Well played, Dave.

OK, I like Ben Shpigel’s Yankees coverage for the New York Times, but this is getting absurd. From today’s write up of the Yanks’ win over Seattle last night: Rodriguez is no longer just climbing the career home run list. He is scaling it at a feverish pace, crushing two mammoth blasts to the nether [...]

Apropos of yesterday’s discussion of the pressures Against Me! faces, check out Ted Leo’s public service announcement knocking down misrepresentations that the collapse of the music industry is forcing him to retire. Here’s a guy who’s trying to stay DIY and live his life on his terms, making his music the way he wants and [...]

Reflecting on some scary Arab-Kurdish violence in Iraq’s Diyala province, Juan Cole wonders about a goal not attempted on Vice President Biden’s just-completed trip to the country: He should have had a fourth goal, of Arab-Kurdish reconciliation before the US loses its leverage, but that issue appears not to have been central to this trip. [...]

Riffing off my post yesterday about civilian casualties and radicalization, Rob Farley combs the archives of airpower boosterism and ground-pounder pushback. The debate within the British Army in the 1920s, as Rob notes, was remarkably similar to our own. “[I]n these countries it may be proved that the Air Service is capable of maintaining order [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 581-10 July 06, 2010 DOD Identifies Army Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. Sgt. Jordan E. Tuttle , 22, of West Monroe, La., died July 2 at Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries suffered in a non-combat related incident. He was a [...]

Michael Hayden gave an interview to Studies in Intelligence claiming that waterboarding really does produce good intelligence. It’s not exactly an admission against interest, even if President Bush stopped the CIA from waterboarding two years before Hayden himself became CIA director. The agency’s own declassified accounts of its descent into torture in 2004 and 2005 declined [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 578-10 July 06, 2010 DOD Identifies Army Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Spc. Louis R. Fastuca, 24, of West Chester, Pa., died July 5 at Abdulhamid Kalay, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his vehicle with an improvised [...]

Taking under advisement your very helpful suggestions for how this blog should evolve — thanks and keep them coming — I’m going to experiment with compiling an end-of-the-day wrapup of what I reported over at Danger Room. It’s not really going to occur at any set time, since internet journalists don’t keep regular hours, and [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 579-10 July 06, 2010 DOD Identifies Army Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Spc. Clayton D. McGarrah, 20, of Harrison, Ark., died July 4 at Arghandab, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when insurgents attacked his unit using an improvised explosive device [...]