Outside the Beltway

It’s Campaign Fact of Life No. 1: If you aren’t a factor in the race, you aren’t going to get free media.

Thanks to an appearance on Hardball we’ve got another story about a 47 year old law.

Mitt Romney began his effort to confront what is likely to be his biggest political liability in the 2012 campaign.

Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who will enter the Presidential race tomorrow, says he wouldn’t have tried to have Osama bin Laden killed.

David Brooks declares Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, and Jon Huntsman the only serious candidates for the Republican nomination.

Last night’s Presidential Debate in South Carolina was interesting, but, in the end, not very important.

For the first time, Donald Trump is leading a poll for the GOP 2012 nomination. That’s bad news for the GOP.

Donald Trump has been surging in polls of Republican voters recently, but that doesn’t mean much of anything.

House Republicans engaged in a publicity stunt on Friday that displayed a profound misunderstanding of how government actually works in the United States.

Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson is running for president.

The race for the 2012 Republican nomination is missing the one thing that GOP nomination battles have almost always had, a frontrunner.

So far, the Republican House’s effort to cut back Federal spending isn’t very impressive.

The social conservatives seems to have won the battle over CPAC.

President Obama isn’t unbeatable in 2012. but it’s clear even now that he’s going to be a far more formidable opponent than many Republicans seem to think.

Four years after Barack Obama became a Presidential candidate, the birther myth not only persists, it seems to be becoming more prevalent. Why?

The 2012 GOP nominee will have to raise $300 million and assemble a top-notch staff.

Ron Paul has won the CPAC straw poll for a second straight year. But YAF has voted him off its board over his opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The new Chairman of the American Conservative Union seems to want to mend fences with social conservatives, even if that means throwing new friends under the bus.

The media are wildly exaggerating the heckling at a gathering of conservatives.

Donald Trump sounds like a man running for president.

Ron Paul is poised to win the CPAC Straw Poll. So what?

On the eve of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, another shot has been fired by those boycotting the meeting due to the presence of a gay conservative group.

While most Americans consider themselves “conservatives,” some conservatives exclude most Americans from the definition.

It’s straw poll season already. First up, New Hampshire where things turned out about how you’d expect them to considering Mitt Romney lives there now.

Once again, the frontrunners for the 2012 GOP nomination aren’t looking very good at all.

By this point in the last presidential cycle, there were already 14 major party candidates who had publicly announced. There are zero today.

Was John McCain’s place of birth as big an issue to the fringe left as Obama’s has been (and continues to be) to the fringe right?

What will Republicans think of a candidate for President who admitted to smoking marijuana as recently as two years ago?

Ron Paul has introduced a law (the “American Traveler Dignity Act”) that would punish TSA agents for groping and x-raying Americans.

He’s the darkest of dark horses right now, but Gary Johnson stands as the heir apparent to Ron Paul’s surprisingly energetic 2008 run for the GOP nomination.

Despite votes in the 2010 contest still being counted, polls for 2012 are already pouring out. They’re largely meaningless.

The Federal Reserve is injecting $ 600,000,000,000 into the economy, primarily in the hope that it will boost stock prices and, in turn, the economy. It might work, but if it doesn’t the consequences could be severe.

Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson To Launch Presidential Bid In February?