, cited "police officials in several cities" claiming that it "amounted to little more than an urban myth," and noted that Gotham officials were questioning "whether in fact it existed." Excerpts and other ostrich-like responses from others are after the jump.