I’ve been kicking myself this week. Maybe you have, too, but I remember the morning that they launched the new currency of Europe back in 1999. It was pegged to the US dollar, the pre-eminent currency. Think how different the world was then. There was a modest surplus in the US budget. Osama bin Laden […]

The shake-up in Public Radio continues. I know, like who cares? It is a niche network, a boutique media outlet, but it serves an important function in a lot of lives around here. Many of us are recovering news junkies, and here in Washington it is not unusual to have a friend or neighbor pop […]

It is a curious story from a region where the truth is ephemeral, and subject always to embellishment. For a change, though, it is not people in the Middle East who saying too much, but too little. What happened seems to qualify as an act of war, as if that meant anything in a world […]

The word started to spread yesterday afternoon. There was a firefight after a car bombing in Baghdad’s primarily Sunni Mansour neighborhood. The target may have been a State Department convoy under the protection of a private security firm. In the confusion that followed there was collateral damage; to wit, eight dead Iraqis. An Iraqi Interior […]

It is the end of summer, and the change of the season. I know the Earth does not recognize it, not for another week or so, but the finale came as Andre walked down the concrete steps into the grim sub-basement of Big Pink. He turned a medium-sized wheel in the dusty machinery room to […]

The Little Church, Mid-town Manhattan We pull out of Washington’s Union Station at 8:10 on The Vermonter, one of the Amtrak trains that still has a name. My older son and I are headed for New York City, and the re-creation of a wedding held sixty years ago. It was one of the serial marriages […]

The General and the Ambassador talked to the Congress yesterday, and today is the anniversary of the attacks. The Surge is going generally well, according to the duo. Thankfully the weather is crappy, and we have rain. It helps me relax. I cannot experience a beautiful September day without thinking that something might fall out […]

Summer is going to linger another few weeks, but the season is just about in the bag. The weather was glorious this week, but no one was free to enjoy it. The Congress is back, and the bickering has begun once more. People like me who make their paychecks on international woe have to get […]

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, or so the Bard claimed. I am not sure. Names have intrinsic power all their own. The world has been busy while we have drifted down the placid brown Potomac this last week, from the old secret installation at Fort Hunt to Germany, and the […]

War Department Identity Card issued to “Hans Holbein,” the cover name of Major General Reinhard Gehlen At the end of World War II, The Navy and Army each operated airfields on the narrow strip of flat land along the Anacostia River across from the Capital in Washington. It was a matter of efficiency; each service […]