Outside the Beltway

The GOP doesn’t have a charismatic superstar waiting in the wings. That’s okay.

“Our records indicate that your annual income for the 2011 taxable year was $2,170,000,000,000. You have requested a credit limit of $17,000,000,000,000. These figures exceed the American Public’s guidelines for credit issuance”

Jon Huntsman made his first stop in New Hampshire as he explores a presidential bid. So far, so good.

Go The Fuck to Sleep, the children’s book aimed at parents, has become an Internet sensation and reached #1 on Amazon well before its release owing to a leaked copy.

Does the Donald Trump flame-out provide any kind of guide to other candidates? Only if they want to host a reality show.

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.

Matt Eckel’s takeaway from my Atlantic piece on How Perpetual War Became U.S. Ideology is that we need a peer competitor.

Erick Erickson questions Jon Huntsman’s loyalty to America.

Santorum has an interesting theory about the decline of great powers.

Congress is coming back to Washington and gas prices continue to rise. Expect a lot of demagoguery, but very little in the way of solutions.

An aide’s compliment about the president “leading from behind” has generated controversy.

President Obama is suffering in the polls because of high gas prices, but is there really anything he can do about them?

Events in Syria, and the world’s response to them, are revealing the moral bankruptcy of the justification for the war in Libya.

Is there a magic formula to fix soaring gas prices? A Washington Examiner editorial claims to have found it.

Presidential wannabe Jon Huntsman wrote some embarrassing letters about President Obama and the Clintons.

Francis Fukuyama: “In the developed world, we take the existence of government so much for granted that we sometimes forget how difficult it was to create.”

The “Obama Doctrine,” such as it is, seems to boil down to moral self-certainty combined with a glaring ignorance of reality. That’s a dangerous combination.

Amnesty International is drawing attention to capital punishment in the United States, with bad math and a credulous media on its side.

Senator Joe Lieberman said today that we should intervene in Syria using the same rationale we did for Libya. Because, you know, what’s the big deal about a fourth war?

Obama is visiting Brazil and Chile while American fighting men join the coalition against Libya.

The uneasy coalition that coalesced around action in Libya will be strained by decisions to come.

There must be a predisposition against war and we should only engage in just wars.

Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton’s first Secretary of State, has died at 85.

America is about to enter a third war in the Muslim world with no clear idea of the end game.

The Obama Administration is asking the U.N. Security Council to authorize direct military intervention in Libya. The question is, why now?

We’ve been hearing about peak oil for years. But now some experts are warning of an even more serious crisis: Peak coffee.

We’re heading towards a future of higher food prices and more hunger.

The Dalai Lama will give up his political role in the Tibetan government-in-exile and shift that power to an elected representative.

All of the plausible Republican contenders for 2012 have significant downsides.

An op-ed by a Hao Leifeng in China’s Global Times argues that “Actor Charlie Sheen is a classic example of the difference in Western and Eastern values and norms.”

As gas and oil prices rise, the pressure is increasing to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It’s a dumb idea.

Intervening to “help” the Libyan revolt is very tempting, but it’s a temptation we ought to resist.

The uprisings in the Arab world have led some to suggest that the Middle East isn’t “ready” to be free. They’re wrong.