OTB turned four last Wednesday. I usually remember such things but between the California trip and work on an outside writing project, it slipped my mind. My first post* at Outside the Beltway was at 9:37 a.m. on Friday, January 31, 2003. This is my 14,368th post. My co-authors and guest bloggers have added another [...]

OTB passed this 14 million unique visitor mark as measured by SiteMeter during the 8 o’clock hour Pacific Time. Thanks as always to those who visit, comment, and link.

I’ll be blogging from California this week, so my posting schedule may be off a bit. My wife has to handle some business for her firm’s Hermosa Beach branch the next few days, so we flew out last night. We’re here through Thursday and then head down to San Diego through Saturday for a little [...]

Andrew Olmsted concludes his discussion on the recent blogospheric meme about whether people who opposed the Iraq War for the wrong reasons deserve any credit with a formulation that is both correct and amusingly Rumsfeldian: Some people were right about Iraq for the wrong reasons. Some were wrong for the right reasons. Some were right [...]

WaPo fronts its Business section today with a discussion of what it means to have credentialed bloggers joining traditional reporters at the Scooter Libby trial. The principal focus is on the lack of institutional controls on blogs. The new validation doesn’t necessarily clarify the blurry line between bloggers and traditional journalists at a time when [...]

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and Brett McGurk, Director for Iraq, National Security Council held a teleconference with invited bloggers this afternoon on the topic President Bush’s speech tonight on the way forward in Iraq. Following is a summary, not a transcription, of major points unless indicated by use of quotation marks. Snow provided [...]

I’ve just received and approved a BlogAd for Rudy Giuliani’s exploratory committee for the Premium Left adstrip. It goes nicely with the one on Premium Right strip for Mitt Romney’s exploratory committee, don’t you think? I’m not proud.

OTB passed this 13 million unique visitor mark as measured by SiteMeter last evening. Thanks as always to those who visit, comment, and link.

Earlier this evening, OTB passed the 11 million unique visitor mark as measured by SiteMeter since 4 February 2003. Thanks as always to those who visit, comment, and link.

OTB passed the 11 million unique visitor mark, as measured by SiteMeter since 4 February 2003, sometime overnight. Thanks as always to those who visit, comment, and link.

Apparently, the fact that we were getting slammed with search engine referrals and experiencing server issues was a coincidence. There were undisclosed issues with the server hardware that have seemingly been fixed. Normal posting will resume shortly.

OTB and especially our Gone Hollywood sideblog have been getting swamped with traffic the last couple of days and it’s quite literally overheating our dedicated server. We had an outage yesterday afternoon and are operating quite sluggishly now and it’s not even 9 a.m. on the East Coast yet, which means the peak traffic is [...]

My wife and I are headed off for a few days R&R tomorrow morning and will be back Wednesday evening. I’ll have Internet access and will likely post a little something but certainly not my usual volume. I’ve asked some folks to fill in while I’m away and they’ve graciously accepted. Steven Taylor, my former [...]

OTB passed the 10 million mark as tabulated by SiteMeter sometime Monday. I noticed it last night but the timing seemed inappropriate. Thanks as always to those who visit, comment, and link.

I’ll be blogging from a DC coffee house starting around 4 Eastern as part of a CNN’s “E-lection Nite Blog Party.” (See how they have the clever homage to the kids there with the intentional misspelling of “night” and the pun on E as in electronic? Very hip!) Here’s the lowdown: On Election Night, Tuesday, [...]

I’ll be attending and speaking at a blogging conference this morning. Regular posting will resume this afternoon.

The mysterious green underlined words that appear in sporadic posts are part of a new advertising campaign. Do not panic. Do not adjust your sets.

Rodney Dill informs me that OTB has passed the 9 million unique visitor mark as measured by SiteMeter since 4 February 2003. As always, thanks to all who read and comment.

Some of the more astute readers might have noticed that I’ve added some additional links to the left sidebar. I wanted to make the site navigation links more obvious to the reader, so put links to the About, Policies, and Contact pages (previously in the top navbar) over there. That consolidates the links to internal [...]

