ohmidog!

That sound you hear is the collective bile rising in the throats of hundreds of thousands of Michael Vick-haters, who — if his new clothing line and new book aren’t distressing enough — will surely blow their tops, or lunch, upon hearing this news.

Michael Vick says maybe he’ll get a dog.

And, worse yet, at the end of this month — when the no-dog clause of his sentence for dogfighting expires — he legally can.

Vick makes the comment tonight, during an interview with Piers Morgan on CNN.

Above is a segment of what will be airing (with apologies for the 30 second commercial).

In the interview, we’re told, the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback “speaks candidly about his fall from grace in 2007 when he was implicated and convicted of participating in the operation an illegal dog fighting ring.”

In his new book “Michael Vick: Finally Free, An Autobiography,” Vick expresses his love for dogs, despite taking part in training them, killing them and watching them fight to the death.

As part of his sentence, Vick was banned from owning a dog for three years, but this month the ban expires.

During the interview, Morgan asks Vick if he will get a new dog.

He says he would — for his children:

“I can’t take that dream away from them. That’s selfish on my behalf. You know, so, gotta find a way to make it right and, you know, I put everything in God’s hands to make it right.”

When Morgan asks Vick what kind of dog he would adopt, Vick replies “I would let them pick it out. Certainly wouldn’t be a pit bull.”

The interview airs at 9 p.m.

A recent CNN report raises questions about Operation Baghdad Pups, and the charity that oversees the program, SPCA International.

CNN, whose sister network presented a positive and heartwarming portrayal of the program last year,  found that SPCA International spent nearly all $27 million it received in donations to raise more money through a direct mail company.

The report also said SPCA International “misrepresented” Baghdad Pups on its tax filings, and that it hired an officer for that program with a “questionable background.”

Two immediate thoughts:

One, in an ideal world, which of course we’re not in, it would have been nice of CNN, or even its less probing sister network, HLN,  to do its digging before tugging at our heartstrings to the extent we cough up money.

Two, with animal charities becoming big business, where should the line be drawn when it comes to how much of the money they rake in actually goes to helping animals?

A charity needs to spend money to raise money, of course, but Bob Ottenhoff, president of the charity watchdog group GuideStar, told CNN that the SPCA International’s tax records raise “a number of red flags.”

“No. 1, there is an enormous amount of money going into fund-raising,” Ottenhoff said. “It’s not unusual for a nonprofit to fund-raise. In fact they need to fund-raise. But this organization has an enormous amount of fund-raising costs, certainly relative to the amount of money being spent.”

Of the $14 million raised in 2010, SPCA International reported it spent about $60,000, less than 0.5%, on cash grants to animal shelters across the United States.  About $450,000 — about 3% of the total raised in 2010 — went to bring back animals from Iraq and Afghanistan as part of its “Baghdad Pups” program.

The CNN report seems to make much of the fact that most of those animals weren’t actual members of the armed services — but, from our coverage of the organization, it never seemed to making the claim that they were.

Baghdad Pups is a program that “helps U.S. troops safely transport home the companion animals they befriend in the war zone,” it states on the website.

As CNN put it, “the charity admitted that only 26 of the nearly 500 animals transported to the United States from Iraq and Afghanistan were actually service animals. The rest were stray animals … And those 26 service animals were not attached to military K-9 units but belonged to Reed Inc., a private contractor that built roads in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

While dogs abandoned by contracting companies have been a concern of the program, stray animals, as I understood it, were what the program was all about — seeing that, in cases where they bonded with soldiers, they had a chance to come home with them.

While the CNN report may have been barking up the wrong tree in that regard, it was on the money in other ways — namely, in looking at what happens to the money.

SPCA International funneled nearly all the donations to Quadriga Art, one of the world’s largest direct-mail providers to charities and nonprofits. The payments to Quadriga Art and its affiliated company, Brickmill Marketing Services, were for publicizing the organization and helping it raise more funds.

It is the same company hired by two veterans charities that spent tens of millions of dollars for its services,  triggering a Senate investigation last month. One of the charities,Washington-based Disabled Veterans National Foundation, collected nearly $56 million in donations over the past three years yet paid Quadriga Art more than $60 million in fees, raising questions about whether it should retain its tax-exempt status.

SPCA International is still $8 million in debt to Quadriga Art, according to a spokeswoman for the direct-mail firm.

Lat week’s CNN report also brought up previous problems Operation Baghdad spokeswoman Terri Crisp encountered while working on behalf of animals.

Crisp, who appeared on CNN’s sister network, HLN, last year with two dogs rescued from Iraq, is the former head of a California-based animal rescue charity called Noah’s Wish. It took in $8 million in contributions to support its work “rescuing and caring for the animal victims of Hurricane Katrina.” An investigation by the California attorney general was looking into whether that money was being used for that purpose when a settlement was reached in 2007.

Crisp, while not admitting to any wrongdoing, agreed to return $4 million in donations, and to not ”serve as an officer, director or trustee or in any position having the duties or responsibilities of an officer, director or trustee, with any non-profit organization” for five years.

The former president of CNN Headline News in Atlanta was caught on a security camera when he placed a bag of dog poop into the mailbox of his neighbors.

Bob Furnad, who also served as CNN’s political director, was fined $180 for his act, which he told police in Covington was the result of an ongoing feud.

Video from the security camera shows Furnad walking his dog, and stopping to place the bag inside the mailbox in front of a neighbor’s home.

Benjamin Dameron and Ralph Miller said they couldn’t understand why Furnad, who also was once an instructor at the University of Georgia, did it.

The incident was reported by CBS in Atlanta.

“We were working, getting ready for a wedding and we were out on the driveway,” explained Dameron. “We thought, well, we’re this close, we’ll check the mail box to see if the mail’s come.”

