Outside the Beltway

Across the country, Republicans are pushing laws that will make voting harder.

It’s hard to get paid for work others will do for nothing.

Glenn Greenwald asks two questions about the cases of Osama bin Laden and Ratko Mladic. Helpfully, the second answers the first.

A profile of George Mason economist and blogger Tyler Cowen offers this amusing description: “Cowen, 49, has round features, a hesitant posture, and an unconcerned haircut.”

It’s just one Congressional District out of 435, but that won’t stop everyone from trying to turn the results in NY-26 into a national referendum on Medicare reform.

Prisons can be so overcrowded as to constitute cruel and inhuman punishment.

Frank R. Lindh, father of Abu Sulayman al-Irlandi (aka Sulayman al-Faris, Abdul Hamid, and John Walker Lindh) has an op-ed in the NYT asking “Bin Laden’s Gone. Can My Son Come Home?” The answer is, sure: In another 8 to 11 years.

President Obama doubled down in his speech before this year’s AIPAC conference. Why he did so only he understands.

Bowing to the inevitable, Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned overnight as head of the IMF amidst high-level calls for his ouster in wake of a rape scandal.

Has technology robbed us of more than it’s given in return?

When one realizes that Trump is basically a brand, rather than anything else, his PR foray into politics makes more sense.

Senate fails to revoke tax cuts for big oil.

Foreign Policy’s David Kenner has a reading list for President Obama to help him get read for his big speech to recast our relationship with the Arab world. Topping the Persian Gulf section is Crossroads Arabia, by our own John Burgess.

Romney wants to make a federalism based argument for why his MA health care bill is good, while the PPACA is tyrannical. However, just saying that is not an argument.

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

An item in the Extra Bases baseball notebook last Sunday misidentified, in some editions, the origin of the name Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver, which Mets pitcher R. A. Dickey gave one of his bats. Orcrist was not, as Dickey had said, the name of the sword used by Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains in “The Hobbit”; Orcrist was the sword used by the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the book. (Bilbo Baggins’s sword was called Sting.)

Boehner wants some pretty big cuts in exchange for a vote on raising the debt ceiling.

The defense of torture as an extreme measure for extraordinary circumstances has evolved.tortu

There’s not much movement in the President’s job approval numbers.

A study shows that most national columnists and talking heads are about as accurate as a coin flip.

Three years later, there are no signs that the real estate market is anywhere close to recovering.

The free market in action.

Go the Fuck To Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing off to dreamland.

The NYT says it’s time for U. S. advisers and military air traffic controllers on the ground in Libya.

The new CBS/NYT poll is out and the numbers are not exactly happy, no matter whom you support.

It is waaay too early to be putting much stock in polling for 2012 (either in terms of X v. Obama or GOP v. GOP).

Donald Rumsfeld famously worked standing up. He was on to something.

Paul Krugman is disappointed with the President, but it’s really his own fault for being so naive.

Breathless hysteria over the trend toward a less white America misses an important fact: most Hispanics are white.

Glenn Beck will leave his Fox News show in December.

The story that GE paid zero taxes last year despite mega-billion dollar profits is completely untrue.

Philip Greenspun wonders, “How did the New York Times manage to spend $40 million on its pay wall?”

Rather than fighting over the remnants of the FY 2011 budget, the GOP should make a deal and get ready for the bigger, and more important, battle ahead.