Outside the Beltway

For years, American troops fought a ‘forever war’ to delay the inevitable. It’s now coming.

Critical race theory rears its ugly head yet again.

Yet more evidence that we’re a nation divided.

You know, some light weekend thoughts.

Well, nothing of course.

A veteran health reporter says the end is near. But there’s a huge caveat.

Even the smartest designers can’t anticipate all the flaws with the rules they write.

I think this underscores the problem with the 60-vote requirement.

Could this be the straw that broke the camel’s back?

A quick lesson about American parties.

Here we go again.

Huge swaths of the country are underserved.

The latest bogey man is likely not well understood.

The least controversial subject in school is suddenly controversial.

Republicans who admit Joe Biden won the election fair and square are being driven from the party.

Bill Clinton’s strategist thinks his party needs a wake-up call.

Another early COVID myth has been shattered.

More voice, more votes, more representation.

Are we thinking about job training all wrong?

Science, politics, and social norms intersect in some really strange ways.

Rogue cops, racial profiling, tainted cases, and the lack of consequences.

The semantic debate is obscuring the actual public policy issue.

There’s no voting in baseball.

We can all agree that it’s important but not what it is.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to improve the system.

The 6th Circuit is allowing a professor fired for misgendering a transwoman to sue his state university.

Competing analogies and externalities.

The Excelsior Pass is the nation’s first. Will it start a trend?

The lack of common understandings and shared assumptions makes political conversations challenging.

A mass shooting in Atlanta draws attention to a problem of which I was only tangentially aware.

Yet another example.

Also some ironic positions on capitalism.

Reacting to the asymmetrical polarization of the electorate.

Yet another reminder about pathologies of US democracy.

Debunking urban legends and Internet rumors is harder than it used to be.

Now, we’re just haggling over price.

There’s more than enough opinion journalism.

The disgraced loser remains as popular as ever with his base.

America’s institutions are undemocratic but only some of them are a product of the Constitution.

America’s Newspaper of Record needs to figure out what it wants to be.

Some reflections

Most Americans have never even heard of it.

Mitch McConnell is testing out his spine again.

It is not a tool to foster compromise. It is tool of obstruction, plain and simple.

Our two-party system distorts the representativeness of our politics.

The Republican Party is not really a thing.

The GOP, alas, is not going anywhere.

AOC v. MTG: one of these things is not like the other.

The aftermath of the January 6 Capitol riots runs into the First Amendment,