OTB’s erstwhile Breaking News Editor Greg Tinti has decided to return to The Political Pit Bull. While enjoying the increased visibility and interaction his posts received here, OTB’s collegial (by blogospheric standards, at least) tone cramped his style a bit. He feels more comfortable unleashing his inner pit bull at his own home. We wish [...]

The tag team of Mark Jaquith and King of Fools have, apparently at least, fixed the bug that has been causing machine language characters to appear in blog comments that included pasted quotation marks, em dashes, and so forth. Let me know if you have further problems. UPDATE: Unfortunately, fixing the bug apparently created a [...]

Wizbang’s Paul has hung it up, I think for good this time, saying “It just ain’t fun anymore.” The last straw was a recent flamewar he got into with Ace but he’s been tired of the trevails of blogging for quite some time. Coincidentally, his colleague, Jay Tea, is taking a hiatus having just helped [...]

My wife and I are flying to Chicago for a wedding and will make a long weekend of it. My posting and e-mail responses will be more sporadic than usual until my return Monday afternoon.

Yes you can. Thanks to a plug-in I had installed (by the King of Fools) over the weekend and have been testing the last couple of days, you can easily submit or vote for your favorite OTB entries to Digg, Reddit, Fark, Blinklist, or several other social networking and bookmarking sites. Just click on the [...]

OTB has had over 8 million unique visitors as measured by SiteMeter since February 4, 2003. We passed the latest milestone sometime this afternoon. As always, thanks to all who read and comment.

I was on a short vacation on Connecticut’s Long Island Sound shore visiting the wife’s family and friends from very early Saturday and just arrived home about an hour ago. The Verizon card that I was relying on for ‘Net access, which generally works superbly, only intermittently got a signal, partly explaining the dearth of [...]

Sorry for the lack of posting. My Internet connection has been down all day. Not sure why it’s back up now, to be honest, since Cox claims it’s not on their end and I haven’t done anything on my end to fix it.

The New Media Strategies workshop for Capital Hill staffers I participated in Friday got coverage in yesterday’s Washington Times. I’m quoted toward the end of the piece answering the “Should Members of Congress fear bloggers” question suggested by David All: “We’re not that powerful,” said Outside the Beltway blogger James Joyner. “We’re never going to [...]

I’ll be participating this morning in the New Media Strategies Workshop for congressional staffers from 10-noon. I’m on the Bloggers Panel along with Robert Bluey (Human Events/Right Angle), Philip Pidot (Suitably Flip), Mark Tapscott (Tapscott’s Copy Desk), and Clayton Wagar (RedState).

I’d like to welcome Greg Tinti, proprietor of The Political Pit Bull since August 2005, to OTB as a guest writer. He has his B.A. in Anthropology from The George Washington University and is particularly interested in foreign policy and cultural issues. He has developed knack for video blogging and now frequently uses clips in [...]

I’m pleased to announce that three blogosphere veterans have agreed to join the fold at OTB. All three are folks I’ve been reading since my earliest days blogging and I’m thrilled to be able to bring them to the audience here. Robert Prather started posting at his site, which went through several name changes before [...]

I’m scheduled to appear on BBC radio’s “World Have Your Say” between 1300 and 1330 Eastern (1800-1900 GMT) today. I’ll be talking with presenter Anu Anand and perhaps other guests “about the Moussaoui sentence and whether or not ransom should ever be paid for hostages, following the release of the two German hostages from Iraq [...]

An article I wrote recently about a plan to subvert the Electoral College has been named an Editor’s Pick at Gather. I invite you to join my Outside The Beltway group at Gather. It’s another place to discuss some issues that I’ve posted on here as well as article posted by other Gather members affiliated [...]

OTB has had 7 million unique visitors as measured by SiteMeter since February 4, 2003. Thanks to all who’ve come by, and especially those who leave comments and (non-spam) trackbacks.

