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In 1862, a man named Lt. Charles H. Colley of Gray, ME was killed during the Battle of Cedar Mountain. When his grieving family opened up the casket that was supposed to contain their son, they were stunned to discover that a fully uniformed Confederate soldier had been shipped to them instead. Having no way to identify the soldier, and also lacking the means to ship him back to Virginia, Lt. Colley's family decided to bury him in Gray Village Cemetery alongside the Union soldiers who had been killed in the war. They figured that this unknown Confederate's family would...

Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for Breitbart, has quit the company following an incident where one of its reporters accused GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s campaign manager of violently grabbing her. "When you reach a point where you can't give 100% to people you represent, it's not tenable to continue representing them,” Bardella said in a statement to The Hill. Bardella, a former spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), also implied that Breitbart’s handling of the incident at the Trump event was his main reason for leaving. “My own personal observation is that there is a cycle of behavior that is...

Video ay link. President Obama said in an interview broadcast Sunday morning that his inability to reduce polarization between the political parties in Washington "gnaws" on him as he settles into his final year in office. "The one thing that gnaws on me-- is the degree of-- continued polarization," he said during an interview broadcast on "CBS Sunday Morning." "It's gotten worse-- over the last several years," Obama continued. "And I think that in those early months my expectation was is that-- we could pull-- the parties together a little more effectively." Obama campaigned in 2008 on a platform of...

Writing in The Atlantic, Peter Beinart has launched yet another debate about America's ideological direction. Asserting that the country is becoming more liberal, Beinart argues that Occupy and Black Lives Matter activists have commandeered the national debate far more effectively than the radicals of the past, to the point that the next Democratic president is likely to be more liberal than Barack Obama and the next Republican president more liberal than George W. Bush. I think not. All evidence suggests that America is growing both more liberal and more conservative. The Left is moving Left, and the Right is moving...

In a recent op ed, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein points out that “partyism” – prejudice against supporters of the opposing political party – is on the rise in America: If you are a Democrat, would you marry a Republican? Would you be upset if your sister did? Researchers have long asked such questions about race, and have found that along important dimensions, racial prejudice is decreasing. At the same time, party prejudice in the U.S. has jumped, infecting not only politics but also decisions about dating, marriage and hiring. By some measures, “partyism” now exceeds racial prejudice — which...

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – Chris Stigall spoke with comedian Rob Schneider on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT about the struggle comedians face in today’s current political environment. Schneider struck on ominous tone when discussing the path he sees the country on. “Democracies don’t end well. We are sliding very fast towards fascism. It’s an ugly kind of thing. There’s this kind of mob mentality that we have to be careful of,” he said. He believes comedians are pressured toward one side of the political spectrum. “There’s a polarization that’s happening…I do think you look can look at government and go, ‘Wow, it...

Scientists have spotted swirling patterns in the radiation lingering from the big bang, the so-called cosmic microwave background (CMB). The observation itself isn't Earth-shaking, as researchers know that these particular swirls or "B-modes" originated in conventional astrophysics, but the result suggests that scientists are closing in on a much bigger prize: B-modes spawned by gravity waves that rippled through the infant universe. That observation would give them a direct peek into the cosmos' first fraction of a second and possibly shed light on how it all began."I see it as a big step forward," says Charles Bennett, a cosmologist...

But whether Barack Obama is elected to a second term or Mitt Romney is elected the 45th president, the contours of their support during this fiercely fought campaign show that we live in two Americas. The culturally cohesive America of the 1950s that some of us remember, usually glossing over racial segregation and the civil-rights movement, is no longer with us and hasn’t been for some time. Niche media has replaced universal media. One America listens to Rush Limbaugh, the other to NPR. Each America has its favorite cable news channel. As for entertainment, Americans have 100-plus cable channels to...

WASHINGTON -- Frankly, I wish the Pew Research Center would occasionally keep its thoughts to itself. Sometimes those thoughts are merely insipid and beneath the attention of serious minds. Sometimes they are alarming and capable of stirring up an already excitable populace. There is talk of cannibalism being practiced by the criminal element. There is Lady Gaga. These are worrisome times. Yet the Pew Research Center has gone and done it again. The Center released a study Monday that employed exhaustive polling and ingenious charts to render my fellow Americans restive, or so it seems. The Pew Research Center's overall...

Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein ignited a bit of a firestorm with their column describing Republicans as main drivers behind Washington's problems. The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza has made some excellent points with regard to Mann and Ornstein's qualitative arguments, and other thorough responses abound. Rather than revisiting these points, I would like to focus my attention on the quantitative arguments made at the end of the article. Mann and Ornstein note that: “[P]olitical scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have long tracked historical trends in political polarization, said their studies of congressional votes found that Republicans are now...

he historically high gap between partisans' job approval ratings of Barack Obama continued during Obama's third year in office, with an average of 80% of Democrats and 12% of Republicans approving of the job he was doing. In fact, Obama's Year Three average 68-percentage-point partisan gap is tied for the fourth highest in Gallup records dating back to the Eisenhower administration. Only George W. Bush's fourth, fifth, and sixth years in office showed higher degrees of political polarization. Together, Bush and Obama account for the 7 most polarized years, and 8 of the top 10.

Former U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale says this country is politically "paralyzed and polarized by gridlock, but we can change this." Mondale, who grew up in small Minnesota towns, was warmly received by independent booksellers Friday when he introduced his new political autobiography, "The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics" (Simon & Schuster, $28). His breakfast talk was part of the Midwest Booksellers Association's annual trade show at RiverCentre in St. Paul. "What we need in America is an open, just, accountable society. We must hold all government responsible," Mondale said. He lamented that Americans' trust in government is...

The National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund has endorsed on-the-ropes incumbent Democrat Chris Carney in Pennsylvania's 10th Congressional District over Republican challenger Tom Marino, who is also a staunch defender of the 2nd Amendment and who, unlike Carney, has never voted for Nancy Pelosi to lead the House of Representatives.

Okay, I've had it. I'm finished with the loony Left. Polarization, the political gap between liberal and conservative, is now a canyon without a bridge. When liberals took power riding Obama's bandwagon of popularity, they went crazy with lust for dominance. I kept my mouth shut as legions of my fellow Americans (some even close friends) turned zombie, talking glassy-eyed about their Dear Leader as if he were their democrat messiah. Converts to political activism, these people were formerly NOT involved or politically AWARE, so they over-compensated with childish enthusiasm. It was hard to watch as the media and the...

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved. A campaign to encourage participation in the 2010 census reflects many of the major changes since the last census in the population that is to be counted. For one thing, the advertising, marketing and promotional efforts are being produced in 28 languages -- the most ever, according to the executives responsible for the census. By comparison, a campaign to encourage Americans to take part in the 2000 census was done in 17 languages. ''There's more sensitivity to language subgroups, cultural subgroups,'' said Robert M. Groves, director of the United States...

LONDON (Reuters) – The amazing eyes of a giant shrimp living on Australia's Great Barrier Reef could hold the key to developing a new type of super high-quality DVD player, British scientists said on Sunday. Mantis shrimps, dubbed "thumb splitters" by divers because of their vicious claws, have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom. They can see in 12 primary colors, four times as many as humans, and can also detect different kinds of light polarization -- the direction of oscillation in light waves.

President Obama is becoming the most divisively partisan president in history. At this point, he has less bipartisan support than former President George W. Bush after the Florida recount or former president Bill Clinton, whose first months in office were marred by missteps over gays in the military and the 51-day Waco, Texas siege that killed 74. After a little more than two months in office, Mr. Obama has created the widest partisan gap in America since pollsters started measuring this in the 1960s. According to a new Pew Research Center poll, 88 percent of Democrats approve of the job...

The sun was not necessary for Vikings to navigate, say researchers Vikings may have used a special crystal called a sunstone to help navigate the seas even when the sun was obscured by fog or cloud, a study has suggested. Researchers from Hungary ran a test with sunstones in the Arctic ocean, and found that the crystals can reveal the sun's position even in bad weather. This would have allowed the Vikings to navigate successfully, they say. The sunstone theory has been around for 40 years, but some academics have treated it with extreme scepticism. Researcher Gabor Horvath from...

New York Times columnist John Tierney fears that Iraqis will never put aside their differences to form a unified nation in which people "look on society as a collection of individuals working for the common good of the nation" (subscription required): Iraqis bravely went to the polls and waved their purple fingers, but they voted along sectarian lines. Appeals to their religion trumped appeals to the national interest. And as the beleaguered police in Amara saw last week, religion gets trumped by … the clan. The deadly battle in Amara wasn’t between Sunnis and Shiites, but between two Shiite clans...

Starting the New Year off much like he ended the old one, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the liberal dubbed “the most popular and important force in the blogosphere” by the Weekly Standard, hurls invective at the Bush administration and those who would sacrifice any measure of personal freedom in order to fight terrorists: The breathtaking cowardice of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists knows no bounds. They hide behind the American flag and our genuinely brave men and women in uniform. It's bad enough that they wouldn't deign to join the boots in the ground in Iraq. But now they make a mockery...