Stu Bykofsky, a former colleague at the Philadelphia Daily News who broke the dog-days torpor of last week with an outrageous column stating that another 9/11 terrorist attack would unify America, has now predictably backpedaled. Some 2,000-plus emails and nearly 100 voicemails tend to have a clarifying effect. Stu now writes that: “I led my column saying, ‘I was thinking another 9/11 would help America.’ I was speculating on the effect of an attack, not calling for it. Later I...

It was October 2002 when these prescient words were uttered by someone whose views on the Iraq war some people are now trying to discredit: “I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better...

(Clockwise from top left) Abeer’s ID card, crime scene, ringleader Steven Green, “Abeer” insurgent rocket * Iraq was a rather different place when Abeer Qassim Hamza came into the world 15 years ago this week. It was a year and a half after the first Gulf War ended with a whimper with the withdrawal of nearly a half million troops from the U.S. and 34 other nations after repulsing Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But Saddam remained firmly in power as Iraq slid into...

Karl Rove, the master of polarizing politics and George Bush’s longtime mentor and White House consigliere, is resigning effective August 31, bringing to an end one of the most controversial tenures of a presidential political operative. Rove, Bush’s deputy chief of staff and a man so influential that he was a de facto Cabinet member, told the Wall Street Journal‘s worshipful Paul Gigot that: “I just think it’s time. There’s always something that can keep you...

I covered or directed coverage of eight presidential campaigns, so I can appreciate how difficult it is to write something fresh, let alone something fresh 15 months from Election Day. Will Bunch knows. A former colleague at the Philadelphia Daily News and blogger extraordinaire, Will was asked by his editors to put together a prototype for a weekly rundown on the presidential candidates and has posted it to Attytood. Click here to check it out.

Olu Dara I’ve been toiling over the most absolutely depressing piece I’ve written to date on the Iraq war (coming next week God willing and the creek don’t rise) and I’m really, really really hard up to offer something that has nothing to do with people dying. So I’m going to splash around in the shallow end of the pool this morning and share a Saturday Seventeen of Great Songs that I’ve heard on the radio or played myself recently. The artist and album are...

Were These Sheep Taliban? As the war in Iraq has degenerated and with operations in Afghanistan not looking too good either, I have cut way back on blogging about collateral damage — the unfortunate instances in which civilians are bombed by mistake. It’s quite simple: I have a deep empathy for the boots on the ground, if not the knuckleheads in Washington, and don’t want to appear to be piling on. But with possibly hundreds of Afghan civilians being killed in U.S. bombing raids...

Stu Bykofsky, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News (note to copy editors: only Daily News is italicized) has set off a sh*tstorm by writing that he is hoping for another 9/11 terrorist attack because it would bring Americans together again. Before I address the particulars of Stu’s column, which as Joe notes in a post below is beyond the pale, I would like to note that Stu and Shaun are on a first-name basis. This is because we worked in the same newsroom – although very seldom...

As I have written early and often, the mainstream media has been painfully slow to embrace the Internet and even slower to come around to the blog as a way to leaven its loaf, attract new readers or (gasp!) even win back readers it has lost. Joe Gandelman, Robert Stein, Alan Mutter and Yours Truly are examples of Dead Tree Era journalists who quit or retired from the biz and have embraced blogging. But Mutter is an especially interesting example because on the way to the blogosphere he stopped over...

In response to criticism that I’m picking on President Bush, I’d like to praise him in providing these morsels from his pre-vacation news conference today: * In a gesture of empathy to the residents of Minneapolis where a major interstate highway bridge collapsed last week, he dismissed dealing with the nation’s 70,000 structurally deficient bridges until Congress changes the way it spends highway money. * In a gesture of empathy to middle-class homeowners hit with foreclosures...

Time to ask yet again why it is that Republican politicians seem to get caught doing naughty things much more than Democrats? That’s tough to answer, but two new cases appear to be examples of closeted gays in a party that officially loathes them. The latest nominees to the GOP Hall of Closeted Pols are Glenn Murphy Jr. and Bob Allen, with a special kudo to Michael Flory, who has been nominated for entry into the Non-Consensual Sexual Assault wing of the hall. Murphy is chairman of the Clark...

The Romney Regiment: Not a Soldier Among ‘Em Other than John McCain, who has a son at the Naval Academy and another about to report to Marine Corps boot camp, none of the Republican presidential wannabes have sons or daughters serving their country although most are foursquare for the Iraq war and call their Democratic opponents antiwar pansies. Unless you’re Mitt Romney and you claim that your five sons are serving the country . . . by working in daddy’s campaign. Are we too...

Think of the Iraq war as an old man. This old man would like nothing more than to go out in a blaze of glory. But his life is dominated by fights with a sister in law, and as he shuffles around his thoughts frequently turn melancholy as he thinks back to when he was young, full of piss and vinegar and the world was his red, white and blue oyster. “You goddamned blowhard!” screeches the sister in law. “You wasted all those goddamned years! You never did what you said you were gonna...