I have established an Outside The Beltway Group on Gather. It’s another forum for people to discuss articles that have been posted here as well as to engage others who are not regular readers.

Last evening, I played poker with legendary players Greg Raymer, Chris Ferguson, and Howard Lederer at the University Club in DC. I did so at the invitation of Mike Krempasky along with Radley Balko, Kevin Aylward, Cam Edwards, Marshall Manson, Julian Sanchez, birthday girl Mary Katharine Ham, Nick Gillespie, and others. At right, I’m getting [...]

Kim and I are winging our way to Jamaica for a short vacation. We’ll be back Monday evening. We’re at a different resort (San Suici) this time but I doubt there will be in-room Internet access and trying to blog from the business center is hardly worth the effort, especially with a beach and all-inclusive [...]

Outside the Beltway won the Golden Dot Award for Best Blog, presented last night at the Politics Online Conference sponsored by the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet (IPDI) of the George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management. Best Blog: A Golden Dot will be awarded to an outstanding Web log that successfully [...]

After a month of mostly behind the scenes experimentation, today marks the official debut of three niche blogs under the OTB banner: OTB News: A compilation of links and short excerpts, sans commentary, of the news of the day. Quite often, something will be going on that I find noteworthy but it never makes the [...]

Better late than never, here are my photos from today’s D.C. rally supporting Denmark and free speech. A crowd shot. Cute girl in wool hat tries to get people to chant “We’re all Danes now.” Christopher Hitchens, event organizer. Christopher Hitchens, event organizer and a bald, goateed fellow who is not Andrew Sullivan. Bill Kristol [...]

We’ve been making some tweaks to the site and have a couple bigger moves about ready for unveiling once the technical details are taken care of. Some of you may have noticed that the Blogroll, Major Topics, and monthly Archives have been consolidated on the right sidebar. I’m not quite happy with the look yet [...]

Saturday, Kim and I picked up our new puppy from the breeder Saturday morning. Her name is Molly and she’s a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. We already had three animals, my two cats (Scamp, age 7, and Henry, age 5-1/2) and her dog (Miniver, a lab-cocker mix, age 8), but this is our first pet [...]

I did something to the site template and created a parse error. WordPress default template temporarily in place until fixed. Update: Fixed.

I’m blogging from Amsterdam, having settled into the hotel and gotten Internet connectivity. I’m a bit bleary eyed, as I only got about three hours of sleep. Even though the flight was undersold and Kim and I had bulkhead seats, it’s still rather difficult to get comfortable on an airline seat. One of the strange [...]

My apologies for the extended outage. My WordPress caching plug-in was corrupted somehow and my night owl tech guru had just gone off the ‘net when I awakened to find the site down.

My first post at Outside the Beltway was at 9:37 a.m. on Friday, January 31, 2003. You are reading my 11,642th. My co-authors have added another 1270: Rodney Dill, 355; Steve Verdon, 270; Robert Tagorda, 240; Kate McMillan, 215; Leopold Stotch, 152; Richard Gardner, 28; Robert Prather, 5; and Athena, 5. While the blogging phenomenon [...]

A few days ago, Justin Abbott of BlogAds emailed asking whether I would be interested in going to Amsterdam for five nights as part of a promotional tour. The conditions were pretty straightforward: In exchange for the trip, each blogger will a) be interviewed by someone (a blogger or Blogads) about their trip (the Dutch [...]

I am pleased to announce that Will Baude has agreed to a tour as a guest poster at OTB. Some of you know him from his writings at Crescat Sententia, a group blog he started with several other University of Chicago students. He has also done guest posting stints at several other blogs and wrote [...]

Owing to constant instability, my site host has moved me to a new server. We’ll see if it works. In the meantime, there may be issues related to a DNS switchover. It’s times like these that I wish I’d stayed on Blogspot. Sure, they suck–but at least they’re free. Update:  Youch!  More painful than I [...]

OTB passed the 6 million unique visitor mark as calculated by SiteMeter some time in the 10:00 EST hour. The counter was installed on February 4, 2003. Thanks to all who link and visit.