You tolerated her as the teary-eyed wife of Rob Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show and the straight gal on her "breakthrough" eponymous show (you know the one where she threw her hat up into the air during the opening credits and played straight gal to Capt. Stubing of the Love Boat)--and you absolutely loved her like a tortured Harvey Keitel-tormented-Catholic-type in her 1969 (!) Elvis-nun flick, Change of Habit (it was her personal Mean Streets and Bad Lieutenant rolled into one, with a touch of The Piano thrown in for good measure!).

But for all of us who revel in the federally funded wanton murder of leftover frozen embryos in the hopes of curing everything from spinal cord injuries to simple chronic halitosis, public diabetic Mary Tyler Moore shone like a beacon yesterday as the U.S. Senate approved a stem-cell research bill. There she was, reports the Chicago Sun-Times' Lynn Sweet in Mickey Spillanesque prose, confabbing with admitted cat killer and stem cell backer, Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.):

I'm on the second floor of the Capitol, the Senate side, walking past the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist(R-Tn.)

Out walks actress Mary Tyler Moore, slim and wearing a pantsuit, holding hands with man I did not recognize....Moore had just finished meeting with Frist, a heart transplant surgeon, a few hours before the Senate was to vote on three stem cell research bills.

Is it too much to assume that MTM provided the right amount of celebrity muscle to squeak this bill through? And who was the mystery man? Alas, Sweet has yet to follow up. But this much we know, from the Houston Chronicle, MTM is going to pull out all the stops to get President Bush, who has vowed to veto the legislation, to reconsider:

"This is an intelligent human being with a heart," she said of Bush, "and I don't see how much longer he can deny those aspects of himself."

In her own patriotic way, MTM has set the stage for the first great showdown of the Bush presidentiary.--Nick Gillespie