Outside the Beltway

Bristol Palin was paid $262,500 by Candies Foundation as an anti-teen pregnancy spokesman. That’s 7 times what they spent on teen pregnancy prevention.

The American people have no idea what’s really in the Federal Budget, which makes any discussion about what to cut virtually impossible.

Amnesty International is drawing attention to capital punishment in the United States, with bad math and a credulous media on its side.

Evolution is falsifiable and biology is a science. Economics might be.

While complaints that there’s too much information for intellectuals to sort through, much less read, are constant, they’re not new. Harvard historian Ann Blair argues in her new book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age that this stress goes back at least to Seneca’s time.

Add this to the list of things for parents to worry about: Car safety seats for children over 65 pounds are not adequately tested.

Automated programs are getting very good at poker and are winning large sums on online gambling sites.

An offhand comment in my post “Obama Killed Cap’n Crunch” sparked inquiries about the fate of the General Mills line of cereals featuring monster characters.

Cap’n Crunch is going the way of Joe Camel.

We’re heading towards a future of higher food prices and more hunger.

The top ranks of the military are whiter and decidedly more male than the country as a whole. Should that change?

PP’s intensive effort to recast itself as a preventer of abortions doesn’t bear scrutiny.

Sometimes the most sensible result can be the hardest to reach. This isn’t one of those times.

Whites make more money than non-whites throughout our food distribution system.

Should public schoolteachers make more money than the people paying their salaries?

We can’t rely on private companies, the stock market, or the taxpayers to maintain our lifestyle in our golden years.

Florida has again scheduled its primary ahead of the deadlines set by the Republican and Democratic parties.

IBM’s Watson computer crushed human competitors on Jeopardy. What does it mean?

Being unemployed, especially in the long term, makes it less likely to get hired.

A new poll finds that Republican policies on immigration are chasing Latino voters straight into the arms of the Democratic Party.

Newt Gingrich is very popular among young conservatives. But two ugly divorces will keep him from being a contender for the presidency.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 could be a Google killer. It could also kill the Web as we know it.

Is the Chinese economy headed for a correction?

The Obama administration’s investigation into Toyota safety problems has found no electronic flaws to account for reports of sudden, unintentional acceleration and other safety problems.

A new Wikileaks revelation indicates that the U.S. may have paid a heavy price to get a deal on New START.

The January jobs report is, in a word, disappointing.

European subsidies have given Airbus a competitive advantage over America’s Boeing in commercial aircraft salesboein. The reverse is true on military aircraft.

Glenn Beck seems to have more in common with End Time preachers than he does with a serious political analyst.

Breaking news from CNN.

A new study suggests college students aren’t learning the critical thinking skills they’re supposed to learn, but that isn’t necessary the fault of the university they’re attending.

Despite anecdotal evidence debunking global warming, 2010 was another record year for warm temperatures.

Defying logic, New York City taxis are least available when they’re most needed: as people are getting off work.

We’re producing more PhDs and JDs than there are full time openings for professors and lawyers.

Honest pundits will tell you that it’s simply too early to make useful predictions about the 2012 elections.

The cost/benefit ratio of tablet computers seems to be a bit…. lacking.

A Michigan man faces five years in prison for reading his wife’s email.