Outside the Beltway

We’ve reached the point where public figures coming out of the closet is barely news anymore, and that’s a good thing.

Does talent spawn growth? Or does growth attract talent?

Following yesterday’s shoot-down of a Turkish F-5 by Syria has once again raised the specter of NATO action under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. It’s not going to happen.

Sometimes, the law can be an ass.

What hath a fury greater than a woman scorned? Hundreds of scorned women with Twitter accounts.

Jonathan Chait makes an astute observation about the media’s role in meme generation.

A Bill Clinton parody account created by the Romney campaign is both clever and yet another sign of what’s wrong with American politics.

You have Martin Luther King’s statue in your office, but you are sending these unmanned drones out, and bombs are dropping on innocent people.

Contrary to what you’re hearing, the Facebook I.P.O. was a huge success.

Michael Fumento becomes the latest prominent conservative to criticize what conservatism has become.

The Internet is public and forever. But maybe it shouldn’t be.

The people who gave us the “war on Christmas” are now touting an upsurge on black-on-white crime.

Yesterday, Cory Booker committed the rookie mistake of saying what was on his mind.

Americans Elect is dead. This should surprise nobody.

An object lesson in the problems with our intellectual property laws

Will Twitter impact the 2012 elections? The evidence seems thin that it will.

There may be reason to doubt reports alleging that Mitt Romney engaged in vicious bullying of a gay classmate as an 18-year-old prepster.

The Germans are taking this austerity thing a little far: their police fired only 85 shots at humans last year.

A blog post lampooning black studies dissertations got a writer fired, setting off a controversy over the limits of free speech.

Did Joe Biden misspeak, or drop a hint that he shouldn’t have?

If you agree to work for nothing, don’t complain you’re being “exploited.”

The outpouring from my Twitter stream yesterday on the news of the death of Adam Yauch, MCA of the Beastie Boys, surprised me.

Based on the postmortems, it certainly seems like the Romney campaign threw Richard Grenell under the bus.

Richard Grenell’s time as Mitt Romney’s foreign policy spokesman lasted less than a month. The fact that he’s gay appears to be the reason it ended.

Last week, an absurd campaign became even more absurd.

Why have so few Republicans stood up to condemn Allen West?

Thanks to a media that focuses obsessively on irrelevancies, we now have a permanent political silly season.

Picking the wrong target.

The Washington Post prematurely posted that Rick Santorum was dropping out of the race on its news wire and Bloomberg made the story viral while the Post was verifying its accuracy.

A bill that may become law in Arizona could make your Internet comments a crime.

An lesson from the United Kingdom in the importance of protecting freedom of speech.

What walking around knowledge about our political system is necessary to be an informed citizen?