Charles Amico reports at We the People that the Pentagon appears to be playing games with the much vaunted July U.S. casualty numbers in Iraq – much vaunted because it made a big deal out of its assertion that there were 78 casualties in July, the lowest number this year. Oops! DoD has now quietly added three more deaths that it must have overlooked or something, bringing the July total to 81. This is the same as February and March, which makes for a far less sexy talking point at the old...

In a post yesterday, I challenged bloggers to look into whether there is even the slightest chance that the maintenance of the collapsed I-35 bridge in Minneapolis could have been postponed because of a $400 billion-plus infrastructure improvement project known as the Iraq war or the penchant these days for state and local governments to operate on the cheap. After the usual outbreak of Republican kerfuffling in the comments section, I also asked whether the bridge collapse was Democratic, Republican,...

“George Bush Killing Freedom” by Werner Horvath When I was invited to write at The Moderate Voice, a blog considerably larger and more buttoned down than my own, it became obvious pretty quickly that I would have to file down some of my rough edges – especially as they pertained to the language and images I used in writing about Mr. George Bush – if I was going to fit into Joe Gandelman’s estimable stable of co-bloggers. So terms like “The Decider” and...

I realized within seconds of the first aerial shots on CNN from Minneapolis last night that the DF&C and I had been on the southbound span of the I-35 bridge a couple of weeks after the 9/11 attacks on our way back home from Minnesota’s lovely North Country. It took a few minutes for me to ascertain that while the collapse of the northbound span was awful, there appeared to be very little loss of life. One life lost because of a tired interstate bridge that lost its battle with gravity...

Headlines from The Guardian’s daily Iraq war roundup: Cheney talks up Iraq progress Baghdad blasts kill 67 Iraq’s biggest Sunni bloc quits government

I did a pretty fair job yesterday of trashing Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack for their myopic New York Times op-ed on military progress in Iraq, but another journo puts the firestorm over the piece in a must-read perspective after actually interviewing one of the authors. Money graf from a post at Interesting Times by George Packer: “[The interview] was a step back from the almost definitive tone of “A War We Just Might Win” (a bad headline, and not the authors’)....

It was like old times as former Donald Rumsfeld settled into the witness seat in a committee room on Capitol Hill this morning. And it was. The former defense secretary, making his first appearance since President Bush sacked him late last year, said: * He took no personal responsibility for the cover-up of the circumstances behind the death of Corporal Pat Tillman, whom the Pentagon initially said died defending his comrades against an enemy militia in Afghanistan. * He said that he always told...

Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, confers with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. You can surely do better than that. What caption would you write for this photo?

It all rolls into one/and nothing comes for free/There’s nothing you can hold for very long/And when you hear that song/come crying like the wind/it seems like all this life/was just a dream — “STELLA BLUE” Jerry Garcia did not seek out fame. A gentle soul who just wanted to play music, fame found him. And despite a long career as an extraordinary guitarist that brought him adulation, gold records and eventually wealth, happiness remained elusive and fame finally killed him. Don’t...

Please click here for my monthly roundup on Iraq war casualties and other statistics.

If I had picked up my morning newspaper a few years ago and read that Rupert Murdoch had bought Dow Jones & Company, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, I would have sneezed coffee through my nose and then collapsed to the floor with heart spasms. But times have changed, and while it still is a bit off putting that a conservative media mogul who has built his empire on sleaze and scandal is buying the owner of one of the most respected brands in mainstream media for a cool $5 billion, that...

The British army’s longest continuous military operation comes to an end at midnight tonight when responsibility for security in Northern Ireland passes to the police. Operation Banner lasted 38 years and involved 300,000 personnel, of which 763 were killed by paramilitaries. The last soldier to die was Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick, who was shot at a vehicle checkpoint in 1997. From tomorrow there will still be a garrison of 5,000 troops in Ulster, but they will not be on active operations...

A New York Times op-ed piece this week by Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack stating that the U.S. is finally making progress militarily in Iraq has gotten enormous coverage – and deservedly so. I offer two overarching and interrelated observations pertaining to it: First, the response to the piece by the Brookings Institution braniacs puts the lie to the notion flogged by conservatives and right-wingers that many liberal and left-wing commentators want the U.S. to be humiliated...

