Lieutenant Daniel Choi is a member of the New York National Guard who previously served as an infantry officer in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 and before that graduated from West Point with a degree in Arabic. This March, Choi came out on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and was subsequently served a letter of [...]

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On a Sunday night in October, David Olson, local musician and libertarian, came to the open mic night at the Ames Progressive and told me that a group of traveling activists were on their way to Ames. He intended to bring them by the Ames Progressive to show them the space.
And maybe I’d like [...]

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Nate Silver is a statistician originally known for creating the Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm (PECOTA), a system of prediction for Major League Baseball players’ future achievements. More recently, he started the website FiveThirtyEight.com - a reference to the 538 electors in the electoral college - where he successfully predicted the winners of [...]

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Check out The Wheelers and Nuclear Rodeo on MySpace.

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“This song has actually been known to make it rain,” Michael Martin said from the stage at Papa’s Corner a few weeks ago, introducing his song “Thunderstorm Waltz.” He was not joking. I first saw Michael play at an open mic at the Roosevelt Summer Music series in 2007. Through [...]

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Pareidolia is the clinical term for the detection of patterned images in random visual stimuli. Most humans demonstrate this tendency to some degree. It’s the perceptual phenomenon that transforms topographic contours into the so-called “face on mars,” turns the sear marks on a tortilla into a likeness of the Virgin Mary, and allows for [...]

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Selden Spencer is a Democrat and neurologist from Huxley who practices at Ames’ McFarland Clinic. In 2006, he challenged 4th district Republican Representative Tom Latham, receiving 43 percent of the vote. He decided not to run again this year over concerns that he would be unable to run a competitive race.
Spencer first spoke with the [...]

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Fourth district congressional candidate Becky Greenwald speaks to voters at a house party in Ames on April 30. (photo: Gavin Aronsen/The Progressive)
Update: On June 3, Greenwald won the 4th district Democratic primary with 51 percent of the vote. In November, she will compete for Tom Latham’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. William [...]

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Fourth district congressional candidate Kurt Meyer sits down for an interview at the Ames Progressive Office on March 25. (photo: Gavin Aronsen/The Progressive)
Kurt Meyer has made a career working for nonprofit organizations ranging from nursing homes and hospitals to museums and libraries. In 1988 he started a company to assist nonprofits that has since [...]

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