ohmidog!

Last night’s debate was a great opportunity to get the poop on the presidential candidates.

Here’s another: Metro Paws LLC is offering biodegradable dog poop bags emblazoned with the candidate of your choice — Romney or Obama, whoever you like the least.

They’re calling the marketing drive ”Smear Campaign.”

Here’s how they described their thinking in an email to ohmidog!:

“Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, we can all agree that politics these days are a big stinkin’ mess. Smear Campaign poop bags give you the chance to let out a little political frustration every time you pick up after your pup.”

Political Dog Poop Bags can be ordered here, and sell for $14.99 for a package of four rolls, or 80 bags.

Metro Paws LLC is a New York-based family business that described itself as being “dog owners first and entrepreneurs second.”

Smear Campaign, the company says, is the only political degradable poop bag on the market. Metro Paws teamed up with RS Kmiec Design to make the bags. “Our message is fun, whimsical, and yet calls for all Americans to vote,” the website says.

They’re available in some stores, including New York’s Who’s Your Doggy?, a pet store in Fort Greene that is keeping track of which bags sell the most.

“Whoever sells the most will lose the Presidential election,” predicted the store’s manager, Julia Rosenfeld.

As of Monday afternoon, Patch.com in Fort Greene reported, Romney’s red poop bags were outselling their blue Democratic counterparts 24-8, according to a tally written on a dry erase board behind the store’s register.

I know from experience that, for a writer of news, the jaws of a cliche can be a difficult thing to escape.

You’re in a hurry, you need an image people can relate to, you need to somehow make the political convention you’re writing about seem exciting, as opposed to just a multi-day display of balloons and bluster, pomp and propaganda.

The cliche, often, is the first term that pops into your head, and once it latches on — legend has it they exert a force beyond any other words, something like a million pounds per square inch — you just can’t shake them off.

So, unless you find something you can describe as a “game-changer” — it having quickly risen up the cliche ladder — you pepper your reports with terms like “attack dog.”

This being convention season, “attack dogs” are everywhere.

Just in the first few days of this week — as the Democratic National Convention got underway in Charlotte – Vice President Joe Biden, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, to name a few, have been described in the news media as attack dogs.

Rest assured, the pack will grow as the convention progresses, as will the use of the misnomer.

They are not attack dogs; they are attack humans. And it’s unfair to identify them by lumping them into a whole different species — a species that’s smart enough to eschew the back-biting world of politics.

I have no problem with the political parties designating certain politicians to be the tough guys, to say the things that — be they borderline truths, senseless vitriol or other comments deemed too indecorous — the presidential candidate himself probably shouldn’t utter.

But let’s leave dogs out of it.

Let’s come up with another descriptive term, like Clint Eastwoods.

A true attack dog, of the canine variety, is a dog that humans have done all they could, through breeding, through training, through constantly reinforcing aggression, to instill that behavior. It’s not, at least since dog was domesticated, their natural way.

With politicians, I’m not so sure.

Those creatures you see at the political conventions are growling, smarmy, snarling humans, doing what their masters tell them to do. That’s not a behavior learned from dogs; it’s a behavior learned from politics.

(Photo: West Highland terriers Ricky and Reba, who, like most dogs, aren’t attack dogs at all)

The North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled today that Charles Jones, shown above kicking his State Highway Patrol dog in September 2007, and fired shortly thereafter, should be reinstated.

And with back pay.

Jones was fired after another trooper turned over two 15-second video clips of him suspending his K-9 partner, Ricoh, from a railing and repeatedly kicking him to force him to release a chew toy.

In 2008, the State Personnel Commission found Jones’ punishment too harsh and ordered that he be reinstated.

Tuesday’s ruling is the latest in a series, all of which agreed the Highway Patrol did not have cause to terminate Jones’ employment. (Ricoh didn’t get a vote.) You can find the full text of the ruling here.

