Anne Romney, wife of presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, has posted an entry on the family blog, Five Brothers, about the family's dog, Seamus, in response to the media reaction to an article in the Boston Globe last Wednesday that caused an outcry in the blogosphere.

The Globe article reported that Romney attached a dog carrier to the luggage rack atop the family's station wagon, protected by a windshield, and drove with Seamus in the carrier on a 12-hour vacation trip to Ontario in 1983. Commentators and bloggers have been highly critical of Romney's treatment of the dog, with many saying it was cruel to expose the dog to the elements in a rooftop carrier.

Anne Romney writes: "Surprise, surprise, the media didn't get the dog story right. Our dog Seamus rode in an ENCLOSED kennel, not in the open air. And he loved it. Every time he saw it, he jumped up on the tailgate, walked in, and lay down. It was just like the kennel he curled up in at home."

She doesn't refer specifically to the Ontario trip or the arrangements the family made to Seamus on that occasion.

"Mitt and I love our dogs," Ann Romney adds, noting that Seamus, an Irish setter, was the first of several beloved family dogs. She says Mitt let him sleep on the bed when she wasn't home. "And usually when he was riding in the car, his head was out the window. Seamus lived to a ripe old age, basking in the affection of a large family."

From Michael Levenson, Globe Staff

The Globe's disclosure this week that Mitt Romney put his Irish setter into a dog carrier on the roof of his station wagon for a 12-hour trip to Ontario in 1983 has become a surprising flashpoint in the presidential campaign.

TIME.com's Swampland blog has been flooded with more than 200 comments from readers complaining of animal cruelty, YouTube viewers have posted satirical videos, and hundreds of personal blogs are brimming with opinions and jokes.

For some, the story has become an occasion to consider larger issues of ethics and animal abuse. Romney, who has built an image as a strong manager, is now facing concerns about his ability to empathize with the less powerful, in this case, his dog, Seamus, riding atop his station wagon.

"I'll admit that I`m coming from a dog-centric point of view," Tucker Carlson, the conservative pundit, said Thursday on MSNBC. "But I'm feeling that maybe Mitt Romney lost my vote here. Do you need to be a PETA member to be disturbed by the fact that this guy put a dog on the roof of his car? Does that bother you?"

For some critics, the answer was yes.

"Well, I am a dog owner, and I can say with certainty that strapping your dog to the roof of the car for a 12-hour drive, windshield or no windshield, is, well, nuts," David Kravitz wrote on BlueMassGroup, a liberal blog. "It also strikes me as classic Romney: it solves a problem efficiently, in a business-like manner, and with no regard whatsoever for the suffering that the solution may cause."

The Globe learned of the incident from Romney family friends during its reporting for a seven-part series this week on the candidate's life, and Romney family members confirmed the facts.

Family members told the Globe that Romney attached a special windshield onto Seamus' carrier to protect him from the wind. Romney was traveling that summer with his wife, five sons, and Seamus to his parent's cottage on Lake Huron. But hours into the ride, Seamus apparently suffered diarrhea, which ran down the back window of the car. Romney's sons, all under 14, howled in disgust. Romney pulled off the road into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, and they drove on to Ontario.

As soon as it was published in the Globe Thursday, the episode became fodder for bloggers.

TIME's Ana Marie Cox was among the first to weigh in. Under the headline, "Romney's Cruel Canine Vacation," she quoted Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, calling Seamus' ride "a lesson in cruelty" for Romney's sons.

"Thinking of the wind, the weather, the speed, the vulnerability, the isolation on the roof, it is commonsense that any dog who's under extreme stress might show that stress by losing control of his bowels," Newkirk told Cox. "That alone should have been sufficient indication that the dog was, basically, being tortured."

Cox also pointed out that Massachusetts law prohibits carrying an animal "in or upon a vehicle, or otherwise, in an unnecessarily cruel or inhuman manner or in a way and manner which might endanger the animal carried thereon."

Soon, a blogger posted a video of a singing dog atop a station wagon, another hawked T-shirts on the Internet that said "I do not support the Romney Fresh Air Tour of Canada," and a rival campaign circulated a clip from National Lampoon's "Vacation."

The issue gained enough momentum that by the time Romney landed in Pittsburgh for a campaign stop Thursday, reporters were ready with questions. Romney told them that Seamus liked his rooftop perch.

"He scrambled up there every time we went on trips," Romney said. "He got [up] all by himself and enjoyed it."

And Romney noted that he has never been one of PETA's favorite politicians.

