Outside the Beltway

If the polling is anywhere close to accurate, a Republican wave will come crashing down today, repudiating the first two years of the Obama administration. What does it mean?

Perhaps the dumbest study ever published in the Lancet compares the negative effects of alcohol and illicit drugs without controlling for incidence.

The younger voters that flocked to Barack Obama two years ago feel let down. They need to grow up.

If you’re looking for a reason why the GOP is likely to do very well tomorrow, voter response to the “right track/wrong track” question is a very good guide.

Too many copyright owners are stupidly invoking their rights to keep short clips off of YouTube and other services, losing potential customers in the process.

Ezra Klein argues that Sarah Palin’s Twitter account isn’t very popular. But that misses the point.

Isn’t that a strange goal? Shouldn’t college prepare students to have better lives later on?

Joe Biden’s statement last year that the Republicans taking back the House would be “the end of the road for what Barack and I are trying to do” proved to be an inducement, not a deterrent.

Thanks to a combination of good intelligence and fast action, it looks like the U.S. and UK avoided a serious attack on airliners last week.

Pundits and partisans constantly overreact to the momentary mood expressed in a single election. The Republicans have already rebounded from 2008. The Democrats will recover from 2010.

The GOP is headed for big gains on Tuesday. The only question now is how big they’re going to be.

A News Corporation donation to a group opposition a ballot initiative in California is casting doubt on the objectivity of reporting at Fox Business Channel

Unnamed Republican leaders are lined up to ensure that anybody but the former VP nominee is the party’s 2012 standard bearer.

Theodore Sorensen, a speechwriter and close adviser to President John F. Kennedy, died today at the age of 82

David Broder offers up some odd ideas on the relationship between a war with Iran and the economy.

National Republicans are reportedly abandoning Joe Miller’s Senate campaign at the last minute out of fear that only Lisa Murkowski can stop Alaska’s Senate seat from falling into Democratic hands. That could have a serious impact down the road for relations between inside-the-beltway Republicans and the Tea Party.

Neither Law Schools nor law students are admitting the fact that the legal market has changed significantly.

With polls opening in less than 48 hours now, the final pre-election polling is showing that 2010 is going to be a pretty bad year for Democrats.

The growing number of cell-phone-only households gives Democrats hope that the polls are undercounting them.

215,000 people attended the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” compared to 87,000 for “Restoring Honor.” Even if you believe the numbers, they don’t tell us much.

The Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear ended up having a point after all, but it’s not one that anyone is likely to take to heart.

Newt Gingrich for President ? You might want to think twice about that, Republicans.

What would the Nevada Senate race look like if “none of the above” could actually win?

It only seems fair to take an entire tweet, lengthy though it may be, into account when reacting.

The Onion spoofs life at a think tank with Boy, I Really Thought Like Shit Today.”

The guys at Gawker took the web yesterday in an effort to justify their sleazy article about Christine O’Donnell. They failed.

Jonah Goldberg has written a bad column. In this case, an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune headlined “Why is Assange still alive?”

Ivo Daalder, the US Ambassador to NATO, says that we are “seeing the corner and can peek around it in Afghanistan” and that a province-by-province handover of security responsibilities to the host government will “start in the first half of 2011.” But the final handover is not expected until “the end of 2014” and NATO forces will remain in an advisory capacity indefinitely. “The process will take years,” he emphasized.

Once again, Angela Merkel has held her ground and forced the other EU leaders to accommodate Germany’s policy concerns. This time, it’s a set of amendments to the Lisbon Treaty to deal with sovereign debt emergencies.

Another poll confirms that Sarah Palin continues to be viewed negatively by the majority of American voters, but that doesn’t seem to matter to supporters who seem have a degree of adulation usually reserved for celebrities than serious politicians.