Patrol leaders said they initially planned to discipline Jones but decided to fire him when then-Gov. Mike Easley’s office intervened.

In its ruling, the court noted testimony from Jones’ former supervisor, Lt. Col. Cecil Lockley, who said, “They want him gone … the decision regarding Sgt. Jones’ career was predetermined, not by the patrol’s disciplinary process but by an outside entity.”

Lockley called Jones’ method of disciplining Ricoh “ugly,” but said it did not fall outside the realm of patrol-accepted training techniques.

The appeals court agreed with a lower court ruling that ”the training method used by Jones on Ricoh in this matter, while appearing excessive and extreme to the general public, is not unreasonably outside of or substantially different from several of the training techniques that are tested, trained and approved for use by the Patrol.”

It concluded, “Jones acted consistently with his training, and used compliance techniques on Ricoh similar to those used by all Patrol members who were canine handlers.”

We’d hope that the highway patrol has redefined the boundaries of its realm of training techniques –  as it stated it would after the case came to public attention.

A rebuilding of the K-9 unit was promised, and an end to the kind of rough training tactics — swinging, suspending and kicking of patrol dogs — that the video depicts. New training procedures, they said, would specifically prohibit punching, kicking, beating and choking of dogs.

Leave it to the Sun to melt the Snowman.

The Baltimore Sun reports that Frosty the Snowman — so rudely removed from the Chestertown Christmas parade — has a history of tangling with police, and that Saturday’s arrest, after he allegedly kicked at a police dog and butted his snowman head against an officer, was his fifth this year

The man beneath the Frosty costume, Kevin Michael Walsh, 52, of Chestertown, has performed off an on at the Christmas parade for 10 years.

But this year alone, according to the Sun, he has been convicted of “telephone misuse” for calling police in April and pretending to be a CNN reporter, and found guilty of disorderly conduct for standing outside the Town Hall in May banging pots and pans because he couldn’t get inside. Both incidents led to suspended jail sentences and probation.

The parade-related charges, though — three counts of second-degree assault and one count of resisting arrest — could, upon conviction, carry a sentence of as much as 33 years in prison.

“He likes to agitate police,” Deputy Police Chief William H. Dwyer Jr. told the Sun. “He’s just a town nuisance.”

Walsh, who once ran a watch business, describes himself as a political activist “exercising his right to free speech in a small town where officials don’t like being challenged,” according to the Sun.

Walsh said that upon noticing a police dog at the parade, he approached patrolman James H. Walker, who was standing on the corner with his K9, Henzo.

“I said, ‘Well, that’s not right to have a dog at the parade,’” Walsh told the Sun. “I don’t think a children’s parade should have police dogs.”

Police reports say Walsh made a “kicking motion” toward the dog; Walsh says he merely lost his balance in the costume.

After putting Henzo in his police car, the patrolman returned and removed Walsh from the parade — ostensibly to counsel him on the wisdom of antagonizing police dogs.

Deputy Chief Dwyer said Walsh then started “cussing” and became “verbally abusive” toward Walker, at which time he was arrested. He was released on his own recognizance later that day.

Another tale from the not-so-good neighbor department:

Police in St. Cloud, Minnesota, have ticketed a man for ”unlawful dumping” after he admitted to being the culprit who had been placing small bags of dog feces in the back of his neighbor’s pick up truck — all because it was adorned with a McCain sign.

Police said Donald Esmay, 19, of St. Cloud, told radio station KNSI-AM that he’d been finding small baggies of dog feces in the back of his pickup truck for the past few weeks — ever since he put a 2-foot-by-4-foot McCain sign there.

He and his family watched the truck trying to catch the culprit, but didn’t have any luck until Wednesday when his mother and brother saw someone from the neighborhood, according to an Associated Press report.

They confronted the 45-year-old man, who admitted to it. When police later spoke with the man, he said he did it because he “hates McCain.”

The unlawful dumping ticket comes with a $183 fine.