Outside the Beltway

Tim Pawlenty may face trouble from a pardon he issued while he was Governor of Minnesota.

Mike Huckabee’s decision not to run has shaken up the GOP field for 2012.

Romney wants to make a federalism based argument for why his MA health care bill is good, while the PPACA is tyrannical. However, just saying that is not an argument.

Mitt Romney began his effort to confront what is likely to be his biggest political liability in the 2012 campaign.

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

A study shows that most national columnists and talking heads are about as accurate as a coin flip.

Obama’s main politics are hardly as leftist as many make them out to be. Indeed, much of them could have fit well in the the GOP of 1990s and early 2000s.

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

President Obama is suffering in the polls because of high gas prices, but is there really anything he can do about them?

President Obama is vulnerable, but he’s facing a GOP field that is underwhelming even for Republicans.

Donald Trump figures that, because he’s rich, he’s qualified to be president.

Donald Trump has been surging in polls of Republican voters recently, but that doesn’t mean much of anything.

Michele Bachmann raised more money in the First Quarter of 2011 than any other Republican. Which means that she’ll have to be taken seriously if she decides to run for President.

The race for the 2012 Republican nomination is missing the one thing that GOP nomination battles have almost always had, a frontrunner.

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is the latest Republican to reject the idea that America is a secular nation.

The Obama Administration is asking the U.N. Security Council to authorize direct military intervention in Libya. The question is, why now?

Republicans are starting to sour on Sarah Palin, meaning that they’re finally starting to catch up to the rest of the country.

John Kerry’s Washington Post op-ed supports U. S. leadership in establishing a no-fly zone in Libya.

All of the plausible Republican contenders for 2012 have significant downsides.

Mitt Romney starts his 2012 run as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. But, in reinventing himself yet again, the “authenticity” issue that troubled many of us in 2008 looms again.

Democrats won’t say if they consider Mitt Romney a threat, but they’re sure acting like they do.

The fight over Federal funding for Planned Parenthood seems to be about much more than whether taxpayer dollars should be going to Planned Parenthood.

Opposition to marriage equality is no longer the wedge issue it used to be.

A new set of polls from Gallup show that President Obama is still looking good for re-election.

Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown was a Tea Party darling when he picked up Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat last year, but he’s not embracing the movement as he prepares to run for re-election next year.

Facebook has come up with new settings to meet the needs of users in same-sex relationships.

Thanks to the help of a group of Tea Party Freshman in the House. Congress has finally cut off funding for a second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that the Pentagon never wanted.

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

Ron Paul has won the CPAC straw poll for a second straight year. But YAF has voted him off its board over his opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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.

The home mortgage interest deduction benefits Democrat-voting states most! Is the fix in?

It’s straw poll season already. First up, New Hampshire where things turned out about how you’d expect them to considering Mitt Romney lives there now.