End the Iraq War 
It's time to end the Iraq War and as Oliver Willis says Democrats need to be leading the call - it's clear that Republicans will not.
| With 2006 on the horizon, we are at a definite turning point, one in which history chooses a path and our nation follows. But we aren¹t simply slaves to the passage of time, rather, our actions define the times. That is why the Democratic party and its leaders needs to quit weighing the pros and cons and ups and downs and maybes and shouldas. They need to forcefully and stridently challenge this unpopular president directly to his face. It is smash mouth time, and its quite clear that these guys can be taken down if Democrats just present some backbone. |
| This isn¹t just one speech where you come out and demand something then tepidly disappear, instead this needs to be a daily drumbeat firmly and patriotically demanding that there be a reasoned withdrawl from Iraq and the president present to the congress a realistic timetable for doing so. Again, I cannot stress how important it is for this mantra (whatever the actual text may be) to be repeated over and over again, not just by individual Democrats but by everyone associated with the progressive movement. Too often we see progressives stray off the reservation because they want to be seen as mavericks or because they¹ve got some sort of pet issue at stake. That is a formula for failure. In today¹s mediaverse, achievements are made through rapid repetition. |
One rationale for "staying the course" is that if we pull out we will embolden the terrorists. The London bombings put a lie to the flypaper or "better to fight them there then at home" theory. We can be hit no matter what is going on in Iraq. President bush says they hate us for our beliefs. I rather think that they hate us for our policies with respect to their lands. Either way, the Iraq War is not making us safer and is only doing the only sure thing in war, killing people.
It has to end, sooner rather than later.
GMT Testing
Whoops! I was not setting the GMT date for posts in the WordPress database. The times looked fine on the blog but on the RSS feed all the posts had a date of 1969! This post is to test if the fix worked.
Update: It looks like it's working. Thanks John!
Boxscore RSS is Offline
I've gotten some emails about problems with my MLB boxscore RSS feeds. Yes, when I moved my server the feeds broke. It's going to be a big job to get them going again as I need to install some software on that server. That combined with the surprising, to me at least, lack of interest means I'm probably not going to get them going again this season. Perhaps it was a idea ahead of it's time. I'll get them back for next season - when the Mariners might be good again. :-)
casdra.com/blog is Caught Up
Yea! I have my OPMLToWordPress script working and I've caught the original CasdraBlog up on all the posts on OPML CasdraBlog. Before using the OPML Editor blogging tool I averaged less than two posts a day. Since I made the switch at the beginning of August I'm posting almost four posts a day. So my parallel blog plan is in place. When the OPML backend code gets release I will look into setting it up on my server and combine the two blogs.
My script preserves the day and time of the post and adds the OPML comments to WordPress. I'm going to make the script available but I need to do some cleanup. Also I have a licensing question. Some of the fields in the WordPress database are conversions of the title into a one word string with '-' for the spaces. In order to be sure it would work I put the function from the WordPress code into my script. It seems like this is a no-no but does anyone have any advise. When I release it I will probably no-op this function and allow users to fill it in however they want.
Test Post
I'm doing final checks on the OPMLToWordPress script and the day changed! I need a post for the 25th. :-)
