Outside the Beltway

My (apparently) annual reflections on “The content of their character” day

We charge patients way more than other counties.

Washington has imposed a contract that workers rejected.

Would bypassing politicians altogether make the system more just?

An impasse over schedule flexibility could have widespread impact.

What’s being billed as the largest hike in years is anything but.

Is it time to call the whole thing off?

The symbolic vote attracted a handful of Republican votes.

How long can the unsustainable be sustained?

Half a century have passed since a botched burglary changed history.

Are we too regulated for our own good?

A diplomatic nightmare brewing since last week is now upon us.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

A too-small step in the right direction.

The pandemic seems to have broken the social contract.

It’s not compelling.

The equivalent of Pennsylvania’s entire labor force is sitting on the sidelines.

Doing nothing is still a choice, and the legitimacy crisis is here, like it or not.

We’re an incredibly divided country but splitting it into two is impossible.

President Trump’s destruction of longstanding norms continues under his successor.

The new CDC guidelines raise some serious questions.

The reaction to the pandemic has long since been about much more than the pandemic.

Look at who’s lined up against H.R. 1.

The Free State may have gotten just a little freer.

An interesting but uneven debate.

The politics and the science are in conflict.

Multiple indicators point to a decline in the representativeness of the American system.

The evidence is too clear to ignore at this point.

Policy wonks are seeing a refreshing return to the normal order. Some believe that’s a bad thing.

Thinking about unsupported narratives and a little bit about data usage.

When an apolitical process gets politicized.

A world in which we’re all contractors is a dystopian utopia.

The lousy hybrid option has been scrapped in favor of a worthless virtual one.

“Lift Every Voice and Sing” will reportedly precede the “Star-Spangled Banner” in the opening week.

Contra the CDC, the AAP says getting kids to class outweighs the modest risk of their catching COVID-19.

The Commonwealth is the first state in the nation to issue regulations.

The system makes it next to impossible to punish bad cops.

How to translate understandable frustration at injustice into tangible reform?

Until our kids go back to school, we can’t go back to work.

The bad news keeps on coming.

A disgraced governor is signing a wave of progressive legislation

It’s a reasonable question but not the right one.

Money has increasingly dominated American politics but the court case had little to do with it.

Paul Volcker, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board who put an end to the rampant inflation that threatened to choke the American economy, has died at 92.

In what many are seeing as a rebuke of the President, Louisiana voters re-elected Democratic incumbent John Bel Edwards over his Republican opponent.

A familiar name has entered the race for the Democratic Senate nomination in Massachusetts.

More than five years after the fact, the NYPD officer who applied an illegal chokehold that resulted in the death of Eric Garner has finally been fired.