"PETA has not been my fan over the years," Romney said. "PETA was after me for having a rodeo at the Olympics and was very, very upset about that. PETA was after me when I went quail hunting in Georgia. And they're not happy that my dog likes fresh air."

With the second quarter closing this Saturday, Barack Obama's campaign says it's closing in on what would be an impressive milestone: 250,000 unique contributors to his presidential campaign.

"Suddenly, we're within reach of something no presidential campaign has ever dreamed of at this stage," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe wrote in an email to supporters today. "With your support, we could reach 250,000 donors for the year by the June 30th filing deadline." (They're tracking their progress on the campaign's web site.)

Plouffe goes on to say that the media and the punditocracy are missing the story by focusing on how much the candidates are raising, instead of how many contributors they have -- the idea being that donors, not the total amount raised, is a better indicator of grass-roots support. Is this a tacit acknowledgment that Hillary Clinton will outraise him again this quarter? We'll know after this weekend. Until then, the expectations-setting game continues unabated.

To wit: Clinton's communications director, Howard Wolfson, announced on the campaign blog today that they will have raised roughly $27 million in the second quarter, eclipsing the $26 million they raised in quarter one. "While that figure is record setting, we do expect Senator Obama to significantly outraise us this quarter," Wolfson wrote.

From Susan Milligan, Globe Staff

WASHINGTON -- Republicans overwhelmingly want Ronald Reagan. But for the moment, they'll take Rudy Giuliani.

A poll of 2,000 Republicans unveiled yesterday reveals a party in search of a leader, with the overwhelming majority hoping for someone like the former president. But when faced with the slate of ten announced GOP candidates and two potential contenders -- Republicans favored former New York Mayor Giuliani across the board, with even so-called ``moralists'' preferring the candidate who has drawn ire from conservatives because of his divorces and pro-abortion rights stance.

``Giuliani is universally known to all Republicans,'' and scores high on ``leadership'' qualities among primary voters, said Tony Fabrizio, the GOP pollster who directed the comprehensive study of Republican voters. Among a 12-man field, Giuliani drew 30 percent support, followed by Arizona Senator John McCain with 17 percent, former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson with 15 percent, and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- who has not announced a run -- with nine percent each.

Giuliani does startlingly well among ``moralist'' voters who are heavy church-goers and disapprove of abortion and gay marriage, pulling more than 20 percent support among that group, Fabrizio said. ``That presents a huge problem for someone trying to be the consensus conservative and take him on,'' he said. Further, 60 percent of GOP voters said they could vote for a candidate even if they disagreed with his position on abortion, suggesting the issue is not a campaign-killer for Giuliani,

Fabrizio warned that the voter support is soft; 74 percent of those polled said they could still change their minds, and some may already have done so, given the fact that the polling was completed in May, Fabrizio said.

But the survey by Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates -- called The Elephant Looks in the Mirror Ten Years Later, a follow-up to a similar study conducted a decade ago -- foreshadows some troubles for the GOP presidential nominee next year.

The party --once divided into about five general ideological camps -- is now splintered into seven categories, including pro-war ``Bush Hawks,'' anti-immigration ``Fortress America'' Republicans, family values-oriented ``Heartland Republicans,'' moderate ``Government Knows Best'' voters, ``Free Marketeers,'' ``Moralists,'' and fend-for-yourself ``Dennis Miller Republicans.''

Those voter segments largely see themselves as Ronald Reagan Republicans, with 71 percent defining themselves as such (just 16 percent called themselves ``George Bush Republicans''). They in general want smaller government, an end to illegal immigration and a balanced budget. They also agree that the war in Iraq was the right thing to do.

But the GOP voter camps disagree on issues such as health care, global warming, defense spending and gays serving in the military. Slightly more than half believe universal health care should be a ``guaranteed right of every American,'' with 43 percent believing citizens are not entitled to health care. Some 49 percent believe gays should serve in the military, with 42 percent disapproving of the idea. On global warming, GOP voters are divided about whether the government is doing too much, not enough, or about what it should be doing to address the threat from climate change.

More than a third of GOP voters want an immediate or scheduled withdrawal of troops from Iraq, a trend Fabrizio said is likely only to grow over the next year unless the situation in Iraq improves dramatically. Nearly all of the GOP presidential contenders have rejected a timetable for withdrawal.

Overwhelmingly, GOP voters said they would not consider casting a vote for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently changed his party identification from Republican to Independent. But the 17 percent who said they would consider supporting Bloomberg should give the GOP pause, Fabrizio said.

After the losses in the 2006 congressional campaigns, ``we can't afford to lose any part of our base,'' he said.

