Master of Policy The Master of Policy is a man of small stature with merry eyes. They twinkle behind his gold-rimmed glasses. He is bald, though his forehead would be prominent in any case. Perhaps to make up for the deficiency in follicles to the north, his eyebrows have grown to astonishing length, wizard length, […]

The Sofa King A friend of mine sent me an e-mail with a picture embedded in the text. Technology has really marched on. It used to be that the pictures came as attachments to the e-mail files, and had to be downloaded separately. Hackers loved that. They could send intriguing spam notes out with purportedly […]

It is Holy Week, Palm Sunday, and I am going to church. A former colleague is singing the tenor part in Handle’s Messiah in a few hours at the Methodist church just across the parking lot. It will be the first time I have set foot in a sanctuary since at least 2001, perhaps longer. […]

General Mike Hayden, the senior intelligence officer on active duty, lectured his service on their approach to intelligence collection and analysis the other day. Mike had been pretty quiet since the tempest over NSA �wiretapping� began last year. Perhaps he feels it is safe to address something as innocuous as how his Service is handling […]

It is the anniversary of the second day of the battle of Shiloh, the battle in Tennessee that demonstrated the resolve of General U.S. Grant, and just how awful things were going to be when the large formations of armed men collided. Shiloh is the word is Hebrew for �place of peace.� My great-great Uncle […]

The police are playing it close to the vest, and Few details of the killing have been released. It was a shotgun, that much seems to be clear, since two shells were reportedly found near the body. It is said that a woman passing the little whitewashed cottage noticed a broken window, and that is […]

It is certainly not the first Spring, nor the first warning of high winds. Comes with the season. Still, the band of storms that swept over Big Pink was a mighty one with jagged bolts of lightning. It is the remnants of the system that generated twisters in Arkansas and Tennessee on Sunday, killing twenty-four. […]

I’m a Gabacho now, and I didn’t know it. With all the hoopla over the immigration issue swirling around the last few weeks, it has been easy enough to not notice. The folks in the La Rasa movement are fond of saying that the border is nothing special; in fact, the Americans just moved it […]

Spring broke out in the three days I was in Tidewater. The dogwoods are out, even as the cherry blossoms pass their prime and turn to green. There are golden banks of forsythias, and the discontent with the long gray winter has caused an incipient riot in the diverse family of azaleas. It’s Andrew Marvel’s […]

Last Call The fog is thick this morning, and the cherry blossoms are on the trees, and there is a crappy newspaper at my hotel door. USA Today, I think, the one with the bright colors written for high school kids, if they could read. There were days I would have killed for a newspaper, […]