Outside the Beltway

The Confederate battle flag is suddenly toxic.

Well, that didn’t take long.

Taylor Swift is taking a stand against Apple’s new streaming music service, and she’s largely right.

Surely it’s time to put a woman on American currency again, but why go after Alexander Hamilton?

Marijuana is legal in Colorado, but it’s illegal under Federal Law. Because of that, the Colorado Supreme Court dismissed a claim by resident who was fired when he tested positive for pot.

House Democrats defied President Obama on an important trade deal today, thus arguably marking the official beginning of his lame duck status.

We have unreasonable expectations for airlines.

Dave Schuler proposes a “radical idea” to safeguard individual privacy “in the wake of the hacking of Sony and the multiple credit card exploits over the last year or so.”

Most Americans think that income inequality is a problem, but they don’t all agree on what to do about it.

It’s getting easier and easier to cut the cord.

Billionaire wunderkind Elon Musk has had a lot of help from taxpayers.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Muslim woman who was refused a job because of her hijab.

The economy contracted in the first quarter of 2015, and that suggests the rest of the year isn’t going to be very good either.

A minimum wage for thee, but not for me.

Several of the top representatives of soccer’s governing body have been indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in New York.

Los Angeles became the latest major city to increase its minimum wage. It’s a risky bet that is likely to do more harm than good.

A New Jersey legislator is proposing finally getting rid of an antiquated law that makes it illegal to pump your own gas in the Garden State.

There’s a better way to finance news than hiding it behind paywalls.

What if this is the new normal?

If a new campaign succeeds, Harriet Tubman could replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.

Congressman Darrell Issa says that America’s poor are generally better off than the poor in the rest of the world. While he’s correct, he’s also incredibly tone deaf.

Economic growth slowed significantly in the first three months of 2015, but it’s not clear what that means going forward.

The N.F.L.’s league office is giving up its tax exempt status, but that means far less than the headline implies.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is now appealing to the worst aspects of economic populism on the right.

“Chewie, we’re rich.”

The scandal that will make everyone forget about Benghazi.

One Missouri legislator is going on a crusade against a “problem” that may not actually exist.

The US economy added 126,000 jobs, much less than the guess of 244,000.

A tale of Kafkaesque torture by Comcast Customer Service reveals that the person who really made the mistakes here was the homeowner.

February’s jobs report came in stronger than analysts expected, but wage growth remains stubbornly stagnant.

As expected, President Obama has vetoed the bill that would have authorized the Keystone XL Pipeline.

The January Jobs Report showed that the trend of strong jobs growth we saw in 2014 appears to be continuing into the new year.

While the issue of income inequality is quite real, Oxfam’s numbers are not.

President Obama’s decision on Keystone XL is apparently to delay things long enough so he doesn’t have to decide at all.

Just one day into the new Congress, the first confrontation is already set.

JetBlu is joining the competition in charging bag fees and cramming in more seats.

Reversing a previous decision, Sony will allow The Interview to be screened in a small number of theaters.

The Commerce Department had a Christmas present for investors, businesses, and consumers today.

Talk about your second- and third-order effects.

President Obama criticized Sony for backing down, and said that the U.S. would respond to North Korea’s cyber attack “at a place and time we choose,”

With major theater chains having pulled out, Sony bowed to the inevitable, but now there appears to be proof that a foreign power is behind the Sony hacking attacks and threats of violence.

For a year that started out with regaining long-lost territory in Ukraine, 2014 is not ending so well for Vladimir Putin’s Russia.