Chief campaign strategist for George W. Bush: “Kerry was right.”

In 2004, Matthew was appointed the president’s chief campaign strategist.  According to a new article by the Washington Post, Dowd now says his faith in Mr. Bush was “misplaced.”  In a wide-ranging interview here, Mr. Dowd called for a withdrawal from Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s leadership. He…

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Supporting Troops, Withdrawing, and Politics

The bill to set withdrawal timetables from Iraq has passed, on its way now to the President's desk--where it will be vetoed.  Democrats will work on this issue from now on, presumably with an eye toward using it as a campaign issue to gain more seats and hopefully hand the White…

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3,300 active duty soldiers deserted the army in 2006

According to this article by Newsweek, 3,301 U.S. active-duty soldiers deserted the Army in 2006.  Jeffry House is a defense lawyer representing many of these soldiers.  Newsweek asked House why so many soldiers were deserting.  According to House, The common idea is that the war in Iraq is going nowhere,…

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Why Republicans deny global warming.

Jonathan Chait of Common Dreams raises a good question: why do Republicans disagree with climate scientists more at a time when climate scientists are accruing new terrifying evidence that human activities are truly responsible for warming the atmosphere? 

Last year, the National Journal asked a group of Republican senators and House members: “Do you think it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems?” Of the respondents, 23% said yes, 77% said no . . . So, the magazine asked the question again last month. The results? Only 13% of Republicans agreed that global warming has been proved.

As the evidence for global warming gets stronger, Republicans are actually getting more skeptical. . . . How did it get this way? The easy answer is that Republicans are just tools of the energy industry. It’s certainly true that many of them are. . . But the financial relationship doesn’t quite explain the entirety of GOP skepticism on global warming. For one thing, the energy industry has dramatically softened its opposition to global warming over the last year, even as Republicans have stiffened theirs.

The truth is more complicated — and more depressing: A small number of hard-core ideologues (some, but not all, industry shills) have led the thinking for the whole conservative movement . . .Conservatives defer to a tiny handful of renegade scientists who reject the overwhelming professional consensus.

In other words, the thinking process of most Republicans is worse than …

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Copyright police crack down on guitar players trading chords online

This morning I tried to visit a site called OLGA (on-line guitar archive), a place where I had often gone in past years to check out chord progressions for pop/rock tunes.  Many guitarists had worked out tunes as best they could, then posted them at this site.  Over the years,…

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