Outside the Beltway

Is no one thinking about the end state?

An ominous sign for the majority party.

If you don’t collect the data, the problem disappears, right?

My latest publication.

In an op-ed in The Hill titled “Enviro elitists keep America unemployed,” Rick Manning of Americans for Limited Government argues that one factor behind the anemic jobs picture is the onerous regulatory environment.

Save water: Grow a beard.

You don’t often see a candidate for President tell Iowans that he wants to eliminate ethanol subsidies, but Tim Pawlenty did.

No, Ron Paul is not a viable candidate for president.

Ohio State researchers: ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs.

Are we safer in high population areas?

How much of public opinion is about tribal political identification and how much is about the actual policies themselves?

Why the United States has found itself in a seemingly endless series of wars over the past two decades.

The GOP seems to be losing the public relations battle over deficit reduction.

Keith Urbahn, chief of staff of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, broke the news.

The birthers are dead (kinda), so long live the transcripters!

Why are many of the top Republicans are sitting out the race despite a seemingly vulnerable incumbent?

While elite schools confer many advantages on their graduates, they also wall them off from normal people and create an entitled, out-of-touch elite.

America’s war colleges have some problems but we can’t close them.

What is Donald Trump up to? Only he seems to know for sure.

The GOP seems to be telling President Obama that revenue increases are off the table. That’s a huge mistake.

Two new polls show that the public supports the budget deal, but has no idea what to do to solve our long term problems.

The Japan nuclear meltdown has now topped the scale used to measure such things, reaching the same level as the Chernobyl disaster. It’s a stupid scale.

Should transparency stop at the water’s edge?

A photo suggesting oral sex on the cover of a student newspaper has generated controversy.

It has become quite apparent that neither the White House nor our coalition partners have any idea what the path to an endgame in Libya even looks like. That’s not good.

The Nixon Center has gone from one of the most controversially named think tanks in Washington to yet another blandly named one: Center for the National Interest.

We’ve been hearing about peak oil for years. But now some experts are warning of an even more serious crisis: Peak coffee.

Shirley Sherrod’s lawsuit against Andrew Brietbart promises to be an interesting test of the boundaries of defamation law in the political blogosphere.

Ezra Klein dubs the Federal government “an insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army.”

President Obama is telling business they have a social responsibility to invest in America. He’s wrong.

The events in Egypt have led some to ask if the mere act of cutting off access to the Internet is, in itself, an human rights violation.

Demanding that the new GOP House hold the line at the current number is satisfying rhetorically, but all-but-impossible politically.

NYT public editor Arthur Brisbane explains how it came to pass that his paper reported as fact the erroneous news that Gabrielle Giffords had been killed.

Rumors are floating that Rudy Giuliani is thinking about running for President again. All of America asks, Why?

Diplomacy means having to be nice.

Younger users are moving away from email as a way to communicate with others, and toward more instant forms of communication like text messaging and Twitter.

The Federal Communications Commission is using a statute from the 1930s to try to regulate the technology of the 21st Century. It’s a mistake.