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,...

In a move that should surprise no one, a piece of legislation billed as “pension reform” appears to be poised to come out of a Congressional conference committee in a form that would, wait for it… weaken the nation’s private pensions. The solution to a national problem of underfunded private pensions, which arise because of various factors ranging from financially failing companies and underperforming assets, to simple greed, to outright thievery, according to Congress, is to weaken companies’ funding requirements, and to permit even rosier projections than currently exist and have led to the current crisis. (Further, there appear to...

< This week's featured talking dog doesn't exactly talk, in the manner of, say, our previous subjects like Mr. Peabody or Underdog. In this case, Muttley, the canine sidekick of cartoon villain Dick Cheney Dastardly with whom he is pictured above, snickers with an asthmatic laugh, and mutters under his breath, but makes himself understood in something vaguely resembling English, and hence, falls into the genre. Muttley appeared first in that incarnation (wearing only a collar) in the Wacky Races, where he and Dastardly driving “Double 0” would try to sabotage other racers (such as Penelope Pitstop, Peter Perfect, Professor...

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, we’ll honor this most un-blarney-like exegesis of recent ersatz intelligence releases by the Bush Administration offered by Barbara O’Brian (it’s all thematic) of the O’Maha Blog. You see, with his approval ratings sinking deeper than the Lower Ninth Ward led by an ever more unpopular Iraq War taking him down faster than Dick Cheney with a shotgun, the President and the team must go back in time, and now show us just why the current intractable situation was fully justified from the beginning. They do this by providing misleading “intelligence”, essentially juxtaposing various sources...

The largest military assault in Iraq since… well, the last time a large military assauult was announced… this time, called Operation Swarmer, involving over 1,500 U.S. troops and over 50 aircraft of various sizes were deployed in an anti-insurgent operation near the Samarra area of Iraq, toward purported insurgent strongholds and weapons caches. Coming just a few days shy of the third anniversary of the commencement of the Iraq war, I guess we can call this “shock and awe light”. Perhaps very light. It comes as the extremely fragile “democracy” we installed met in the form of a brief meeting...