Outside the Beltway

Mitt Romney told a group of unemployed Florida voters that he was unemployed, too! It’s being touted as a gaffe on Twitter but appears to be a joke.

Our long national nightmare is nearly over.

The ISI appears to have shown a special interest in informants that helped the CIA find bin Laden.

DC is once again resetting the clock on its universe and starting all its books over with issue #1.

Where’s the line when a public figure interacts with a teenage fan?

A quick glance provides some insights into Palin’s thought processes and leadership style.

The American public is increasingly skeptical of foreign adventurism. Why aren’t our political candidates reflecting that?

Anthony Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, is several weeks pregnant and desperately trying to salvage their marriage and his career.

In a decision released yesterday. the New Jersey Supreme Court clarified the journalist/blogger distinction somewhat.

Beck heads to the internet.

Never popular with his colleagues, Anthony Weiner may now be the least liked Member.

Austan Goolsbee is resigning as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors to return to the University of Chicago.

Is Peter Diamond qualified to be a Fed governor?

James Arness, best known as the iconic Marshal Dillon on Gunsmoke, has died at 88.

Palin and the press are in mutual love, despite protestations to the contrary.

America’s physicians are becoming more liberal in response to changing working conditions.

Across the country, Republicans are pushing laws that will make voting harder.

It’s hard to get paid for work others will do for nothing.

Glenn Greenwald asks two questions about the cases of Osama bin Laden and Ratko Mladic. Helpfully, the second answers the first.

A profile of George Mason economist and blogger Tyler Cowen offers this amusing description: “Cowen, 49, has round features, a hesitant posture, and an unconcerned haircut.”

It’s just one Congressional District out of 435, but that won’t stop everyone from trying to turn the results in NY-26 into a national referendum on Medicare reform.

Prisons can be so overcrowded as to constitute cruel and inhuman punishment.

Frank R. Lindh, father of Abu Sulayman al-Irlandi (aka Sulayman al-Faris, Abdul Hamid, and John Walker Lindh) has an op-ed in the NYT asking “Bin Laden’s Gone. Can My Son Come Home?” The answer is, sure: In another 8 to 11 years.

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

Bowing to the inevitable, Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned overnight as head of the IMF amidst high-level calls for his ouster in wake of a rape scandal.

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

When one realizes that Trump is basically a brand, rather than anything else, his PR foray into politics makes more sense.

Senate fails to revoke tax cuts for big oil.

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.

Can one effectively run for the presidency if one’s spouse doesn’t want to be in the spotlight?

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.)

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

The defense of torture as an extreme measure for extraordinary circumstances has evolved.tortu

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.