Meet the Iowa Republican voters

On Monday, February 1, 2016 Iowa holds its caucuses. This is a complicated process and there is a long and tortured path from what takes place that evening to how the final delegates to the party convention are apportioned. So in one sense, what happens that night is not really definitive but the media, anxious to quickly identify winners and losers, have used the non-binding secret ballot that begins the proceedings as their marker and this can lead to problems as in 2012, when Mitt Romney was declared the winner on caucus night but later it turned out that Rick Santorum had edged him out.
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Are atheists attacking the wrong god?

There comes a time when, on some particular issue, I start to feel that I have heard and said all that I really care to on that subject, have formed a pretty firm opinion about it, and am no longer really interested in debating its merits much more since I am unlikely to learn anything new. The only reason to further engage with the question is to challenge the propagation of ideas one thinks are wrong and harmful.
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Countering the George W. Bush rehabilitation project

It is a striking testimony to how far the Republican party has gone off the rails in its xenophobia and anti-Muslim venom that some people in the party are now looking back fondly at George W. Bush as a model of how one should respond to the appalling actions taken by some Muslims, such as in the San Bernadino attacks. Following the events of 9/11 he is now said to have struck the correct note, carefully distinguishing between the specific beliefs of the people who carried out those attacks and the vast mass of people who happened to share their same religion.
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Sanders is as electable as Clinton

With all the attention going to the Republican primary race, we should not forget that there is a Democratic contest too. The media may not have as much interest in it because there is less drama and because of the belief that Hillary Clinton is the inevitable choice. While it is true that she does have a commanding lead in the polls, her neo-liberal policies of being a Wall Street-friendly warmonger who takes Republican-lite positions on economic issues and is only liberal on the GRAGGS (guns, race, abortion, god, gays, sex) issues, though even there on some of them she is a latecomer and less than enthusiastic.
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