After a streak that, I think, endured the whole of human history, the subject of bestiality has now come up twice during White House briefings this month. In a quasi-friendly exchange this afternoon, ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper let out some annoyance at Press Secretary Jay Carney for skipping around the room, and sarcastically told Carney “No, America wants to know about your position on bestiality,” a reference to a Les Kinsolving question from last week.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has had tongues wagging in the political media for the past couple of days, based on what has to be the weirdest attack ad ever. The ad is weird because it doesn’t contain a single mention of any of his opponents, or anything at all, other than Mitt Romney. It portrays the GOP presidential hopeful as a steady family man, and a loyal company man, but an adviser for Newt Gingrich knows what’s really going on, telling ABC News that the ad “is basically Romney saying ‘My family is better than your family.’ It’s going to backfire.”

Lost in all the hoopla surrounding the ad is how deeply it cuts, not at Newt Gingrich, but at Mitt Romney.

At Monday’s White House briefing, Press Secretary Jay Carney tried to show a little Christmas generosity by calling on WorldNetDaily correspondent Les Kinsolving near the top of the briefing. For his trouble, Carney is now under fire from PETA for supposedly “making light of bestiality” because he laughed at, and waved off, Kinsolving’s less-than-seriously-phrased question about a defense authorization bill that repealed the sodomy provision of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Republican frontrunner Newt Gingrich audaciously declared in an interview with ABC News’s Jake Tapper that he would end up winning the Republican nomination. “I’m going to be the nominee. It’s very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I’m going to be the nominee,” Gingrich affirmed.

Jake Tapper‘s tweet of bizarre “no comment” boilerplate had all the makings of an Onion parody: “”…a spokeswoman for the Romney campaign, declined to comment on the candidate’s hairstyle, or to make Mr. Romney available to discuss it.”

It was no joke, but rather, a quote from The New York Times‘ straight-faced report on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney‘s fantastic hair.

On the heels of his “To Catch A Journalist” sting video, conservative activist James O’Keefe sat for a nearly 30-minute interview for Mediaite on Monday, discussing his attacks on Huffington Post’s Sam Stein, his discrediting of Rutgers Professor Jeff Keefe, and his infamous “CNN Caper.”

In the final portion of our interview, I asked O’Keefe for his thoughts on mainstream journalism, and he revealed that some of his journalistic heroes include Mike Wallace and Jake Tapper.

At Friday afternoon’s White House briefing, Press Secretary Jay Carney responded to a story that’s scorching up the conservative blogosphere as the next Solyndra-style “scandal” to emerge from a loan guarantee program begun by George W. Bush, and expanded by the Obama administration. ABC News‘ Jake Tapper asked Carney to respond to his network’s report on a $529 million loan guarantee to a company called “Fisker,” that is producing an electric car in Finland.

Currently, the news catnip du jour for conservatives are Solyndra and Fast and Furious. Today, conservative media watchdog Newsbusters expressed outrage that a Fast and Furious question was left out of ABC News broadcasts of Jake Tapper‘s exclusive interview with President Obama. Fortunately, we’ve got the exchange here.

In a wide-ranging exclusive interview with ABC News’ Jake Tapper, President Obama said he’s not worried about who the Republican nominee is going to be, and told Tapper that the GOP candidates’ ideas aren’t anything new. “There’s going to be a very clear contrast,” the President said, “between whoever they nominate and their vision of where we should take the country and where I believe we should take the country.”

At a joint press conference with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, Fox News’ Ed Henry asked the President to respond to a quote from Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney over recent actions by Iran, to which President Obama replied, “I didn’t know you were the spokesperson for Mitt Romney.”

Minutes later, Megyn Kelly asked Henry for his reaction, and he defended the question, and said the President “decided not to engage with Mitt Romney, instead decided to kind of go after me a little bit.”

Since becoming Fox News’ Senior White House Correspondent in July, beat veteran Ed Henry has endured several barbs from Press Secretary Jay Carney, but today, it was President Obama needling Henry. At a joint press conference with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, Henry asked the President to respond to a quote from Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney over recent actions by Iran, to which President Obama replied, “I didn’t know you were the spokesperson for Mitt Romney.”

On This Week today, Christiane Amanpour brought up a point often raised about any potential candidacy undertaken by Chris Christie: whether his weight problem would be a negative with voters or not. However, while the panelists didn’t seem to agree with that sentiment, Jake Tapper suggested the grueling work of a presidential candidacy might be [...]