“Something had, a package,” said Miller.

“It doesn’t happen very often,” said Capt. Kem Malcom with the Covington Police Department. “In this situation the victims actually had video. ”

“Mr. Furnad stated that he did place a bag containing dog feces in the victim’s mail box,” Malcom said. When asked why, Furnad told the officer it was the result of “an ongoing feud.”

The neighbors agreed to settle the issue at a local court in Covington.

Maybe I’m missing something, but this ad, which PETA says has been rejected by Lifetime, CNN, Animal Planet and other networks, doesn’t seem that over the top to me.

In fact, it seems an awful lot like the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) ad with Wendy Malick that has been airing on TV with amazing frequency — sad looking animals behind bars, plaintive song in the background, request for donations, free subscription to our monthly magazine.

PETA says it has approached many of the largest cable networks hoping to place its latest ad, which features actor and PETA honorary director James Cromwell.

In an email, PETA said the reasons they were given for the ad being rejected include the group being “too controversial” and that some of the video depicts animals being abused. Apparently showing animals that have been abused is OK, but showing people abusing them is not.

Even so, I don’t see clear instances of the latter in the new PETA ad.

Whatever the case, PETA will get plenty of mileage out of of being able to put the label “banned” on their ad — thereby assuring it a place in blogs such as this one — as they have before, including a Super Bowl ad in 2009 that it says was deemed too sexy for TV.

“Thought Provoking?” It’s not like winning best in show at Westminster, but I’ll take the sign my book appears under at this bookstore as a compliment.

A friend sent me this photo, taken at the Barnes & Noble in Towson, which shows “DOG, INC.: The Uncanny Inside Story of Cloning Man’s Best Friend” getting some pretty decent display (at least better than the bottom shelf of the astronomy section, as was the case at an area bookstore that shall remain nameless).

I can think of no other sign I would like my book to be under — except maybe ”New York Times Bestseller.”

Alas, it’s not there yet, but it did rate the “Page 99 Test,” a website by Marshal Zeringue dedicated to the proposition that the quality of a book can be judged by turning to, and reading, its 99th page.

I lucked out in that page 99 of “DOG, INC.” contains a revelation — namely who it was that located Genelle Guzman, the last survivor found after 9/11, and held her hand until she could be freed from the mound of debris she was trapped under.

(Clue: It wasn’t the volunteer firefighters who took credit for rescuing her on CNN)

If you’re wondering what this has to do with cloning dogs, you can click the link to Marshal’s blog or, better yet, buy the book and allow your thoughts — and perhaps more — to be provoked.

 
Just when I proclaim this quite a week for wieners (dogs and franks), there’s more late breaking wiener news: The world’s oldest hot dog — possibly the world’s first hot dog — has been unearthed at Coney Island, CNN and others reported.

CNN posted a story about the “discovery” of a “140-year-old hot dog” after officials at the Coney Island History Project put an “ancient” frankfurter — bun and all — on display, saying it was unearthed during the demolition of Feltman’s Kitchen, said to be where the first hot dog was made.

“1st Hot Dog,” read a sign next to the display. To the embarassment of CNN and others who picked up the story — to be frank, they didn’t check the facts — it was all just a publicity stunt, aimed at creating interest in an exhibition this summer of real artifacts from the Feltman’s site, the New York Post says.

“The recent discovery by an amateur archaeologist of the ‘140 Year Old Feltman’s Hot Dog’ encased in ice along with a bun, [and] an original receipt from Feltman’s, … was a publicity stunt in the grand tradition of Coney Island ballyhoo,” said Tricia Vita, spokeswoman for the history project.

She said that the hoax was an example of Coney Island’s history of P.T. Barnum-type hype. Even though the ancient hot dog was said to be found “encased in ice” by archaelogists, the story was gobbled right up.

(It was Barnum, I believe, who said a sucker was born every minute. That rate has increased to about every millisecond, thanks to the Internet.)

“I was surprised in the beginning at how many people believed it was true,” Vita said. “But after reading all the buzz about it on Twitter and the Internet, I’m not really that surprised because people want to believe these types of things are true.”

Here’s CNN’s report on the Westie who had the coat stolen off his back while briefly tied outside a New York City supermarket.

Lexie was relieved of his $25 green wool coat last week, while his owner was buying milk. Fortunately, it was his everyday coat, and not the Burberry.

What exactly the cow with a tire stuck on his head — seen near the end of the report — has to do with any of this is beyond me, but then what would you expect from a reporter named Jeanie Moos?

CNN took a look at the unparalleled skills of search and rescue dogs — hundreds of which have been dispatched from around the world to help find victims of the earthquake in Haiti.

Nearly 100 dogs, mostly pit bulls, were seized in a raid of a house in East Dublin, Georgia, whose owner is suspected of raising dogs for dogfighting.

The Sheriff’s Office in Laurens County, based on an investigation triggered by information received on a telephone tip line, executed a search warrant at the property — and CNN was there to watch it unfold.

Private investigators with Norred and Associates Inc. worked alongside sheriff’s deputies and volunteers from the Dublin-Laurens County Humane Society. Greg Norred has been donating his firm’s time and expertise and his own money to rescuing dogs for the past two years, helping to save almost 300 dogs in at least 16 raids.

Afer getting a good ribbing from Steven Colbert for the AC 360 report on Michael Jackson’s former chimp, Bubbles, CNN’s Anderson Cooper aired nearly the entire piece on his show.

Now maybe Colbert can run a segment on Cooper’s segment on Colbert’s segment on Cooper’s segment. That would be more than a 360 — an actual 720, if my math is right.

Cooper called the Colbert Report bit both “very funny” and “well-deserved.”