A Hero? You Bet. As noted in the previous post, another casualty of the Iraq war is that fewer medals and fewer medals of distinction for bravery are being awarded because they call attention to the war’s bloody realities. A veteran blogger who has spent considerable time in Iraq tells me that: “Company commanders . . . complain that the awards they submit are constantly downgraded as they go up the chain of command.” Some 300,000-plus Americans have served in Iraq, and there also...

Alberto Contador, a 24-year-old Spaniard and rider with the Discovery Channel team, has won the Tour de France. Given past experience, we must now await with bated breath whether Contador passes the drug test. More here . Photograph by Bryn Lennon/Getty Images

. . . That is the question. Fuggedabout troop withdrawal timetables, tax cuts and universal health insurance. Can a woman political candidate be taken seriously if she shows cleavage? This became an issue last fall in Alabama, when The Associated Press noted in a report on Loretta Nall, the Libertarian Party candidate for governor: “[She is] campaigning on her cleavage and hoping that voters will eventually focus on her platform.” Now I’ll be the first to admit that while my thoughts...

No thanks to commercial radio, we live in a golden age of woman folk and rock singer-songwriters. They include, to name just a few of my favorites, Suzanne Vega, Nancy Griffith, Rosanne Cash, Sarah McLachlan, Feist, Tori Amos and Jonatha Brooke. All in one way or another owe an immense debt to Joni Mitchell. With very few exceptions, don’t expect to hear any of these women on commercial radio. You have to tune into the rare progressive rock station or college station, or go on the Internet...

Jake, a black Labrador who became a national hero after burrowing through white-hot, smoking debris in search of survivors at the World Trade Center site after the 9/11 attacks, died Wednesday after a battle with cancer. Owner Mary Flood said Jake had been in pain and had a 105-degree fever. She had him put to sleep after a last stroll through the fields and a dip in the creek near their home in Oakley, Utah. It is not known if the black Lab became sick, as have many rescue workers, because of exposure...

When historians look back on the long, sad history of the Iraq war, July 24, 2007 will be illustrative of the sad era in which we live: At a time when the American people were all but begging President Bush to find his way out of Iraq, he stubbornly kept changing the subject and yet again lied to them in declaring why our men and women should continue to shed their blood in the service of his fool’s mission. First, and with the president’s tacit approval, yet another plan on how everything...

In a tacit admission that the political clock is outrunning the military clock in Iraq, the U.S. command has gone public with portions of an ambitious plan that assumes a major military presence well past the presidential election and into 2009. While the plan, called the Joint Campaign Plan, is technically classified and does not specifically address troop levels or withdrawal schedules, the mere fact that it was shared with a New York Times reporter shows how concerned commanders, and presumably...

Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin plans to offer a proposal to officially condemn President Bush and Vice President Cheney for leading the U.S. into the Iraq war. Said Feingold:: “I think we need to do something serious in terms of accountability.” To which Meet the Press host Tim Russert countered: “Isn’t this a futile effort that will simply be described as politics?” Replied Feingold: “Let’s see what actually happens . . . What I am proposing...

VIETNAM AND IRAQ Counterinsurgency = Political Action + Civic Action + Counter-guerrilla Operations — BERNARD FALL The great war correspondent Bernard Fall understood Vietnam better than the French, whom he predicted would fail in their war against Ho Chi Minh’s national liberation movement, as well as the Americans, whom he also predicted would fail although they went about doing so a great deal more creatively. Fall, who reported from Vietnam from 1953 until he stepped on a landmine...

As someone with strong (and sometimes too strong) opinions about people, I was surprised at how sad I felt when I read in May that Tammy Faye Bakker Messner had decided to stop taking treatments for the cancer that was well on the way to killing her. Why, I asked myself, would I feel common ground with the mascara-impaired wife of a televangelist who had famously cried for the cameras when her hubbo got caught with his pants down? First of all, because anyone who has had to battle cancer has my...

In yet another stinging rebuke to the Bush administration’s extralegal policies and practices, a three-judge federal appeals court has unanimously ordered the government to turn over virtually all its information on the 360 detainees being held at the Guantánamo Bay brig. The New York Times reported that “The ruling, which came in one of the main court cases dealing with the fate of the detainees, effectively set the ground rules for scores of cases by detainees challenging the...