Outside the Beltway

President Obama doubled down in his speech before this year’s AIPAC conference. Why he did so only he understands.

We’ve reached a turning point in the debate over same-sex marriage.

A judge granted Dominique Strauss-Kahn bail on Thursday, allowing the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund to be freed from Rikers Island to stay in a Manhattan apartment while his sexual assault case is pending.

Wall Street says raise the debt ceiling. The Tea Party says no. What will the GOP do?

Ben Stein seems to have been out to lunch when he wrote his column about Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Some French politicians and intellectuals seem offended that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is being treated like a common criminal.

You know those creepy running shoes that look like fluorescent feet? They’re going mainstream.

Foreign Policy’s David Kenner has a reading list for President Obama to help him get read for his big speech to recast our relationship with the Arab world. Topping the Persian Gulf section is Crossroads Arabia, by our own John Burgess.

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.

So, what’s up with Donald Trump’s bizarre hairdo? He insists it’s not a comb-over.

An item in the Extra Bases baseball notebook last Sunday misidentified, in some editions, the origin of the name Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver, which Mets pitcher R. A. Dickey gave one of his bats. Orcrist was not, as Dickey had said, the name of the sword used by Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains in “The Hobbit”; Orcrist was the sword used by the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the book. (Bilbo Baggins’s sword was called Sting.)

Hockey star Sean Avery’s recent statements supporting gay marriage has drawn fire from an unlikely source: His agent.

Boehner wants some pretty big cuts in exchange for a vote on raising the debt ceiling.

One U.S. Senator wants to bring elements of the TSA’s security theater to America’s rail system.

There’s not much movement in the President’s job approval numbers.

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

Three years later, there are no signs that the real estate market is anywhere close to recovering.

The free market in action.

Go the Fuck To Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing off to dreamland.

The NYT says it’s time for U. S. advisers and military air traffic controllers on the ground in Libya.

Terry Jones may sue the City of Dearborn for its prior restraint actions against him. And he should.

The new CBS/NYT poll is out and the numbers are not exactly happy, no matter whom you support.

A survey of three studies demonstrates consistently that exposure to certain pesticides used in farming diminishes mental development.

It is waaay too early to be putting much stock in polling for 2012 (either in terms of X v. Obama or GOP v. GOP).

On Palm Sunday, French Christians stormed a museum and slashed Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