Outside the Beltway

One of the most active American diplomats of the past twenty-five years has passed away.

A Federal Judge in Virginia has handed the first legal defeat to the President’s health care reform package.

Peter Orszag, President Obama’s first budget director, is headed to Citigroup and a multimillion dollar salary.

President Obama is already taking heat from the left for his compromise on tax cut extensions, but will it actually hurt him in the end?

The Obama administration is banning hundreds of thousands of federal employees from calling up the WikiLeaks site on government computers because the leaked material is still formally regarded as classified.

Sarah Palin has taken to her Facebook page to raise “Serious Questions about the Obama Administration’s Incompetence in the WikiLeaks Fiasco.” They’re more interesting than I’d expected.

The two English language newspapers who have been Julian Assange’s accomplices in disseminating stolen secrets defend themselves.

A new round of Wikileaks documents is out, and it opens the door on diplomatic correspondence previously hidden from the public.

Israelis and Palestinians don’t agree on much these days, but they do agree that Barack Obama hasn’t helped the peace process at all since coming to office.

North Korea has unveiled to the world a new nuclear processing facility that puts back on the table the question of just what we should, or can, do about the fact that a rogue state possesses nuclear weapons and wants to build more.

The finger-pointing about the global economy continues.

The first civilian trial of a Guantanamo detainee ends with the Defendant being acquitted on all but one charge, and shows us why the entire process is little more than a show trial.

Hamid Karazi says that the United States needs to reduce it’s military presence in his country. Perhaps we should listen to him.

Eliminating earmarks is good policy and good politics.

According to reports, the Obama Administration is set to abandon the July 2011 withdrawal deadline that was set earlier this year.

The race between Jeb Hensarling and Michelle Bachmann for Chair of the House GOP Conference is a microcosm for a battle that is likely to take place within the GOP for the next two years.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner held a private, off-the-record meeting in comedian Jon Stewart’s office back in April. Speculation abounds.

If the polling is anywhere close to accurate, a Republican wave will come crashing down today, repudiating the first two years of the Obama administration. What does it mean?

The younger voters that flocked to Barack Obama two years ago feel let down. They need to grow up.

If you’re looking for a reason why the GOP is likely to do very well tomorrow, voter response to the “right track/wrong track” question is a very good guide.

Pundits and partisans constantly overreact to the momentary mood expressed in a single election. The Republicans have already rebounded from 2008. The Democrats will recover from 2010.

215,000 people attended the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” compared to 87,000 for “Restoring Honor.” Even if you believe the numbers, they don’t tell us much.

It only seems fair to take an entire tweet, lengthy though it may be, into account when reacting.

Republicans are promising two years of gridlock and obstructionism if they take control of Congress, but is that really what the people who are likely to vote for them next week really want?

We already knew that Hamid Karzai was corrupt, now we know he takes bribes from the Iranians.

The biggest outside spender in 2010 isn’t the Chamber of Commerce but the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

Remember that $400 tax cut President Obama gave you? Neither do 90 percent of Americans.

Reason’s Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie have a pretty amusing rejoinder to the Obama administration’s attempts to smear the anonymous funding of television ads opposed to their agenda in a video titled “Who is Publius? or, Who’s Afraid of Anonymous Political Speech?”

Who’s to blame for the rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States, President Obama or those who have actually been encouraging bias against Muslims?

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates acknowledged in a newly released letter that the Wikileaks Afghan War document dump wasn’t as damaging as the Pentagon initially claimed. So what was the uproar all about?

California voters are two weeks away from possibly legalizing marijuana, but the Federal Government doesn’t care.

Only days after a Federal Court Judge issued an injunction preventing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy from being enforced, Obama Administration has asked for a stay and announced that it will be appealing the case.

A Federal Judge in Florida has handed a significant, albeit procedural, victory to the opponents of ObamaCare.

Desperate Democrats demonize donors, facts be damned.

More bad news for Democrats as a new poll shows that voters are more likely to consider them extreme than Republicans.

Will a Republican-controlled Congress bring about the third Presidential Impeachment in American history? Jonathan Chait thinks it’s virtually certain that it will, I’m not so sure.

A Federal Judge in California has struck another blow to the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Now, the ball is in President Obama’s court.

Greg Mankiw argues that, the more of his money the government takes, the less incentive he has to earn more. That’s debatable.