Presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain called for the release of political prisoners in Cuba following Fidel Castro's resignation Tuesday.

All three candidates also said the United States should look for ways to encourage Democratic reforms in Cuba.

...

"Cuba's future should be determined by the Cuban people and not by an anti-democratic successor regime," Obama said. "The prompt release of all prisoners of conscience wrongly jailed for standing up for the basic freedoms too long denied to the Cuban people would mark an important break with the past. It's time for these heroes to be released."

Representatives of the major Democratic candidates accepted invitations to participate in a discussion of science in the next administration. Senator McCain's campaign sent their regrets that they could not attend on such short notice, while Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul did not respond to the invitation at all.

From Clinton's camp came Thomas Kalil, Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology at UC California Berkeley. He's also former Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Technology and Economic Policy and former Deputy Director of the White House National Economic Council. Obama sent Alec Ross, a social entrepreneur for One Economy Corporation which is a non-profit working to bring new technology to poor communities. I immediately noticed although Ross is the younger, more charismatic speaker, it's obvious he lacks experience and familiarization with science policy.

The good news is that both reps highlighted large increases in funding for basic research. Unfortunately, neither provided any practical blueprint for how this might be accomplished. Actually, at times the forum reminded me of a Jr. High School campaign speech--chock full of promises for more soda machines and longer lunch periods with no sense of how to follow through. Both sides criticized the Bush administration, but made little distinction between their science policy platforms.

Hillary Clinton and Obama each spent about $130,000 in Michigan while Obama spent $1.3 million in Florida--more than any other Democratic candidate and more than eight Republican candidates, who were eligible to win delegates from the state.

Yes, it seems clear the Florida playing field was NOT level. Obama outspent Clinton in Florida. Let the rationalizations begin.

Now compare that to someone who decides they want to run for president that isn't independently wealthy.

As I have maintained for months, I oppose the provision contained in the bill that grants blanket retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that allegedly cooperated in the administration's warrantless wiretapping program. I believe granting retroactive immunity under these circumstances is wrong and undermines accountability.

One reason — not even the most important — is the military's endemic inability to win hearts and minds. Early in the war, the Guardian sounded the alarm:

"Senior British military officers on the ground are making it clear they are dismayed by the failure of US troops to try to fight the battle for hearts and minds. They also made plain they are appalled by reports over the weekend that US marines killed Iraqi civilians, including women and children, as they seized bridges outside Nassiriya in southern Iraq."

The emphasis on force protection is a far cry from past imperial practices. The Romans, Spaniards, British, French, and conquerors of yore seldom agonized over their own casualties. To their credit, Americans do. But this comes at a moral cost: US soldiers are brave but the casualty-averse military doctrine of their commanders is cowardly. That, in essence, is what Susan Sontag, Arundhati Roy, and Bill Maher said—right before the lynching began. In a similar show of disgust diplomatically stripped of the C-word, this British officer echoed the sentiment:

"US troops have the attitude of shoot first and ask questions later. They simply won't take any risk... Unfortunately, when we explained our rules of engagement which are based around the principle of minimum force, the US troops just laughed."

Lebanon and Somalia notwithstanding, the United States rarely cuts and runs. It did not in Vietnam. It fought to the death—of the other guy—and then cut and walked when victory proved elusive. Iraq is too central to US hegemonic fantasies to allow a speedy retreat: it'll be done cut-and-crawl style, with enough pit stops to admire the fireworks over Iran. Bush's playbook: (1) run out the clock; (2) anoint successor as "the dope who snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory and handed Iran the victor's crown"; (3) let the etching in the history books begin.

The entire piece is really well written and I do think that the failure that is the war on terror in Iraq is going to be blamed on the next president. Everything was fine until Obama\Hillary\whomever comes along.

When we started RedState in May of 2004, we used a website program called Scoop — the same program a lot of similar sites on the left used. But, as the number of visitors to our site grew, Scoop kept crashing on us.

If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.

Well, we didn’t close down. We ditched Scoop and moved to the best alternative at the time, a program called Drupal. But, in accomplishing the switch, budget constraints forced us to sacrifice some popular site features in order to alleviate the strain on our overused servers.

It's no secret that the more educated one is, usually the more left of center (whatever that is) one leans. It also isn't surprising that geeks who choose to spend their time on open source software also tend to lean left.

What is surprising is that Redstate can't find any help, especially considering there is a forum specifically for paid Drupal help.

But I hate even more to imagine what America will be like if someone like Hillary Clinton or Barack Hussein Obama wins the presidency in November. RedState can help prevent that nightmare from coming true – but only if we’re offering the best possible web experience to the widest possible audience.

You've got to be kidding me.