Outside the Beltway

What constitutes a true threat?

We need to have a serious debate on taxes and spending. And it would be nice if the debate was honest.

What if in 1861 a cable news network existed to broadcast the events of the day?

A bizarre legal case from Italy.

The Rapture has no biblical foundation and was made up by a 15-year-old girl in 1830.

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

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

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).

Francis Fukuyama: “In the developed world, we take the existence of government so much for granted that we sometimes forget how difficult it was to create.”

A version of a piece I wrote Wednesday, titled “NATO’s Death Greatly Exaggerated,” has finally been published at Foreign Policy under the title “Back in the Saddle: How Libya Helped NATO Get Its Groove Back.”

Donald Trump, who may or may not be running for President, is continuing his strange obsession with the birther myth, and reminding Republicans that two years of silence in the face of lunacy may come back to bite them.

The Libyan rebels probably aren’t strong enough to defeat Gaddafi on their own, and the no-fly zone isn’t going to be enough either. Which means this operation is going to be far more extensive than President Obama is willing to admit publicly.

The last chapter of nonfiction books is almost always lousy. Here’s why.

Speaking before Congress yesterday, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke debunked the assertion that the GOP’s relatively modest $61 billion spending cut package would significantly harm economic growth.

Republicans begin to discover that defeating an incumbent President isn’t an easy task.

For many Ph.Ds, the Ed.D. represents the ticket to the administrative high life, the white flag to academic scholarship, and the tramp stamp of the compromising careerist.

Honest pundits will tell you that it’s simply too early to make useful predictions about the 2012 elections.

Despite recurring predictions that the Internet and mass communications would allow people to work from anywhere, talent continues to cluster in big cities.

The growing number of cell-phone-only households gives Democrats hope that the polls are undercounting them.

We’ve been talking about the 2010 elections since, oh, the day after the 2008 elections.   Now, it’s time for final predictions.

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?

A new projection of Congressional reapportionment shows a dramatic shift to traditionally Republican states in the South and Southwest.

After several years in the wilderness, Dick Morris has returned as a Fox News analyst and, bizarrely, adviser to several Republican candidates for Congress.

While it will be difficult, the idea that Lisa Murkowski could win a write-in bid to retain her Senate seat is not at all implausible.

Google will now display and adjust search results as you type. This should be a boon to searchers and a terror to website operators, who live at the mercy of Google.

Fareed Zakaria argues that the fact al Qaeda has not launched a major attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 proves we overreacted to those attacks. I beg to differ.

Another political analyst is out with a 2010 prediction that should make Democrats very nervous.

The poll numbers look grim for the President, but it’s still far too early to be making predictions about the 2012 elections.

The Democrats are pulling a trick from the Reagan playbook for the fall campaign. They might want to rethink that.

Vice-President Biden glances into the future and sees a relatively good year for Democrats. Is he right ?

San Francisco’s ban on sugary drinks is the latest example of nanny state reductio creep.