Where’s Seamus? I will briefly and but temporarily diverge from my well-seasoned antipathy over the coverage of every jot and tittle of the presidential campaigns to share the following story, which contains no references to religious underwear, cruelty to animals or the ability to manage a crisis. There is a story making the rounds regarding a trip Republican presidential wannabe Mitt Romney and his family took from Boston to Ontario in their Chevy station wagon, date uncertain. Before beginning...

The Bush administration’s campaign to blow smoke up the collective American backside by calling all insurgents Al Qaeda is vexsome enough, but that label has now been applied to 11 men killed in a helicopter attack who may have been Iraqi civilians guarding against the very people the U.S. had targeted. The incident occurred on June 22 in the remote village of Al-Khalis, north of Baquba, during the opening days of Arrowhead Ripper, an operation to capture and kill Al Qaeda leaders and foot...

Lost in the miasma of debate over the Iraq war is a key question: What was the U.S.’s obligation to the Iraqi people once the Saddam Hussein regime was toppled? The Bush administration believed that it had a responsibility to nurture a new government, new constitution and national elections. All eventually did come to pass despite a post-invasion occupation so ill planned and so wretchedly executed that in one fell swoop the U.S. squandered the modicum of good will Iraqis accorded it and...

Two faces of the Poconos: Waterfall and sweatshop Think of the Poconos of Northeastern Pennsylvania and you probably think of forests thick with hemlock, spruce and deer, ski slopes, golf courses and honeymoon hotels with heart-shaped bathtubs. To which you can now add sweatshops where illegal immigrants toil. The arrest of 81 alleged illegals in an early-morning raid by federal immigration agents at Iridium Industries in East Stroudsburg on June 19 has led to revelations that not only was it widely...

Much of the nation’s attention was on the wildfires around Lake Tahoe on Monday, but there was an even bigger conflagration in Washington as Americans continue to reap the whirlwind of six-plus years of Bush administration extremism. * A Supreme Court packed with Bush-appointed right-winger zealots and doctrinaire conservatives handed down four decisions. One favored developers over endangered species. One gutted a key provision of campaign finance reform. One was a slap in the face of Americans...

Exhibit A (Top) and Liar B On September 11, 2001, two hijacked jet aircraft crashed into the World Trade Center, killing 2,600 people and destroying the twin towers. But there has been a second catastrophe, as well: Extremely high rates of deadly respiratory disease among rescue workers and others who toiled in clouds of toxic dust at Ground Zero that officials claimed was not dangerous to breathe. Chief among those officials was Christie Todd Whitman, a former New Jersey governor and rising national...

Providing further evidence that it is disdainful of freedom of speech, the emergent Supreme Court majority has ruled 6-3 against a then-Alaska high school student in the notorious “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case. As freedom of speech cases go, this one was fairly cut and dried. Joseph Frederick had unveiled a banner with the apocryphal message within view of school property. His principal crossed the street, tore down the 14-foot banner and suspended him for 10 days. Arguing for the principal,...

“She was strikingly beautiful and had a great sense of humor. She was a hostess extraordinaire who had filled her New Jersey home with furnishings that she and her husband brought back from their world travels. But by the time she died, she was a virtual hostage of her alcohol- and drug-addicted son and his ex-convict girlfriend. The scene of fresh cut flowers had been replaced the stench of crack cocaine.” So began a commentary I wrote about what happens when bad lawyers can shake down...

It’s hard to believe that a former husband of Elizabeth Taylor holds a big key to bringing American troops home from Iraq. That would be John Warner. Warner, a World War II veteran who was married to the actress from 1976-82, has been anything but a quick study first as Navy secretary in the Nixon and Ford administrations and for the last 28 years a Republican senator from Virginia. I say that because he has grown as a legislator and has continually surprised as a man not necessarily beholden...

As bass guitars go, the Alembic is something of a rarity. So it’s kinda weird that three of my four all-time favorite electric bassists play these distinctive looking and sounding handcrafted instruments. The Alembic players would be Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna fame, Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead and jazz virtuoso Stanley Clarke. (The late Jaco Pastorius of Weather Report is the fourth favorite; he played a Fender Jazz.) In my book, Ron Carter and Charles Mingus were pretty...

U.S. soldiers prepare to search a house in Baquba I’m well outside the Beltway, but I can practically hear what is left of that cadre of pro-war Republicans fingering their worry beads as they fervently pray for the success of the anti-Al Qaeda offensive now well underway in Iraq. I know they can do it! That damned rat Buckley jumped ship too soon! Go Petraeus go! Right is might! And so on and so forth. Even this gang knows that this is it. Anything less than a quantitative victory against...

