It took Andrew Sullivan 18 years to get his request for Permanent Resident status approved. That’s just absurd.

My first piece for The American Conservative, which they’ve titled “War Isn’t for Everyone–The military needs civilian control, not citizen soldiers,” is in the May issue.

As you may recall, I gave up day to day political commentary for Lent. If you’re curious, here’s how it’s going: pretty damn well. I’ll admit, it was hard at first. But now that I’m in week five, I’ve noticed that getting out of the day to day political slog-fests has been rather liberating. It’s [...]

Scott Powers, the Florida Sun-Sentinel reporter who’s reported confinement in what was described as a closet during a fundraising event attended by Vice-President Biden, seems to be a bit surprised that he ended up at the center of a cause celebre: I was kidnapped. That was news to me. My paper and I conspired to [...]

Infographic on How to Have a Rational Discussion.

Radley Balko and his blogs are moving to Huffington Post.

Big new announcement: I am now blogging tech issues for Forbes under the header “Robot Overlords.” Go check it out! And tell your friends! Also, I’m still blogging over at A Practical Heretic about topics non-political. For the consolidators in the house, you can follow all of my writing on Facebook. And, as always, I [...]

Philippa Thomas has a fascinating take on how she broke the news of (now former) State Department P.J. Crowley’s condemnation of the Obama administration’s treatment of Bradley Manning.

Paul Krugman admits that he doesn’t bother to read conservative commentary. Should he?

Today is Ash Wednesday, and for a number of reasons, I have decided that part of my Lenten Sacrifice will giving up following, reading, and writing about the current, day to day back and forth of politics. This, obviously, will change my focus of writing here on the blog. I have planned some posts in [...]

Michelle Malkin is looking for help finding her cousin, Marizela Perez, who’s missing in the Seattle area.  

We upgraded to the latest stable WordPress release, version 3.1, last night. It seems to have broken a couple of things, notably the Quick Picks and Editor’s Picks features. I’ve got a bug report in but, being Sunday, it could take a while to get a fix in.

While the prestige outlets of the halcyon days of the last millennium still hold some cachet for those of us old enough to remember that era, they mean next to nothing on the Web.

The Media Bloggers Association has filed an amicus brief against a company which exists for the sole purpose of suing bloggers.

Thanks to a suggestion from Mark Jaquith, we appear to have found a more elegant solution for making it easier to do simple HTML coding (bold, italics, strikethrough, blockquote) in comments. And added an optional preview feature as well. As always, let us know if there are quirks.

The WYSIWYG commenting interface is finally compatible with WordPress 3.x, so we’re trying again. In early testing, it seems to do a good job with the standard HTML commands: bold, italics, blockquoting, link insertion, and so forth. Unlike the interface from months ago, however, it won’t automatically convert raw HTML code into readable text. Those [...]

Conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel joins Nir Rosen and Jim Hoft in playing “blame the victim” over Lara Logan’s brutal assault on the streets of Cairo: I just love it when the people of the profession of “the public’s right to know” suddenly want “privacy.” Tell it to your next interview subject, Lara. Of course CBS [...]

Gateway Pundit‘s Jim Hoft tries to out Nir Rosen Nir Rosen: Lara Logan is lucky she’s alive. Her liberal belief system almost got her killed on Friday. This talented reporter will never be the same. Why did this attractive blonde female reporter wander into Tahrir Square last Friday? Why would she think this was a [...]

Andrew Sullivan is finally fed up with Barack Obama.

I have banned a couple of serial violators in recent days after various warnings, deletions, and other signals failed to do the trick.

Mob Boss Tommy Shots Gioeli Blogs From Jail

I’m not Arianna Huffington’s biggest fan but some of the charges levied against her since the sale off HuffPo to AOL are unfair. Balloon Juice’s mistermix dubs her “The Ultimate Freeloader” because: 1.) She’s not giving the people who have written her content over the years any of the $315 million AOL paid for the [...]

We now have most of the world’s information right at our fingertips. But we’re not necessarily getting smarter.

