Your talking dog has been quieter than usual thanks to his ongoing computer problems (which translate to: “I haven’t gotten round to replacing the dearly departed ex-computer”) and am on a… borrowed terminal! In other hobby news, your talking dog ran down and back to complete the Delaware Marathon , which cooperated with unseasonably warm and humid weather for the fourth such marathon in a row (note to self: consider carefully before running such event in region of large glaciers without packing scuba gear…) So, how ’bout Newsweek and its story of Guantanamo Bay Gulag Guards flushing the Koran down...

Your talking dog has been having some computer problems of late explaining the lighter than usual free ice cream. Brother Rabid Dog assures me that its most likely a hopeless hard-drive situation, so… we’ll have to do something. We’re pleased to borrow brother rab’s set-up for this brief mention that nothing succeeds in British politics like success. Despite leading Labour to an unprecedented third straight term, many if not most British Labour MP’s want to see Mr. Blair go sooner rather than later in favour of heir apparent Exchequer Chancellor Gordon Brown. This seems consistent with some of my opinions:...

In this case, that would be our friend, West Virginia’s own reservist and designated fall-gal Pfc. Lynndie England, who just caught possibly the break of her life, or at least the next eleven years of it, as Army Col. Pohl, the judge advocate in charge of the kangaroo court set up to bring scapegoats of our empire to some perverse notion of justice whereby those responsible escape punishment in favor of the peons they order around, Col. Pohl declared a mistrial and Pfc. England withdrew her guilty plea. The reason was something I have been hinting at for quite a...

Henry Schuster gives us this CNN column entitled “Where’s Osama?” The simple answer for OBL’s reticence the last few months could have several explanations. One suggestion is that Al Qaeda hasn’t had any thing it can point to as a ‘success” in the last few months. Another is he simply has nothing to say. Schuster opines in general that the no news might be good news. As this compendium from a case brought to trial in 2001 in new York entitled United States v. Osama bin Laden, nothing could be further from the truth. Al Qaeda is.. get this… patient....

Our visit to the People’s Daily commences with this blast from the past: a ceremony in Beijing to honor 3,000 or so “model workers” of the People’s Republic. Among the “workers” is Yao Ming of the Houston Rockets, and 800 government functionaries, along with over 1,000 industrial workers and several hundred agricultural wrokers. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics indeed. Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chain store contracts. And (I guess) in honor of May Day, we get a most unusual visit: the Taiwanese opposition party Kuo Min-Tang (“KMT”) leader Lien Chan meets with CPC...

Our visit to Pravda gives us this explanation of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision not to sell Syria a class of Russian made missiles (during a visit to Israel), though Russia is planning on selling a shorter range, fixed air defense system to Syria (though the Russians have evidently fully disclosed the specifications to Israel, including noting that the system proposed cannot be used as shoulder fired missiles). Although I understand this is the first visit by a Russian leader to Israel, Russia’s relations with Israel (when compared, say, to the Soviet era) are “pretty good”. For one, Israel has...

The Florida Supreme Court (by a 4-3 vote) decided to uphold the right of prosecutors to seek Rush Limbaugh’s medical records to determine (presumably determine) if Rush committed a felony by “doctor shopping” in order to gain vast amounts of prescription drugs, in violation of Florida law (going from doctor to doctor with his medical complaints, obviously not telling each doctor about other doctors he saw). While I love sport as much as the next guy, and would love to see Rush behind bars, where he can see how many fans he has inside, this certainly smacks of “Big Brother”....

The President has threatened a veto of a very popular highway rehabilitation bill if its cost exceeds a certain magic number ($282 billion over six years, or something). While its nice to see anything at all resembling fiscal restraint on the part of the Bush Administration, for the umpteenth time, it is necessary to revisit our little nursery school exercise on the federal budget. Picture the federal budget as a large pie, representing around $2.5 trillion out of our $11 trillion or so GDP. That $2.5 trillion works out very nicely into five more or less even parts of $500...