In the last few days, Vice President Cheney has taken his troublingly erratic behavior to a new level. Cheney has asserted on numerous occasions that his office is part of the executive branch and therefore he is protected by its perks and privileges, at least when it comes to his own accountability. Two notably pungent examples are keeping secret the inner workings of his Energy Task Force and protecting himself against a civil lawsuit filed by Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. On the other hand,...

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Operation Arrowhead Ripper, the problematic name of one part of the largest offensive in Iraq since 2003, is well underway, the fighting is heavy and there are early signs that some progress is being made. The operation’s goal is simple but ambitious: A methodically applied squeeze against Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia, whose fighters have repeatedly confounded U.S. forces by slipping away when confronted, leading to smart-aleck comparisons with whack-a-mole, the arcade game where as soon as you...

I was in the mountains and probably one of the relatively few people in the U.S. who was not around a television on the morning of September 11, 2001. So it strained credulity to hear radio reports that first one and then the other massive twin tower at the World Trade Center had been reduced to a toxic cloud of dust and rubble after taking hits from hijacked jetliners. It still was with a sense of disbelief that we watched the repeatedly played images of the towers being struck and crumbling in...

The sad story of Alex R. Jimenez, one of the two U.S. soldiers kidnapped and feared dead after an Al Qaeda-led ambush in May in the Triangle of Death, has grown sadder still with the news that his wife may be deported. Yaderlin Jimenez, like her husband, is a native of the Dominican Republican, but she entered the U.S. illegally prior to marrying him in 2004. She has been listed for deportation despite being married to a naturalized U.S. citizen because she did not apply for a green card. Jimenez,...

If you’re into the concept of national sovereignty, central governments and all that kind of stuff, then Afghanistan is a seriously beautiful but broken place. I happen to believe strongly that Afghanistan is, in fact, ungovernable, as a succession of foreign occupiers have learned to their dismay. But that doesn’t mean that the culture and history of this wild place should not be preserved, and that’s where Rory Stewart enters the big picture. Stewart is the author of “The...

I have seen a lot of awful things over a long career in journalism and learned a long time ago to compartmentalize them. But there are times when the sights, sounds and smells of inhumanity are too big for the little box I put this stuff in and it comes vomiting out. When that happens, it usually is because children are the victims. Well, it happened again. Take a close look at the photograph above. These are young Iraqi boys, some tied to their cribs, lying on the floor at a government-run Baghdad...

Some of the liveliest comment threads here at The Moderate Voice have been over the question of whether the Iraq war is lost in the traditional (which is to say military) sense. A goodly number of commenters have stoutly defended the notion that the war is not lost and the U.S. needs to be given more time, more troops, and so on and so forth. But as winter turned to spring and now spring is turning to summer, those voices have fallen silent. Where are you guys? What happened to your war? Your...

I thought that I was experienced enough and sage enough that I was correct in my view that rumors the Bush administration was considering military strikes against Iran’s nuculur . . ., er, nuclear facilities could not be taken seriously. But it turns out that the Crew Without a Clue is indeed considering that bit of profound wignuttery. There have been a flurry of stories that the White House was flirting with attacking Iran, most recently a front-page New York Times article based on a Niagara...

I always have had an iffy relationship with French New Wave cinema in general and director Jean-Luc Godard in particular, so when I first saw his Week End at an art cinema in the late 1960s, I knew it was really good but didn’t quite know why. I was afflicted with the same uncertainty when I saw Godard’s Breathless and Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, as well. I gave the DVD version of Week End (1967) another gander over the . . . well, weekend and was wowed. Godard, I’m told,...

U.S. and Iraqi forces, raiding a suspected Al Qaeda safe house near the site of the Golden Dome bombings last week in Samarra, have found what are believed to be the military identification cards of two missing American soldiers abducted last month in the Triangle of Death south of Baghdad. The ID cards of Specialist Alex R. Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Private Byron W. Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Michigan, were found on June 9 about 90 miles north of where the two men disappeared in...

A senior Justice Department official who helped carry out the firings of eight U.S. attorneys is resigning. Mike Elston, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, is the fifth Justice official to leave after being linked to the dismissals of the prosecutors. More here.

“The number of people who would be angered by a (Scooter Libby) pardon who haven’t already abandoned the president could fit in an airport shuttle bus.” — John Dickerson Dickerson has it exactly right. So how then to explain the hemorrhage of feelings from conservatives this week over the impending imprisonment of a very smart man who nevertheless valued loyalty over honesty, was caught dead to rights and cooked to a turn in a trial that will be appeal proof? One answer is...