Outside the Beltway

After three days of buildup to a “mystery speaker,” the closing night of the Republican convention featured a rambling performance by Clint Eastwood and an empty chair.

Paul Ryan pointed to a shuttered GM plant in his hometown as proof of Obama’s failed policies. The truth will make your head hurt.

An Atlantic story on veterans returning to college is both poignant and miscast.

A graph on public debt making the rounds is being used to misdirect rather than clarify.

It’s official.

Security at the Republican Convention in Tampa looks more like a war zone than a political convention in a democratic republic.

Mitt Romney’s forces won a rules change that will allow future nominees to have more say over their conventions. While this strikes me as a no-brainer, some conservative activists are up in arms.

The fallout from Todd Akin’s rape comments on Sunday has exposed a rift in the Republican Party.

American politics has been reduced to a charade where all people do is yell at each other.

A culture of fact-checking, of honesty, is as important as the actual fact-checking.

When and how often must they disclose their relationship? And can we take them seriously at all?

As far as the law is concerned, your social media accounts aren’t private at all.

At some point, however, using the bad actions of the past to justify worse actions in the present has to stop.

Yesterday it became clear that the Presidential campaign is headed into the mud.

There’s a wee bit more to the “Progressive defended my sister’s killer” story that went viral yesterday.

Another day, another mass shooting in America. Details are sketchy.

Storing all your data in the cloud isn’t necessarily a good idea.

Three new polls show President Obama leading in three key battleground states.

NBC’s Olympic coverage doesn’t necessarily recognize the realities of social networking and the 24 hour news cycle.

Virginia has been offering ID cards to military veterans to make it easier to prove that they’re military veterans for months now.

Why the hell is CNN—which purports to be a news organization—pretending that NBC is live casting the Olympics?

Why do we hold Nutella to a higher truth standard than our presidential candidates?

A Kafkaesque legal proceeding is unfolding in Kentucky.

Once again, the usual suspects are exploiting tragedy for political purposes.

Terror erupted in a Colorado movie theater early this morning.

President Obama set off a firestorm by claiming business owners didn’t build “that.”

Several key members of the Syrian government were killed in a suicide bomb attack today in Damascus.

Reporters covering the 2012 election are letting the campaigns control what they report to a disturbing degree.

The Romney campaign went on television to address the Bain issue, but again they just seem to have muddied the water.

There are some glaring omissions from a recent list of television’s “most powerful” moments.

We’ve reached a point where our wonder at modern technology fades almost instantaneously and is replaced by annoyance that our technology isn’t better

Lies and misrepresentations in politics seem to be something the American people have come to, if not accept, at least expect.

With four months to go until Election Day, the Obama Campaign was greeted with a very dismal jobs report this morning.

Opponents of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United continue to miss the point of what the case was really about.