The Big Picture and the Closeup

Perhaps a lot of us sing loudly of feelings that are not quite our own, assert kinships and allegiances we do not exactly feel, try to feel familiar and comfortable in places where we are not thoroughly welcomed.

If the right of public employees to unionize is recognized as a human right, whatever is or is not in the constitution, then it cannot legitimately be one of the things Gov. Walker was elected to obliterate. Hence, to the extent he tries to do so, he will in fact be seen as illegitimate, no matter how legitimately elected. This is the point the Capitol Square crowds are trying to make with their quotation from the Middle East uprisings.

In the global war on terror or, as the Bush Administration likes to call it, the GWOT, the U.S. aspires to the situation of a National League team in interleague play — relaxed rules. This time we consider three aspects of the relaxed GWOT away game we are playing these days: foreign assassinations, extraordinary rendition, and prisoner export.