It is budget season. The big books are going up to the Hill and the staffers are sharpening their pencils and preparation for correcting the President’s needs. There are new faces, and new agendas. Things are different up there, which causes extra anxiety. Parking has always been at a premium on the Hill, and with […]

We Never Sleep It was with some anxiety that I woke at 0445 on America’s East Coast to see if all was right with the world. Had the Public Radio affiliate at American University in fact picked up the essential BBC World Update program after the brutal classical music coup d’etat at WETA? The alarm […]

I didn’t get the body count until relatively late this morning. Normally, I like to get that out of the way early and move on. The radio station I have to listen to now that provides weekday access to the world has a long-standing tradition of serving the Bluegrass Community. That is fine, in its […]

Then, Sink the Boat Asymmetric warfare is a conundrum. When confronting an imperial power with mighty resources, fear and uncertainty are cheap and effective counterweights. Yet when terror is the weapon of choice, there is a limit even to horror. How much can anyone removed from it actually absorb? I could do the headlines from […]

I was going to write about something else this cold morning. It is seventeen out, but blowing fiercely. They tell me it will feel like three degrees, and I can feel the cold draft from the crannies on the windows. I’m surprised that the killings in the pet market did not surprise me. A guy […]

In a perfect world, I would be more worried about the revelation that Georgian officials recently thwarted the transfer of Russian weapons-grade uranium for the second time in less than two years. Georgian security officials arrested a Russian man carrying a little under four ounces of the nasty stuff, breaking the smuggling chain. There was […]

Time Travelers My fellow Americans, we are all time travelers. It is not as romantic as one would think. We do it slowly enough that we do not notice, day to day. It is only when we confront an image from the past, or the mirror, that we realize that we have been dropped down […]

I knew something was wrong when I headed for bed last night, though I have known something was off for weeks. I wrote it off to everything else that was going on. The pretty music on the radio was ominous. It should have been the voices that murmur to themselves all day, back there in […]

In early 1946, America stood at the apex of military triumph even as its forces melted away. The Atomic Bomb had changed the world- that much was clear as day, though the rest was a little foggy. What the Manhattan Project had delivered, though, was still not fully understood. The enterprise may have been the […]

Voyage to Bikini The Americans were nervous for the first few weeks. They had been at war, and now they were in the harbor of their enemy. They manned their guns at an advanced state of alert, though the most threatening thing they saw was Japanese civilians peering at them with curiosity, and bathing nude […]