At Wednesday’s White House briefing, ABC News’ Jake Tapper asked Press Secretary Jay Carney about his criticism of GOP candidates for not reacting to the booing of a gay soldier at last week’s Republican debate, and drew a comparison between that incident and the White House’s response to remarks by Teamster head James Hoffa several weeks ago. Carney rejected the premise outright, and in a later email to Mediaite, explains why it’s “not an apt comparison.”

The pushback against Ron Suskind‘s upcoming (but leaked) book Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President continued today, as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney fielded questions about some of the book’s tales of intrigue. Geithner flatly denied that he disregarded an order from the President, while Carney attacked the book as fundamentally unreliable, and possibly plagiarized from Wikipedia.

So far, it appears that ABC News is the only network to cover a controversial new book shedding a harsh light on the goings-on within Obama’s White House. On Monday, Good Morning America‘s George Stephanopoulos intoduced a segment on the book by calling Ron Suskind‘s Confidence Men nothing short of a “bombshell.” Jake Tapper then outlined the allegations contained therein, including charges of sexism, in-fighting among aides and general incompetence within the administration.

In the hours since the Jimmy Hoffa Voter Encouragement Crisis/Incendiary Rhetorapocalypse, conservative media figures have looked to the White House to provide some becalming wisdom to a shaken nation. At Tuesday’s White House briefing, ABC’s Jake Tapper asked Press Secretary Jay Carney how Hoffa’s comments fit with the President’s post-Tucson remarks in January.

A new ABC News/Washington Post poll released today reveals that more than half of Americans surveyed now disapprove of the job performance by President Obama. Roughly six out of ten have a negative view on the White House efforts to help the economy and create jobs. The only possible solace that the administration can take from this poll is that those polled still blame the GOP more than the president.

When we first learned that Hurricane Irene was headed for the United States, it was only a matter of time before comparisons and contrasts would be drawn between the response of federal and local governments during this storm to Hurricane Katrina, which Jake Tapper today described as “the hurricane that exposed mismanagement and weakness at the highest levels.”

On Sunday morning, Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman continued his quest to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee on Opposite Day, swinging hard at frontrunner Rick Perry (R-TX) and the rest of the GOP field. In an interview with This Week fill-in Jake Tapper, Huntsman derided his fellow candidates’ lack of leadership, opposition to science, and even cracked wise about Perry’s history of secession talk.

The term “Obamacare” is about as loaded a word as you could possibly imagine in the age of opinion media. On the right, it’s used as a way to not just deride the Obama administration’s efforts to reform health care, but also runaway spending and “big government.” On the left, it’s seen as a tell that whomever is using that particular term watches Fox News or listens to Rush Limbaugh. Well, during a town hall appearance today, President Obama weighed in on the term, and let his audience know that its use doesn’t bother him at all. Reclaiming the word?

Deep-fried butter wasn’t the only treat on display over the weekend at the Iowa State Fair. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was also on hand to increase her stores of other people’s thunder, but not everyone was enthralled with the GOP superstar. One fairgoer confronted Todd Palin over his wife’s decision to quit the Alaska governorship, resulting in a viral video exchange that was captured by the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Dollar Store Microphone Department. The paper also caught the extended remix of Jake Tapper‘s heifer-delayed Q&A with Palin.

During his run as interim host of ABC’s This Week with…, Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper lobbied valiantly (but unsuccessfully) to get former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to appear on the program. While covering the shenanigans in Iowa this week, Tapper seized on the opportunity to finally get Palin to answer some “substantive questions,” but before Palin would face Tapper’s queries, she had priority business to take care of: “I’m gonna go meet a heifer first.”

Tapper’s amused, bemused reaction was priceless. “A heifer first?”

After getting the big scoop on Tim Pawlenty‘s departure from the Republican race, ABC’s Jake Tapper turned the focus to fellow Minnesotan Michele Bachmann, and asked if she would be “unelectable” at the national level. Given that Pawlenty and John McCain did better in Bachmann’s congressional district than the congresswoman herself, Tapper wondered if the Republican establishment was right to worry that if she won the party nomination, Bachmann would not be able to win a general election against Barack Obama.

In an exclusive interview to Jake Tapper on ABC’s “This Week,” former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty announced that he was dropping out of the presidential race because he didn’t feel the momentum was there for him to move forward.

Tavis Smiley and Cornel West are not holding anything back in their media blitz, first suggesting President Obama declared war on the poor, then revealing how they aren’t on the White House guest list, and now predicting the London riots could definitely happen in America because of this country’s great wealth disparity. Smiley sums up his frustration with Obama by offering a bit of advice: “enough with the speeches about now it’s time to focus on jobs.”