Outside the Beltway

According to reports, the President had no idea that the NSA was listening to the phone calls of foreign leaders until this summer.

The latest revelations about National Security Agency surveillance outside the United States have caused quite an uproar overseas.

The prospect of Congressional action on immigration before the midterms just got a whole lot less likely.

Is Iran really just one month from producing a nuclear weapon?

Even if it were functioning properly the Federal Health Care Exchange website would still have problems.

Relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia seem to have soured in recent years.

The bad roll out of the Affordable Care Act is starting to lead to calls for delays in enforcement of the law.

Jofi Joseph was unmasked as the obnoxious @NatSecWonk and fired by the White House.

Immigration reform may be the next big battle on Capitol Hill, but it’s going to be far different from the one that just concluded.

The GOP’s shutdown was about as pointless as a show about waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant.

Why the federal government is so bad at information technology and getting worse by the day.

So much for the most transparent Administration in history.

The U.S. sends a mostly weak signal to the Egyptian military.

One cannot support the shutdown tactic and then be outraged that part of the government is shutdown.

One of the dumber aspects of the current shutdown repeats itself.

The Pentagon is recalling up to 300,000 furloughed civilian employees on the same day that Congress voted to pay all furloughed employees when the government reopens.

The NFL donates its game broadcasts to troops deployed in harm’s way but they still won’t get to see them during the shutdown.

The United States and Russia have agreed to the framework of a deal to turn over Syrian chemical weapons.

A throwaway comment by John Kerry in London has led to some interesting diplomatic developments.

Heading into an intense week of Congressional lobbying, the odds still seem against the Administration on Syria.

President Obama has decided not to enforce a law. This is most unusual and somewhat disturbing.

Score one for Team Bush?

Prism ain’t got nothin’ on the Hemisphere Project.

The president’s public dithering on Syria is drawing jeers from friend and foe alike.

Some questions that the Administration needs to answer before attacking Syria.

Humanitarian wars have their own grammar but not their own logic.

Some Members of Congress are calling for a debate before any strikes on Syria. They’re absolutely right.

Persuasion is sometimes an important part of being president.

The White House confirmed today that the goal of any military intervention in Syria would be very limited. Which makes one wonder what the point of doing anything actually is.

There’s more than one way to look at the civil war in Syria.

John Kerry’s speech was the crossing of the Rubicon for US military action in Syria.

Western military action in the Syrian civil war now appears likely.

In both Egypt and Syria, it’s damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

As President Obama’s red line has been crossed more brazenly, he continues to sound reluctant to intervene in Syria while positioning forces to do just that.

Walter Russell Mead explains why a well intentioned, carefully crafted and consistently pursued grand strategy failed.

Reports of the death of the Voting Rights Act have been greatly exaggerated.

Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn is the latest conservative to endorse the foolish idea of a Constitutional Convention.

The Syrian regime may have used chemical weapons again, this time in an even larger and more deadly attack.

With more than a little hyperbole, George Will declares “Obama’s unconstitutional steps worse than Nixon’s.”

The Obama administration has issued a strongly worded statement on this morning’s massacre by the Egyptian government.

CNN reports that CIA is going to great lengths to keep operatives from talking about what happened at Benghazi.