Power Line founder Paul Mirengoff has left the blog, after a controversial posting about the Tucson funeral service got him in hot water with his law firm. William Jacobson has the details but the short version is that Mirengoff took issue with a Yaqui Indian tribal prayer at the memorial service, contending that a Christian [...]

Some thoughts on why certain topics get blogged.

Didn’t we just talk about this?

“But hey, I just write this blog; for some reason you’re here reading it”–Robert Farley of LGM bemoaning his 2010 prediction record. I must confess, that basic thought has often run through my head when commenters get angry what I gave written/get and because they think I should have written something else or about some [...]

Congrats to Gary Farber, who is starting his 10th year of blogging.

Writing about the same story that I posted about earlier today, one of the diarists at Red State says this: Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. There’s still information that the public should know but does not know-information any employer would ask for and receive. Where are the college transcripts? Did Barack Obama apply to [...]

If you’re getting a message saying “Article stolen from OutsideTheBeltway.com” whilst reading our site’s content legitimately, we apologize.  It’s being corrected. Short version:  It’s an attempt to thwart “scraper” sites which steal the content from various blogs via our syndication feeds, posting them as their own.  The coding wasn’t supposed to show on OTB itself, obviously, [...]

The Atlantic made a $1.8 million profit, mostly from Andrew Sullivan’s blog.

Andrew Sullivan has just released The Cannabis Closet, the second in a series of books produced entirely from reader emails to the Daily Dish. Granting that Andrew’s been doing this a couple years longer than I have and has approximately a million times the readership, I can’t help but be disappointed in my commenters. Seriously, can’t you [...]

Those of us who think we’re overreacting to terrorism should remember that we’re in a tiny minority.

For whatever reason, the WYSIWYG commenting tools that we’ve had since moving to WordPress circa 2005 have not worked since moving to WordPress 3.x and the new layout, despite several attempts to fix.   My tech has disabled it again and will try something else soon, hopefully over the weekend.

Should blogs and other online forums ban anonymous comments?

I’ll be participating in a live blog of tonight’s election returns at United Liberty along with Georgia political blogger Jason Pye and whoever else shows up. We’ll start sometime around 6:45pm and continue until, well, perhaps until the Alaska write-in votes are counted  in two weeks (not really). I’m sure there will also be a [...]

World Politics Review has published a special issue on “NATO’s Identity Crisis” ahead of next month’s Lisbon summit and the unveiling of a new Strategic Concept. I contributed the lead essay, “NATO in an Age of Austerity.”

Is angry and violent language which dominates blog comments sections a sign of broader trends in our political culture?

Automated constructive blog comments cartoon fro xkcd.

Being a political blogger during election season is getting to be rather infuriating, especially if all you want to do is check your email.

Mickey Kaus quips, “Andrew Sullivan has “small staff of four people to help him handle the blog” says NPR. Er, what’s a “big” staff for a blog? . . . In ten short years Sullivan’s created a bloated blog bureaucracy! “

OTB crossed the 50 million unique visitor mark, as measured by SiteMeter, sometime overnight. As always, thanks to all who read, comment, and link. Previous milestones: 40 Million – December 21, 2009 35 Million – June 17, 2009 30 Million – October 14, 2008 29 Million – August 26, 2008 28 Million – July 11, [...]

A fascinating discussion about the nature of blogging.

his blog post originally stated that one in three black men who have sex with me is HIV positive. In fact, the statistic applies to black men who have sex with men.

Andrew Sullivan has been blogging for a decade now. He remains one of the few truly indispensable bloggers.

A cryptic email leads to the discovery of what appears to be some sort of Barack Obama themed sex toy. A typically day in the life of a blogger.

Just a tip to fellow bloggers who are still running their blogrolls using the old blogrolling.com widget: Your sites have been banned for some time because of malware issues.

Eugene Volokh explains why he’s not writing on a controversial subject recently in the news: He doesn’t know enough about it and doesn’t want to be wrong.

The relationship between the Obama White House and the progressive blogosphere isn’t very good right now, and it’s a preview of what is likely to happen on the right if the GOP gets back in power.

Another new media star is coming to the rescue of an old media dinosaur. Put it’s probably too late.