Leave it to Ana Marie Cox over at Time to have fun with this anecdote from today's installment of the Globe's Mitt Romney series:

The white Chevy station wagon with the wood paneling was overstuffed with suitcases, supplies, and sons when Mitt Romney climbed behind the wheel to begin the annual 12-hour family trek from Boston to Ontario ... Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family's hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon's roof rack. He'd built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.

Cox cites a provision in Massachusetts law making it illegal to transport a pet "in an unnecessarily cruel or inhuman manner or in a way and manner which might endanger the animal carried thereon." And she gets reaction from Ingrid Newkirk, president of the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who likens Romney's treatment of old Seamus to "torture."

"In the case of the dog on the roof of the car, if this is true, quite remarkably it obviously wasn't for show as only his own children were watching, a lesson in cruelty that was also wrong for them to witness," Cox quotes Newkirk as saying. "If you wouldn’t strap your child to the roof of your car, you have no business doing that to the family dog! I don't know who would find that acceptable."

But Romney's treatment of Seamus is no match for what Bill Frist, the former Senate majority leader and one-time presidential candidate, did to cats. When Frist was in medical training in Boston in the 1970s, he used to go around to animal shelters, adopt cats, and promise to care for them as pets. Then he killed them in experiments.

"It was a heinous and dishonest thing to do," Frist wrote in an autobiography. "I was going a little crazy."

Reports on Fred Thompson's first trip to South Carolina as an unofficial presidential candidate are trickling in. The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder says Thompson was "on the ball" today in his luncheon address to Republicans in Columbia, devoting much of his speech to immigration, Iraq, and terrorism. Ambinder writes: "The substance was about what you'd expect from a conservative candidate, but Thompson, for the time I've seen, seemed jazzed up. And the crowd reciprocated with several loud bursts of applause." Read the rest of his account here.

Rudy Giuliani's troubles in South Carolina continue.

First, his state chairman, state Treasurer Thomas Ravenel, was suspended from state government and forced to resign his position with the campaign last week after being indicted on federal cocaine charges. Now Giuliani's campaign is taking heat for announcing that Ravenel's father, former US Representative and state senator Arthur Ravenel Jr., would serve as one of his regional chairmen in South Carolina.

Arthur Ravenel has been an outspoken advocate of flying the Confederate flag on the grounds of the South Carolina State House. At a rally for the flag in 2000, he called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People the "National Association for Retarded People," local media reported at the time. He later said he misspoke but then apologized to the mentally disabled for comparing them to the NAACP, the Charleston Post and Courier reported.

"I didn't apologize to the NAACP," the paper quoted Ravenel as saying. "I apologized to the retarded folks of the world for equating them to the national NAACP."

The Giuliani campaign declined to address Ravenel's past comments. Talking Points Memo yesterday first picked up on Ravenel's past remarks.

Don't make room on your bookshelf just yet, but there could be another Romney book in the offing. And not by Mitt.

Mitt Romney's campaign confirms that publishers have approached Romney's wife, Ann, a sunny and frequent presence on the campaign trail, about writing a book. Her husband's already got one to his name, "Turnaround," his account of running the 2002 Winter Olympics.

"There have been several inquiries from publishers about Ann's interest in writing a book," says Romney spokesman Kevin Madden. "But Ann has not entered into any agreements or made any decisions on these inquiries."

A memoir from Ann, assuming that's what it would be, could only help Romney burnish his family-man credentials, something he's worked hard to show off during the primary race. Last week, Ann announced on their sons' blog, Five Brothers, that she and other members of the family would begin posting recipes online. The first one, if you're interested, is for meatloaf cakes. "I received this recipe when we were first married and [Mitt's] loved it ever since," she wrote.

With another fund-raising quarter ending this weekend, the presidential money-grubbing is so intense that you can almost hear the coins clanking in the piggy banks.

The emails to supporters are coming fast and furious now: Bill Clinton is urging contributors to give to Hillary; Chris Dodd's campaign is encouraging supporters to form "Dodd Squads" to raise money; and Mitt Romney, the Republicans' top fund-raiser in the first three months of 2007, is pushing people to donate what they can before the quarter closes on Saturday. "Any amount you can give would mean so much," Romney wrote.

By early next week, we should have a pretty good sense of who's up, who's down, who's got momentum, and who's on life support. Expect the pundits to begin writing some political obits. Key questions: Will Romney maintain his fund-raising dominance, and how much of his own money will he have put in? Will John McCain post a respectable enough number to get the chattering class off his back? And can Hillary continue to edge out Barack Obama?

