A relatively new group calling themselves Vets for Freedom is pressuring politicians to keep US troops in Iraq indefinitely.

On Sunday night during the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago, Pearl Jam took the stage and began their performance one of their hit songs, “Daughter”. During an improvisation of the song, the band’s lead singer, Eddie Vedder, a famous opponent to the war in Iraq, expressed his unhappiness with the Bush administration. But for those of us listening to the show via AT&T’s Blue Room website, we didn’t hear a thing.

The Heritage Alliance, an organization dedicated to "equipping conservative Texans to impact politics and the Texas Legislature", released their scorecards for the 2007 Lege session earlier this week.

Among Senator Robert Kennedy's social justice causes were the rights of people with disabilities — initially emanating from his experiences with his own sister Rosemary. It also extended to the then-radical concept that people with disabilities needed deinstitutionalization, that those who could would come out of mammoth state institutions and live among the general population to the greatest extent possible. The standards and practices of state mental health facilities were long in need of a major overhaul.

John Cornyn, to the surprise of no one here, opposes affordable health care for poor children.

Quick — somebody get out the political life boats! The Bush administration’s poll numbers continue to sink. Numbers have now gotten so low that pundits are publicly comfortable making open comparisons between Bush and Richard M. Nixon.

An article in Friday's Washington Post shines a light on an often-overlooked problem that impacts all of us: The aging of our country's infrastructure. These paragraphs, in particular, caught my eye:

Nevertheless, the overall national infrastructure is stuck in a "death spiral," as states repeatedly fail to maintain the status quo condition of their transportation networks, Pisarski said. Maintenance standards slip further as the money is spread thin.

The power of quiet. I was struck by it the other day during my first camping trip in years. In the dark, back country wilderness of Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, I kept finding myself saying, “Listen to that!” Not because there was anything to hear but because there was absolutely nothing; it was complete and total silence. It produced some of the clearest thinking I’ve experienced in years.

It is a sign of the times that House education committee chairman and co-author Rep. George Miller has recently spoken out against the No Child Left Behind Act, which comes up for renewal in September. The law, which has fervent supporters and opponents on both sides of the aisle, favors standardized testing rather than letting teachers do what they do best: teach.

According to embedded CNN reporter Michael Ware, recent progress in Iraq is being achieved at the expense of long term political solvency.