Outside the Beltway

Where should we look to understand the failings of the government?

Judging them by their own manifesto, the Occupy Wall Street protesters are pretty silly people.

Giving the President the unchecked power to kill American citizens raises some serious red flags.

College students finally seem to be listening to the market.

The last two GOP debates have featured cheers from the crowd and responses from candidates that ought to be considered problematic.

Dick Cheney’s long-awaited book’s out and he promises lots of bombshells that will have heads exploding in DC.

Will the trial of Hosni Mubarak actually change anything?

Danger Room’s Spencer Ackerman reports on an alleged secret CIA interrogation facility somewhere in the former Soviet Union.

Contrary to what Senator McCain, seeking realism in military policy does not make one an isolationist.

A system designed to protect the innocent has instead become a menagerie to imprison them. A legal code designed to proscribe specific behavior has instead become a vast, vague, and unpredictable invitation to selective enforcement.

Marc Thiessen claims Khalid Sheikh Mohammad mocked the CIA interrogators who waterboarded him.

John McCain thoroughly dismantles the argument that Osama bin Laden’s capture vindicates the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Elias Isquith proclaims my Atlantic essay “How Perpetual War Became U.S. Ideology” to be “a total disaster.”

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

The debate over “enhanced interrogations” has been renewed by the bin Laden mission, but whether it “worked” or not isn’t the question.

There are many opportunities to go to war. Here’s a guide for choosing between them.

In just over a decade, America has gone from a bipartisan consensus that torture and brutality are bad to a bipartisan consensus that they’re necessary.

The saga of accused Wikileaks conspirator Bradley Manning continues to get uglier, with the military acknowledging that he was forced to spend the day naked for, well, no apparent reason.

While the prestige outlets of the halcyon days of the last millennium still hold some cachet for those of us old enough to remember that era, they mean next to nothing on the Web.

President Obama’s decision to decline to defend Section Three of the Defense Of Marriage Act on appeal was a proper and appropriate exercise of his authority as President Of The United States.

The Egyptian military is promising a quick transition to new civilian leadership. Will they live up to their promise?

Part two of the ongoing series blogging Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny.

Time for midterms.

The last thing that Haiti needed was for a former dictator to return, but that’s exactly what has happened.

WikiLeaker Bradley Manning has been held “under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture” for seven months and counting.

Is Obama really the most liberal President ever? Not really.

It’s not hypocritical or racist to support an aggressive pursuit of terrorists while getting outraged over abuses of Americans’ liberties.

The first civilian trial of a Guantanamo detainee ends with the Defendant being acquitted on all but one charge, and shows us why the entire process is little more than a show trial.

So will there be an efficacious backlash against TSA policies? I am guessing no.

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.

The Obama administration has persuaded the nation’s most liberal appellate court that the executive branch’s right to secrecy trumps the rights of people claiming they were tortured by the United States Government.

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas’ new book, AMERICAN TALIBAN: HOW WAR, SEX, SIN, AND POWER BIND JIHADISTS AND THE RADICAL RIGHT, continues a long tradition in political polemics.

Glenn Greenwald argues that the “Ground Zero Mosque” debate is about more than just a “mosque” near Ground Zero. He’s right, but that also means the debate is likely to get uglier.

The 9th Circuit yesterday ruled that Stolen Valor laws violate the 1st Amendment and that there is a limited right to lie.

The GOP is playing a dangerous game with the anti-Islamic rhetoric that it seems to be courting these days.

Did the American media cover up torture by the Bush Administration?

Michael Gerson argues that the source of our polarization isn’t the Democrats and the Republicans but the Ugly Party and the Grown-Up Party.