After New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich reported on June 16 that an aide to Mitt Romney -- later identified as Jay Garrity, Romney's director of operations -- had ordered him to stop following Romney's car on a campaign trip to New Hampshire, Romney's campaign denied that Leibovich's car was ever pulled over.

Now another reporter is saying she had an experience similar to Leibovich's account. Marcia Vickers, a senior writer with Fortune magazine, said that while trailing Romney in New Hampshire on Memorial Day for a forthcoming magazine piece, Garrity instructed her at one point to stop tailing Romney's car.

Vickers said that after conducting a 45-minute interview with Romney in the car from Concord to Alton, she retrieved her own car in Alton and began following behind Romney's SUV en route to the next campaign stop in Wolfeboro. On the way, she said, Garrity steered the SUV into a dirt pull-off and instructed her and another car to do the same. Garrity then got out, approached her car, and asked who she was, Vickers said.

She said she told him she was with Fortune and had coordinated her reporting trip with the campaign. Garrity, she said, told her no one was allowed to follow Romney's car and ordered her to go ahead to the next campaign stop, at the Wolfeboro Inn.

Vickers said she was puzzled given how accommodating Romney's campaign team had otherwise been.

"I had gone to great pains to coordinate all this stuff with them," said Vickers, whose piece on Romney, "Mr. Fix-It," hits stands Thursday. "That's why this all kind of shocked me."

Romney spokesman Kevin Madden said Vickers's account comes as "a total surprise" and that he hadn't heard any complaint from her.

"We made every effort to accommodate the reporter, even going so far as to have staff transport her rental car so that she could easily get from event to event that day while interviewing the governor for her story," he said. "It was a day packed with travel events and by all accounts the travel, campaign stops and interview went successfully."

The incident with Leibovich, in which Garrity, by Leibovich's account, also told him he had run his license plate number, has prompted an investigation by the New Hampshire attorney general's office. State law prohibits private citizens from accessing license plate databases or pulling over fellow citizens. Garrity is now on paid leave amid an investigation by Massachusetts State Police into whether he impersonated a state trooper in a May 13 phone call to a Wilmington company.

Romney, asked at a Boston fund-raising event today about Garrity, said, "My view on Jay is at this stage, I give him the benefit of the doubt. I hope other people do, too."

Romney declined to say much more, citing the ongoing investigation. "He's a good guy and [I] wish him the very best, but this is really now in his hands," Romney said.

The wife of Democratic presidential contender John Edwards, a familiar face to much of America since her husband first ran in 2004, said in an address to a gay rights group yesterday that she was was fine with same-sex marriage, the San Francisco Chronicle reports today.

"I don't know why somebody else's marriage has anything to do with me," she said in an address to the Alice B. Toklas Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club. "I'm completely comfortable with gay marriage."

Elizabeth Edwards's position puts her at odds with her husband, who supports civil unions but not same-sex marriage. Read the rest of the story here.

Mitt Romney, asserting that he fully intends to tap his personal fortune to fund his presidential bid, said today that he had written another check to his campaign this quarter and may do so again before the quarter ends on Saturday.

Romney, who loaned himself $2.4 million early this year to help launch his campaign, said he felt compelled to contribute again this quarter because he needed to run TV ads and campaign around the country to broaden his name recognition. Romney said he started out as an "underdog" to his better-known competitors, Senator John McCain of Arizona and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.

"It would be nice not to have to loan or contribute to your own campaign, but the reality is if you want to have a strong campaign that gets out there and can talk across the nation, you're going to have to do what's necessary," Romney said at a news conference at the TD Banknorth Garden, where he's assembled supporters for a day-long fund-raising marathon. "One of the things I've had to do that you don't have to do if your name is McCain or Giuliani is introduce myself [to voters]."

Romney declined to say how much he had chipped in already this quarter and said he wasn't sure if his check would end up being a loan or a gift. The amount will be disclosed when Romney, like all candidates for the presidency, files his second-quarter finance figures with the Federal Election Commission by July 15.

The revelation of another check from Romney came as a surprise, as Romney had declared at a similar fund-raising event in Boston in January that it would be "akin to a nightmare" if he were forced to self-fund his campaign. His campaign later revealed that at the time Romney said that, he had already loaned himself the $2.4 million.

Asked to square his more recent contributions with his "nightmare" comment, Romney said, "It is a nightmare." Asked why he was doing it, he said, "Because I have to, alright? My message is important and critical to get out into this country."

Romney said he had already spent $3 million on advertising in five states, though media reports have suggested he's spent more. He said he would continue writing himself checks.

"I recognize that when you're the underdog, not terribly well-known, you have to try harder," he said. "And that's meant that I need to contribute, as well as others, to this effort."