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...

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,...

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.

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...