Outside the Beltway

Measuring our progress a decade after the 9/11 attacks

For a peace envoy, Blair has some nonpeaceful ideas.

Killing’s our business and business is good.

Are colleges teaching the right lessons about the 9/11 attacks?

Understanding why your enemy hates you seems to be an important thing, but some people would rather believe in caricatures.

Repeating the “destruction creates wealth” fallacy every time there’s a natural disaster doesn’t make it any less of a fallacy.

Ron Paul is again making the argument that American foreign policy has contributed to terrorism. He’s more right than wrong.

With a hurricane bearing down on the East Coast, the House Majority Leader is engaged in an accounting exercise.

That a popular two-term governor of Utah is being rejected by likely Republican primary voters as insufficiently conservative shows just how extreme American politics has gotten.

Is the NYPD becoming too much like the CIA?

Either a bunch of bloggers or one of the world’s smartest economists doesn’t understand economics.

According to Paul Krugman, what the American economy needs is for a bunch of space aliens to invade us.

Does Ron Paul’s second place showing at Ames mean the media should take him seriously as a contender? No, it doesn’t.

Examining the impact of current events requires stepping back from them just a little bit.

Michele Bachmann is claiming that the debt downgrade proves she was right about not raising the debt ceiling.

News that Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik was a fan of anti-Islamist sites, including Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch and Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs has opened a big can of schadenfreude.

The House GOP’s proposed Balanced Budget Amendment contains the seeds of its own utter worthlessness.

The death toll in Norway’s deadliest day of terrorism is up to 91. The man behind it, 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik, is a frequent poster of anti-Muslim screeds on Christian fundamentalist websites.

A Federal Appeals Court says the full body image scanners showing up in airports are Constitutional.

Danger Room’s Spencer Ackerman reports on an alleged secret CIA interrogation facility somewhere in the former Soviet Union.

A homeowners association in Augusta, Georgia is coming under fire after denying Homes For Our Troops a permit to build a house for a paralyzed African-American veteran.

Ppartisan politics no longer stops at the water’s edge. This is a bad sign for the Republic.

Last night, the President basically announced that America’s longest war had entered it’s end game.

WaPo’s Jackson Diehl asks, “Will the GOP nominate a dove?”

American drone strikes in Yemen are intensifying. Is this a new war. or just the same one we’ve been fighting since October 2001?

A system designed to protect the innocent has instead become a menagerie to imprison them. A legal code designed to proscribe specific behavior has instead become a vast, vague, and unpredictable invitation to selective enforcement.

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani tops the latest CNN poll of Republican presidential contenders.

Should we worry about the deficit when funding “disaster relief”? Should we be funding “disaster relief” at all?

While President Obama has had some amusing gaffes on his trip to London, including getting the year wrong in the guest book and an awkward toast to the Queen, his speech to Parliament today hit all the right notes.

Some think that 2012 will be like 1992. However, that analogy is problematic.

Marc Thiessen claims Khalid Sheikh Mohammad mocked the CIA interrogators who waterboarded him.

President Obama’s approval numbers shot up after Osama bin Laden was killed two weeks ago. They’ve already settled back to where they were

If former President George W. Bush has any bitterness that Osama bin Laden was finally killed under his successor, he’s not showing it.

Elias Isquith proclaims my Atlantic essay “How Perpetual War Became U.S. Ideology” to be “a total disaster.”

I’ve begun to wonder about the future of U. S. security policy. This isn’t a serious analytical post; it’s just what I call “musing”—committing disorganized thoughts to writing.

Not surprisingly, having ordered a successful mission to kill Osama bin Laden is being highlighted on President Obama’s re-election tour.

Why would David Petraeus take the thankless job of running the CIA?

One U.S. Senator wants to bring elements of the TSA’s security theater to America’s rail system.