It is that time of the year that we celebrate the great ritual of the Democratic process, the General Election. First Tuesday in November we troop to the polls to cast our ballots for the great issues confronting the Republic. Of course that isn’t true this year. We will get to vote on that next […]

Vicki�s last broadcast was this morning. I got up, although I could have slept, and I stayed in bed to listen. She was good, on the top of her game and didn�t say a word about leaving until she introduced Dan Damon to recap the headlines from around the world. She said that she had […]

The news this morning- and it is still Vicki reading it for a few more days- is about the situation in Iraq. Five bombs at rush hour and forty dead. Almost all of them local citizens. The Press is making the case that this is Vietnam all over again, and this mass attack something like […]

The race went under cloudy skies and a cool breeze. Almost perfect. Some prefer crisp and cold, but the challenge of being ready to go and the hour or so that you have to kill waiting for the starting cannon is always problematic. These conditions were about perfect, provided it does not begin to rain. […]

I rounded the corner to get to my truck. I had caught part of the first half downtown at the Polit-tiki bar, a place with pressed tin ceiling and a bizarre Polynesian sports and political theme. The game was at the half, and I didn’t need any more beer. Michigan was comfortably ahead and it […]

I sometimes get plastered at the Caf� Asia on Wilson Blvd. Down in Rosslyn. They sell sushi and alcohol in a very post-modern airy room with big glass windows and the wait staff is all from Asia. Some of the girls are right off the boat and some are second and third generation Americans. It […]

The Dragon Lady was seventy-eight when Concorde first flew a commercial route in January of 1976. The Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Chek, the Dragon Lady’s husband, was in his grave just a year. He passed in 1975 and work on his garish blue and white mausoleum was nearly complete in downtown Taipei. When I first saw it, […]

He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth” On Oct. 23, 1983, a suicide truck loaded with six tons of explosives crashed through a barrier and detonated at the four-story headquarters of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit at Beirut International Airport in Lebanon. 241 […]

I am guilty. I write this nonsense far earlier than I should, sometimes without the necessary caffeine coursing through my brain. And my fact-checkers are inept creatures, old pensioners in worn Naval tunics, kahki ones with the giant pockets that can accomodate a whole carton of Camel Straights. I don’t know why I keep them […]

They are doing something very peculiar at the Metro Stations these days. They have people in safety vests handing out a broadsheet of some thirty-odd pages of newsprint. It is stapled together at the spine, and I thought it was advertising or a polemic the first time someone handed it to me. I glanced at […]