Outside the Beltway

Either a bunch of bloggers or one of the world’s smartest economists doesn’t understand economics.

When one adopts a one-word pseudo-elfin name, one might expect a spot of trouble

Senator Al Franken called Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery a liar in yesterday’s hearing on DOMA. Franken was the one being dishonest.

Even if Casey Anthony had been convicted, there’s a good chance she would have won on appeal.

A space shuttle lifted off for the last time on Friday, and some people seem to think its the beginning of the end of America.

Microsoft is making millions from Android phones, despite having nothing to do with designing, marketing, manufacturing, or distributing them.

A retiree with some rather strange views hosted a Tim Pawlenty event.

Michele Bachmann is not Sarah Palin.

A new study shows that college students who take late classes drink more alcohol.

Pawlenty proposes the “Google test.”

If there’s anything all sides should be able to agree on after several days of back-and-forth is that most of us didn’t really know the story.

Do Republicans like Herman Cain because he’s black?

Has technology robbed us of more than it’s given in return?

A Texas high school student who was kicked off her high school’s cheerleading squad after refusing to cheer for her rapist had her lawsuit dismissed as frivolous and was ordered to pay $45,000 in legal fees.

Local newspapers in Belgium inexplicably don’t want to be linked by Google and are using copyright law rather than a robots.txt file to enforce their wishes.

Apple isn’t the only company collecting data off their smartphones.

Andrew Bacevich refers to Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power as “the Three Harpies.”

Agency heads are pleading President Obama’s case in advance of a shutdown.

Video entertainment is moving in two seemingly opposite directions simultaneously.

Philip Greenspun wonders, “How did the New York Times manage to spend $40 million on its pay wall?”

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.

In less than two weeks, much of the content of The New York Times will go behind a paywall.

Archaeologists may have found the lost city of Atlantis. And, no, not the one in the Bahamas.

Facebook limits accounts to those who say that they are at least 13 years old. Shockingly, some kids lie to get on the popular social network.

Google erects some much-needed defenses in the optimization arms race.

Did a unit in Afghanistan engage in an IO operation against U. S. senators?

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker did not campaign on the union-busting package he’s proposing now.

Should employers be allowed to ask for your Facebook login as a condition of employment?

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

Beck is now concerned about Google.

Rick Santorum is upset that a Google search for his name produces a string of unflattering material. You should be, too.

For many Ph.Ds, the Ed.D. represents the ticket to the administrative high life, the white flag to academic scholarship, and the tramp stamp of the compromising careerist.

The next-generation iPhone 5 is rumored to have a 4 inch screen and even a slide-out keypad.

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

JCPenney used black hat SEO to game Google. But Google’s penalties are arguably just as bad. And what about HuffPo?