Outside the Beltway

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

With minor exceptions, all of the potential candidates for the GOP nomination in 2012 seem to have accepted the idea that defense spending, and the Bush-era interventionist foreign policy, are off the table when it comes time to talk spending cuts.

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum thinks we’ve been too hard on the Crusaders.

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

Florida has again scheduled its primary ahead of the deadlines set by the Republican and Democratic parties.

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

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.

Taking a dive into Mark Levin’s view of Federalism.

The Pittsburg Steelers and the Green Bay Packers are the 2nd and 5th most popular teams in the NFL. The Dallas Cowboys are number one and the St. Louis Rams bring up the rear at 32.

As the night of the State Of The Union Address approaches, the silliness in Washington has been taken up a notch.

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.

The debate over heated political rhetoric has now led one Pennsylvania Congressman to suggest that some speech should be banned. This must stop now.

President Obama’s selection of Bill Daley as Chief of Staff is being seen as a sign that the White House is moving to the center and gearing up for 2012.

Anti-Immigrant groups are beginning their assault on the 14th Amendment, but don’t expect it to go anywhere.

The author of AZ’s SB1070 has a new idea.

Freshman Members of Congress are threatening to block a vote to raise the debt ceiling that Congress will have to take by this Spring. They’d be irresponsible if they did so.

Constitutional ambiguity is as old as, well, it’s as old as the Constitution itself

The National Football League’s decision to postpone last night’s Eagles-Vikings game due to weather is receiving a lot of criticism, but they made the right choice.

The Presidency has lost the aura of mystique that used to surround it, and that’s a good thing.

Red States should gain 10 seats while Blue States should lose eight.

Is Sarah Palin really against child nutrition? Or just taking cheap shots at Michelle Obama?

The repeal of DADT may open the doors for ROTC to return to many elite institutions, if cost doesn’t get in the way.

The hunters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and West Virginia alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

Unless there’s an emergency, is it proper for representatives who have been defeated in a mid-term election to be voting on controversial legislation?

Maine’s Olympia Snowe appears to be the next target of the Tea Party movement, but she is also uniquely situated to retain her seat if she chooses to.

This is a strange disconnect between Sarah Palin’s popularity within the Republican Party and her popularity with the nation as a whole. One wonders if the GOP notices, or cares.

Taxpayer “watchdog” groups are urging House Republicans to cut Congressional pay as an act of symbolism. It’s symbolism all right, pointless symbolism.

Last night’s election results stand as a mixed verdict on the Tea party and its impact on the Republican Party.

The enthusiasm for Tea Party candidates likely helped the House Republican wave. But it also likely cost the GOP four Senate seats that it would otherwise have won — and thus the majority.

Reports of voting irregularity in precincts across the country are threatening to further undermine voter confidence in the legitimacy of election outcomes. There’s a simple solution.

The numbers coming out of the first few weeks of early voting confirms the enthusiasm gap that pollsters have been talking about for months.

Voters head to the polls in thirteen days, and current indications are that they’ll be handing a big victory to the Republican Party.

It’s looking less and less likely that the GOP will gain control of the Senate, but they’re going to come awfully close,, and that might be just as good from their point of view.

The coalition of voters that propelled Barack Obama to an historic victory in 2008 is seemingly falling apart, and the President is reacting by blaming the voters.

Polls show the Republicans easily retaking the House but falling short in the Senate. But 2006 showed us that wave elections can produce shocking outcomes.

More bad news for Democrats as a new poll shows that voters are more likely to consider them extreme than Republicans.