Outside the Beltway

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.

Stephen Colbert has been running an ongoing shtick in which he’s trying to start a political action committee, gets letters from his Viacom bosses poo-pooing the idea, and then inviting his lawyer on to explain ways to get around these concerns.

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

Hockey star Sean Avery’s recent statements supporting gay marriage has drawn fire from an unlikely source: His agent.

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

A major law firm has withdrawn from defending DOMA in Court, and a public controversy has erupted.

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

Andrew Bacevich refers to Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power as “the Three Harpies.”

France’s top court refused to allow French citizenship for 10-year-old twin girls born to a surrogate mother in the United States.

The re-emergence of Obama foreign policy advisor Samantha Power to prominence has brought critics to the forefront

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.

Did President Obama pull off a diplomatic masterstroke? Or is he muddling through?

The fight over Federal funding for Planned Parenthood seems to be about much more than whether taxpayer dollars should be going to Planned Parenthood.

The crackdown in Libya is turning into a massacre.

As in Baharain, the Libyan Government has reacted violently to the populist uprising sweeping the Arab world. The difference is the Libyans are doing it largely without anyone noticing

Examining Levin’s examination of the Constitution, jurisprudence, and property rights.

Is American policy in the Middle East dictated by national interest or interest groups?

Egypt entered a second day of chaos with all signs pointing to things getting worse before they get better.

The events in Egypt have led some to ask if the mere act of cutting off access to the Internet is, in itself, an human rights violation.

The Obama administration’s slow and cautious response to Egypt’s protest was frustrating. And correct.

Brief takes on foreign affairs

Like it or not, human rights is only at the top of the agenda for countries that otherwise don’t much matter.

A somewhat surprising court decision from the European Union gives a glimpse of what the situation in the United States would be if Roe v. Wade were overturned.

President Obama is supporting the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Is this the end of America?

Sarah Palin waded into the foreign policy pool today with a piece about Iran, and it was about as empty as most of the other ideas on Iran that we’ve heard over the last six years or so from everyone else.

An incident at a school in England provides us with an object lesson in why the often derided concept of separation of church and state is an important part of protecting individual liberty.

Of the five countries that use the death penalty the most, only one is a democracy.

Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo has dedicated his Nobel Peace Prize to the victims of the June 1989 massacre in Tianamen Square. Proving again that the events of that day still live on in the memory of many Chinese people.