I don’t know who pays for nonsense like this (the article indicates, at least, that it’s largely a private foundation rather than the taxpayers) but in a story sure to bring a smile to our former co-blogger the Raving Atheist, it seems that a (long-awaited!) scientific study of heart patients has shown that the power of other people’s prayer is… wait for it… of no help whatsoever, and in some cases, there were worse results than for people for whom others didn’t receive any prayers from others. (This is entirely distinct from people praying on their own for their own...

Freelance journalist Jill Carroll, who was kidnapped while working in Iraq some three months ago, has been released, unharmed. She appeared on Iraqi t.v. pleading for her life; demands were made (and unheeded) that all women prisoners in Iraq be released. Nonetheless, despite deadlines for her murder passing, she was released to American authorities, unharmed, not knowing herself why she was kidnapped. I will speculate that there appears to be some version of chivalry (or maybe it’s just machismo or sexism) at play, among some sectors in Iraq, that just will not permit them to murder a woman (“it’s unmanly”)...

Seriously… that’s pretty much what this WaPo article says… the vaguest and most general warning possible to Iran to pretty please with sugar on top to not go to uranium enrichment that will be a precursor to weapons was what emerged from the U.N. Security Council. As Russia and China still oppose sanctions, or anything with actual teeth against Iran, subtlety will be the order of the day… after the international popularity of our excellent Iraq adventure, subtlety is pretty much our main defense against nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Ayatollah Ferbissina and the number one state sponsor...

How can it be? Pat Robertson’s buddy former Liberian president and indicted war criminal Charles Taylor was apprehended in Nigeria. I guess this calls for a prayer meeting or something. Does anyone have Abramoff’s or Norquist’s phone number?

A strange day… they say it comes in threes (well, someone says that)… in this case, two temporal deaths (Weinberger and Nofziger) and one political death (Card)… We’ll start with the political career death (apparently)… White House Chief of Staff Andy Card announced his resignation after five years of holding the President’s pee pee and cutting his food and otherwise pretending he worked for a functioning human being, who, most unfortunately for the rest of us, managed to attain the Presidency of the United States. Card had been Transportation Secretary in Poppy’s government. Card took s**t for the President’s failures...

Could Justice Anthony Kennedy be the safety making the game-saving tackle that ensures that we continue to have a Constitution? That’s what it looks like from this account of the argument in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the second-most important case of our lives (the first being Padilla, which the Supreme Court is still sitting on a decision of whether to review.) Your talking dog knew the importance of this case some time ago, when we got this detailed interview from Neal Katyal, who argued on behalf of Mr. Hamdan today at the High Court. To recap, Salim Hamdan is accused of...

That was the rap on the national elections in Israel for the 120 seat Knesset, that with Ariel Sharon in the hospital, and Kadima leader and ex-Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert essentially acting as a caretaker interim PM, even now as he is the elected head of the newly victorious Kadima Party, which looks like it will garner the most seats of any party in Israel’s fractious national proportion electoral system (the same system now in place in Iraq and Italy, which explains the general political instability in both of those places… well, a small part of Iraq’s problems, anyway). Israelis...

For this week’s installment of Saturday talking dog blogging, we give you McGruff, the crime dog. McGruff’s signature expression is “take a bite out of crime.” Like our subject of last week, McGruff is an employee (the technical term is “tool”) of the Establishment. While, of course, there’s nothing wrong with encouraging children to be perennially vigilant to avoid their victimization, one suspects that there is… more… going on. McGruff, of course, unlike our usual Saturday morning subjects (is it a coincidence that this segment of this blog appears on Saturdays?) is not intended to be “entertainment,” but, like such...

Further giving us the definition of “compassionate conservatism” the Senate is poised to pass something like its version of a bill already passed in the Republican controlled House of Representatives which would change the status of persons in the United States without proper immigration credentials from violators subject to deportation to felons. Naturally, the Congressman who introduced the bill, James Sensenbrenner from Wisconsin, was the happy recipient of lots of nifty protests from his constituents; they might want to consider a voter registration drive to get a s***load of new citizens as registered Democrats and unseat him… or they can...

That’s right, Russia (with strong support from China) blocked consensus on a sharp U.N. Security Council statement against Iran backed by Britain, France and presumably the United States; such a statement is usually a precursor to sanctions. The disagreement means that diplomatic discussion will go on concerning measures to try to get Iran to back off its proposed reprocessing of nuclear materials, widely believed to be a precursor to its development of nuclear weapons; not even Iran’s friends and clients in Moscow and Beijing believe its public nonsense that it is trying to develop civilian nuclear power. In any event,...