Outside the Beltway

Colombia’s President said the wrong thing and had his visa revoked.

Blowing up boats because they might have drugs on them is not justifiable, legally or morally.

Serious abuses of power alongside an almost cartoonish set of behaviors.

What democratic backsliding looks like.

Twenty-Second Amendment edition.

A sad fact about the quality of American leadership and an indictment of Christians who ardently support it.

Sounds to me like he admitted to taking the bag of cash.

Escalations of threats against the press.

Our current round of speech repression may prove worse than McCarthyism.

Allegations of shutting down an investigation.

Restricting those who report on the Pentagon.

An attempt to connect higher education and political violence.

Data? How quaint.

As well as the politics that have followed.

The FCC Chair went on a podcast and now Kimmel is on indefinite hiatus.

Naturalized citizens advance and vivify the American experiment. 

An illustration from the Charlie Kirk discourse as to why stories like the TAMU firing matter.

On politics, guns, and people killing people

To be fully human requires living with and in sometimes unresolvable contradictions

And let’s look at the catalog, shall we?

A student, her cell phone, and yet more authoritarianism in contemporary America.

Air Force honors for Ashli Babbitt.

Sand in the sheets of civil society.

It is unusual and a problem.

Who needs due process when you have drones?

Don’t confuse them with the ice cream man.

Secretary Noem strikes again.

Town hall meetings are a relic of a different age.

Wildly unpopular policies in hyperpolarized times.

Following the Dear Leader.

The gradual population shift from blue states to red continues.

The disconnect between perception and reality about elections.

None of this is good for the quality of our democracy (not that it was great to begin with).

And threatening states.

And other tales of subverting knowledge and expertise on the altar of a preferred mythic narrative.

Elections, the states, and the presidency edition.

A strange obsession.

A heavy-handed move.

“Influencer” Benny Johnson wants to bulldoze certain neighborhoods in DC.

The Kennedy Center “Honors” get a Trumpian makeover.

A review of museums.

This is all for show.

Authoritarian instructions from Trump.

We are observing an effort to embed democratically questionable sectarian norms into the day-to-day life of federal workplaces. 

Thinking about the evolution (or is it devolution) of the GOP since the 1990s.

A window into White Christian Nationalism (as endorsed by Pete Hegseth!).

Are Red and Blue states even part of the same country anymore?