Outside the Beltway

Did the GOP toss social conservatives under the bus when it gave away the Planned Parenthood rider?

As yesterday’s budget negotiations began, the GOP had a choice – appease the base, or make a deal. They made the right choice.

A government shutdown is not just a hypothetical in a debating contest. It will affect real people.

There are still three days left, but it’s looking less and less likely that a budget deal will be reached in time to avoid a government shutdown.

Can a candidate appealing enough to the base to win the Republican nomination beat Obama?

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.

The next week promises to be a battle between John Boehner and the Tea Party over whether or not compromise is a good idea.

Nor, it would seem, are really tired clichés.

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.

They say anyone can grow up to be president. Michele Bachmann is apparently taking them at their word.

The antiwar movement has been strangely silent despite the fact that U.S. foreign policy hasn’t really changed that much since Barack Obama became President.

With minor exceptions, all of the potential candidates for the GOP nomination in 2012 seem to have accepted the idea that defense spending, and the Bush-era interventionist foreign policy, are off the table when it comes time to talk spending cuts.

Regardless of one’s preferences in terms of endgame in Wisconsin, democracy will win out.

Glenn Beck’s own website discovers some interesting, and ethically disturbing, editing in the latest round of video’s from “ACORN Pimp”James O’Keefe.

Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is beginning to more like a real candidate for President. She won’t win, but she will be entertaining.

Mitt Romney starts his 2012 run as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. But, in reinventing himself yet again, the “authenticity” issue that troubled many of us in 2008 looms again.

Republicans are about to take a walk along the third-rail of American politics.

More evidence of what we already knew: the public isn’t especially interested in cutting entitlements.

The Moral High Ground Edition OTB Caption Contest^TM is now over.

Scott Walker’s attempt to crush the Wisconsin public employee unions may be the first wave in a fight to elect Republican governors in 2012.

Opposition to marriage equality is no longer the wedge issue it used to be.

Is Jon Stewart a useful idiot?

Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown was a Tea Party darling when he picked up Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat last year, but he’s not embracing the movement as he prepares to run for re-election next year.

Thanks to the help of a group of Tea Party Freshman in the House. Congress has finally cut off funding for a second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that the Pentagon never wanted.