Outside the Beltway

Time for the Thursday OTB Caption Contest^TM

Discovery channel gunman James Lee was shot at 4:48 p.m., because even the SWAT team doesn’t want to fight rush hour traffic

Tonight’s topics: President Obama’s speech, Tony Blair’s book, Glenn Beck’s rally, and the GOP’s steady rise in the polls.

32 Democratic incumbents are running even or behind their Republican challengers in one or more public or private polls. At this point in 2006, when Republicans lost control of Congress, only 11 GOP incumbents were running even or behind.

The Pentagon, responding to obvious flaws in its security revealed by the WikiLeaks debacle, is working on a data mining program that will monitor employee behavior for suspicious activity.

The idea that we are in the middle of an illegal immigration crisis is not supported by the evidence.

The president has declared an end to combat operations in Iraq. But soldiers assigned there still draw combat pay.

David Corn tweets, “Can I write the Hurricane-Earl-Is-Obama’s-Hurricane-Katrina piece? Or do I have to wait for Earl to make landfall? What’s protocol?”

If Republicans stick to their current (apparent) game plan and just run on not being Democrats, they will have neither a mandate to repeal Obamacare, et al, nor the will.

A case out of Texas demonstrates quite aptly the absurdity of the current patchwork quilt approach to same-sex marriage in the United States.

Aging Vietnam vets are being treated for diabetes and other ailments unrelated to their service on the taxpayers’ dime. We can’t afford it.

President Obama didn’t use the words “Mission Accomplished” last night, but the message was the same.

If there’s an area where our attitudes and behaviors have changed more radically in my lifetime than gender equality, I can’t think of it.