Outside the Beltway

Has Uncle Sam got a deal for you: Lend the Treasury money for five years and it will only cost you negative 0.55 percent!

Political columnist John Heilemann thinks he’s come up with a scenario that would put Sarah Palin in the White House, but his assumptions don’t add up.

Charles Murray argues that the Tea Party is right to complain about out-of-touch elites.

A call for ideological purity in the Democratic Party in today’s New York Times demonstrates that Democrats can be just as foolish as Republicans.

In what is being described as the largest leak of secret documents in U.S. history, Wikileaks has made public more than 400,000 documents related to the seven year long Iraq War.

While the displacement of poor blacks from their neighborhoods by affluent whites may be lamentable, it’s better than the alternatives.

President Obama is reportedly avoiding a visit to India’s Harmandir Sahib, or Golden Temple, for fear that he’ll be accused of being a Muslim.

Recklessness.

Nineteen years after they ended, the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings are back in the news thanks to a voicemail that Thomas’s wife left for Professor Hill.

Remember that $400 tax cut President Obama gave you? Neither do 90 percent of Americans.

Politico says 99 Democratic House seats are “in play.” They’re not. But dozens are.

Who’s to blame for the rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States, President Obama or those who have actually been encouraging bias against Muslims?

Justice Alito said recently he won’t be attending the next State of the Union address. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates acknowledged in a newly released letter that the Wikileaks Afghan War document dump wasn’t as damaging as the Pentagon initially claimed. So what was the uproar all about?

A new law allows Presidential candidates to set up transition offices while they’re still running for election, perhaps providing an opportunity for shortening the 2 1/2 month interregnum between Election Day and Inauguration Day.

Jim Treacher has coined a new term, Oprahturfing, to describe wealthy celebrities funding attendance at political rallies. While clever, the concept of “Astroturfing” is being misused by both sides.

Politicians are, by definition, a bit abnormal. However, this year we seem to have more than our fair share of the truly odd.

A group of conservative activists is planning a last minute ad blitz that could help put several Republican challengers over the top.

Republicans are suddenly targeting — and Democrats in some cases are conceding — House seats that were until recently considered out of play.

If everything you know about Islam comes from Pam Geller and Christianity from Christopher Hitchens, you’re doing yourself a grave disservice.

More on Greg Mankiw’s thought experiment on taxes and incentives to work.

For a guy who has no chance of winning, Carl Paladino certainly knows how to get himself press coverage.

Are we facing a Sharia take-over?

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Virginia is under scrutiny ? Why ? Because she has a job.

InstaPaper’s business model is stealing content created by others, stripping it of the ads that pay the creators, and running their own advertising on it.

Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo has won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. He probably doesn’t know it, though, because he’s currently sitting in a Chinese prison.

New Jersey’s governor has killed a vital infrastructure project because of huge cost overruns. It’s penny wise and pound foolish.

MSNBC.com is contemplating a name change to distinguish their brand from that of a left-leaning cable news channel.

More numbers for campaign 2010–in this case, ones that show the maintenance of the status quo in several states.

Responding to the rant that got Rick Sanchez fired, Slate’s Brian Palmer investigates the question, “Do Jews Really Control the Media?” His short answer, “Maybe the movies, but not the news.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger predicts President Obama’s re-election. Historically, that’s the safe bet.

Three lives intersected last week at Rutgers University, but one person didn’t make it out alive.

More than ever before in the past, Fox News Channel will be the exclusive medium through which many of the candidates for the 2012 Republican nomination communicate with the public. And that’s a problem.

A new projection of Congressional reapportionment shows a dramatic shift to traditionally Republican states in the South and Southwest.

A Vanity Fair piece imagines what John Lennon’s life would have been like had he survived an assassin’s bullet.

Dan Drezner asks, “Has Bob Woodward jumped the shark?” My snarky response is that he did that in Bob Casey’s hospital room.