The Big Picture and the Closeup

Anti-tax rhetoric: Another greenhouse gas Mercifully, the primary campaign has washed over the state where I live, and with the end of the inundation we no longer have to put up with the television ads arising out of a local Congressional district. You know the district I’m talking about, the place where three candidates, all current […]

T&A TV and its Fig Leaves Believe it or not, with the approach of this years Festivus Maximus, we are already about to celebrate the fourth anniversary of The Wardrobe Malfunction. Only a small percentage of the population, even of those who watched it, remembers who was playing in Super Bowl XXXVIII, and fewer yet […]

The Big Picture Home Page | Previous Big Picture Column |  Next Big Picture Column First Principles on Immigration Published in the Maryland Daily Record December 31, 2007 Those men and women trying to enter the country “illegally” are my brothers and sisters. We are all children of the same God, and that makes them my brothers […]

The Big Picture Home Page | Previous Big Picture Column |  Next Big Picture Column Musharraf, Mukasey, and Checks and Balances Published in the Maryland Daily Record November 26, 2007 This month, the lawyers of Pakistan have been in the streets, and closer to home the Senate has agonized over the Michael Mukasey nomination for Attorney General. […]

The Big Picture Home Page | Previous Big Picture Column |  Next Big Picture Column Intelligent Design Revisited   Published in the Maryland Daily Record October 29, 2007             I wrote about Intelligent Design theory here in May of 2004.  In that column, I said, in essence, that Intelligent Design (“ID”) seemed good enough science to […]

The Big Picture Home Page | Previous Big Picture Column |  Next Big Picture Column War Powers Page | Previous War Powers Column War Powers, War Lies: A Series: Part 25: Conclusion: Mission Accomplished   Published in the Maryland Daily Record August 27, 2007                Back in February 2005 I wrote these words in this column: “The U.S. […]

The Big Picture Home Page | Previous Big Picture Column |  Next Big Picture Column War Powers Page | Previous War Powers Column | Next War Powers Column War Powers, War Lies: A Series  Part 24: Metastasis   Published in the Maryland Daily Record July 30, 2007               As we have seen, the exercise of nuclear war powers was […]

  The Big Picture Home Page | Previous Big Picture Column |  Next Big Picture Column War Powers Page | Previous War Powers Column | Next War Powers Column War Powers, War Lies: A Series  Part 23: MADness   Published in the Maryland Daily Record June 25, 2007             “Hell of a weapon, really, when you come to think of […]

The internal justification for area bombing either espoused a view that civilians were collateral damage to attacks on the industrial war machine or that in modern warfare, the civilian/combatant distinction was not viable or important. In some cases, bombing of civilians was, ironically, presented as humanitarian and in keeping with the larger goals of the law of war, in that collapse of the enemy could be precipitated faster, and at a lower cost in human life overall, if civilian morale could be broken from the skies.

The Big Picture Home Page | Previous Big Picture Column |  Next Big Picture Column Unfunny Imus               It was certainly legal to fire Don Imus.  He was employed by private employers (at least to the extent that public corporations whose stock in trade is use of public airwaves can realistically be called private), so by […]