Today at my lab at Ohio State University, my boss (as well as several other professors in my building) received a most interesting book, labeled "Complimentary Gift", and "Scientific Atlas".  We weren't too suspicious at first, since we receive these sorts of things all the time.  But this turned out to be very different.

It turned out to be the Atlas of Creation, an innocuous-sounding title that, within the first sentence of the introduction, gave away its agenda...

(Continued after the fold)

It appears Ohio is about to lose, or has already lost, all but one of it's progressive talk stations.  This is a travesty, particularly in light of the near-total sweep of the Democrats in the state in the 2006 elections!

Just a few reports from the field out here in cloudy Columbus, Ohio, doing GOTV canvassing for Mary Jo Kilroy.

You could subtitle this "the fledging of a canvasser".  I've finally earned my bona fides.

In today's Columbus Dispatch was a story that highlighted just how desparate the Pryce campaign is getting after the dynamite Constituency Dynamics polling showing Pryce 12 points down.

This is a very short diary, but one that many of us Kossacks must be asking in Ohio: what does one do with an absentee ballot once we receive it?

Here's a summary of my debate impressions.  It's turned out fairly length, and is close to a liveblogging blow-by-blow as I can provide.  I hope that it's informative to my fellow OH-15 Kossacks!

First of all, this diary has a somewhat darker tone then my last one, and it's a bit more personal; a mea culpa more then anything.  However, bear with me through the personal stuff; there's good news at the end.

So it was on a sunny Sunday afternoon that I completed my first canvassing assignment for the Kilroy campaign.  It was a most interesting experience.  Read on below the fold...

With all the grim news as of late (though the latest, for a change, seems to be grim news for Republicans) I finally found the courage to do what I've wanted to do many years.

I volunteered for a campaign yesterday.

After a comment that I made this morning, I've decided to post the first diary I've done in nearly a year.

For the last seven years, I've been working toward getting a PhD in molecular virology at Ohio State University.  According to the opinions of many, many people, getting a good education is now the key to employment in the U.S.

But that doesn't stop me from being any less surplus population then, say, a blue-collar manufacturing worker is these days.

Why, below the fold...

This is a reposting of a comment that I made in a diary long passed.  It's in response to a commenter that essentially called me a traitor to the cause for wanting to leave the U.S.  It may not say anything new and I'm certainly not in as bad a shape as the likes of nyceve, but it has to be said.

Now that Sherrod Brown has done the classy thing and suggested all donations go to ActBlue, I have a suggestion from the peanut gallery for BOTH candidates...and for the netroots. I sincerely hope some version of it gets followed.

For the record I don't yet know who I'll vote for in the primary. I'm taking a wait and see attitude. I like features of BOTH candidates.

I've read many, many comments here about how the Katrina catastrophie will be the end of the Bush Administration.  How finally, this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back.  Much crowing of ever-sinking poll numbers.  Much talk of impeachment, of resignations, of finally putting an end to our national nightmare.

While I would love to believe this, love it above all else, how does this have any grounding in reality?

I hope that this comes out okay; after all, I'm not Armando. :)

There's been alot of talk lately about the U.S. losing ground in scientific research to Asia.  Right now, the hot-button issues being tossed around are, of course, the intelligent design flap, the stem-cell flap, and so on.  Our awful education system doesn't help, either, and the Bush's increasing de-emphasis on research funding is starting to put real pressure on the research community.

But this isn't a diary that talks about those things.  My reasoning for the decline of science in the U.S. is alot more pragmatic and personal, from someone that's been in the trenches since 1993.  My assertion is that a large part of what's killing science is lack of good employment in the field.