Outside the Beltway

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

You don’t often see a candidate for President tell Iowans that he wants to eliminate ethanol subsidies, but Tim Pawlenty did.

With the customary hand-wringing over the low quality of the presidential field well underway, the corollary pining for other candidates to join the race is starting.

We’ve reached a turning point in the debate over same-sex marriage.

Wall Street says raise the debt ceiling. The Tea Party says no. What will the GOP do?

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

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

Can one effectively run for the presidency if one’s spouse doesn’t want to be in the spotlight?

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

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

Did a deal between the U.S. and Pakistan during the infancy of the war against al Qaeda play a role in the raid against Osama bin Laden?

The debate over “enhanced interrogations” has been renewed by the bin Laden mission, but whether it “worked” or not isn’t the question.

Americans are rallying around the President in the wake of the mission against bin Laden, but it’s likely to be short-lived.

The impact of the death of Osama bin Laden on the domestic politics is likely to be minimal at best.

Most good government jobs require a college degree–but they don’t care much whether it’s a real one.

Obama’s main politics are hardly as leftist as many make them out to be. Indeed, much of them could have fit well in the the GOP of 1990s and early 2000s.

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

A major law firm has withdrawn from defending DOMA in Court, and a public controversy has erupted.

Once again, President Obama has ignored Candidate Obama’s promises to reign in the Presidential powers assumed by George W. Bush.

President Obama’s budget speech was light on specifics, but that’s because it was really the opening salvo of the 2012 campaign.

Can a candidate appealing enough to the base to win the Republican nomination beat Obama?

The Obama Administration has given up on the idea of trying the September 11th suspects in a civilian court. Considering how much that trial would have perverted the justice system, that’s a good thing.

President Obama says he acted in Libya to avert an imminent genocide, but there’s no evidence that any such thing was about to occur.

Nate Silver argues today’s polls “have a reasonable amount of predictive power in informing us as to the identity of the eventual nominee.”

Politicians in office have a nasty habit of behaving completely differently than they promise on the campaign trail.

Ten days after sending American forces into kinetic military action in Libya, President Obama addressed the nation to explain “what we’ve done, what we plan to do, and why this matters to us.”

Operation Odyssey Dawn has resurrected the eternal battle over what limits there are, and should be, on the President’s ability to use military force without Congressional authorization.

The antiwar movement has been strangely silent despite the fact that U.S. foreign policy hasn’t really changed that much since Barack Obama became President.

What are the limits of Resolution 1973? Are there any?

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

With minor exceptions, all of the potential candidates for the GOP nomination in 2012 seem to have accepted the idea that defense spending, and the Bush-era interventionist foreign policy, are off the table when it comes time to talk spending cuts.

There’s still time for Sarah Palin to burnish her political reputation. But she probably won’t.

Republicans are starting to sour on Sarah Palin, meaning that they’re finally starting to catch up to the rest of the country.

Public support for the war in Afghanistan continues to plummet, but will that hurt the President when 2012 rolls around?

President Obama is once again catching flak for his leisure activities.

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

Former French president Jacques Chirac is being tried on corruption charges stemming from misconduct as mayor of Paris.