When TV camera crews and reporters beat a path to your door, it’s usually not because you just won a big lottery prize or landed in the Guinness Book of Records. It’s because something really bad has happened, and that’s why we’re having to put up with a right-wing blowhard by the name of Robert Murray these days. Murray is the owner of the mine in Crandall Canyon, Utah, where six men are trapped. Three of the miners happen to be Mexicans, but this hasn’t stopped...

With one mighty swing of the bat, Barry Bonds last night broke the most hallowed record in the 131-year history of major-league baseball by hitting his 756th career home run. Mark Spitz’s seven Olympic gold medals, Lance Armstrong’s seven Tour de France victories and Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game all were extraordinary, but don’t compare. Just as Hank Aaron was both adored and reviled when he broke Babe Ruth’s 39-year old record of 714 home runs in 1974, so is...

British troops rush to scene of chopper crash Today’s Iraq war cold shower is brought to you by the British. Despite its years-long efforts to stabilize Basra in southern Iraq, the Royal Army is watching Shiite militias fill the power vacuum being created as its troops draw down by escalating their rivalries in a violent effort to control the region’s rich oil resources. And while you’re toweling yourself off after that shower, prepare yourself an even colder one: Basra was once...

Stories like this one from The Los Angeles Times make me want to throw up, tear my eyes out or something: “In this long, hot campaign season, intimations of sexuality are sprouting like wildflowers along the road to the White House. Not that the commingling of sex and politics is anything new, but for what seems to be the first time in memory, voters are being confronted with questions that don’t usually break the surface: Just how sexy is a first lady allowed to be? And what constitutes...

While the matter of whether newspapers and other media outlets should charge for Internet content will never be settled, I’ve always found TimesSelect, the paywall that allows only paid online or print subscribers to access certain New York Times content, to be a penny-wise-pound-foolish affront. While I have continued to buy the dead-tree edition of the Sunday Times, which has been a part of my life since I was a child, it didn’t take long before I no longer missed the op-ed columnists...

Remember the old saying that a conservative is a liberal who got mugged? Well,who’s a new believer? A conservative governor who twice vetoed tax increases to pay for infrastructure improvements, but had a change of heart after a catastrophic bridge collapse in his own back yard. More here, as well as here for observations on Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty’s former bah-humbug attitude.

Smiling on the outside . . . The next time you’re in a hospital – hopefully as a visitor – watch the nurses as they interact with Uncle Stanley, you and his family, the residents and other physicians, the pharmacy, the therapists, housekeeping and dining services. It quickly becomes obvious that it is nurses who make things work. That makes the crisis in American nursing all the more disturbing. Unlike the U.S.’s crumbling highway and bridge infrastructure, this crisis...

The Associated Press reports that a day after approving a medal claiming that former NFL player Pat Tillman had been cut down by “devastating enemy fire” in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal tried to warn President Bush that the story might not be true. AP reporters Scott Lindlaw and Martha Mendoza, who have been all over the cover-up story, say that in a sometimes contentious November 2006 interview under oath and via videoconference, Pentagon investigators sharply...

Bela Fleck & The Flecktones If you’re within an easy drive of the lovely Rhode Island coast and don’t have plans for the Labor Day weekend, consider dropping in on the 10th annual Rhythm & Roots Festival at Ninigret Park near Charlestown. I’m not in the habit of endorsing events, but the R&R Festival has become an annual sojourn for the DF&C and I because: * Its eclectic range of the best Cajun, creole and zydeco bands around, as well as other bands (honky tonk,...

Shinichi Tetsutani loved to ride his beloved tricycle outside his house in Higashi-Hakushima-Cho, a neighborhood in the Japanese port city of Hiroshima. Shin-chan, as his family called the three-year-old, was doing just that on the morning of August 6, 1945, when there was a brilliant flash in the sky. Shin was about a quarter mile from the hypocenter of the detonation of the first nuclear weapon to be used in anger, the consequence of a frightening new technology that its creators were all too...

In which I quote Frank Zappa, piss on American beers and explain why they’re intentionally watered down, discuss the disconnect between the American love of Mexican beer but not Mexicans, and other staff having nothing to do with George Bush, Iraq, bridge collapses or Yearly Kos. Please click here for less.

Australia’s Aborigines have renewed calls for official recognition of past injustices after a court awarded one of their own nearly $450,000 for having been taken from his family 50 years ago. In a landmark ruling this week, Bruce Trevorrow (photo) received the money in compensation and damages for being taken from his mother as a baby and, without her consent, given to a white foster parent. Reconciliation Australia, set up to promote better relations between Aborigines and white Australians,...